Graduation

Today, May 28, 2017, is exact­ly half of my trip time. And on May 26, Fri­day, at 10 am, Mark had a grad­u­a­tion. My grand­son is in a third grade. The grad­u­a­tion took place in an audi­to­ri­um hall of the music muse­um. At first I thought why it was not car­ried out in the school build­ing, but then I real­ized that this is because of the park­ing lot. They have enough park­ing spots at school only for employ­ees, and par­ents drop off and pick up chil­dren by go-through. You dri­ve up to the school and put a child’s name tag and the class num­ber on the win­dow. An employ­ee at the entrance tells by radio which child to be ready, you slow down slight­ly at the entrance, and anoth­er school employ­ee helps the child get into the car or get out of the car with their bag.

So, let’s talk about grad­u­a­tion. It was held sep­a­rate­ly class by class, at first has been Kinder­gat­en, and lat­er then senior class­es of ele­men­tary school. The grand­son has already grad­u­at­ed from ele­men­tary school, and next school year he will go to mid­dle school. Mid­dle school starts dif­fer­ent­ly for every­one here. In some, mid­dle school is between the fifth grade to the eighth, and already 9, 10, 11 and 12 is a high school. Usu­al­ly it is locat­ed in a dif­fer­ent build­ing. In Basis, the grand­son’s future mid­dle school starts from the fourth grade and is in the same build­ing with high school. It is locat­ed not far from his for­mer school. The park­ing is not only for teach­ers, but also for stu­dents, because many high school stu­dents dri­ve cars to school and even take their younger sib­lings.

Grad­u­a­tion here is almost always a farewell to the for­mer class and pos­si­bly to the for­mer teach­ers, even if you don’t leave the school, because class­es are reformed every year. Of course, with some­one you will end up in a new class, but still, the con­tin­gent changes a lot every time. I used to be sur­prised that Mark doesn’t remem­ber some chil­dren by their first and last names, and then I real­ized that there are names that I couldn’t remem­ber, much less even pro­nounce. Chil­dren of a very diverse nation­al com­po­si­tion study with him — Chi­nese, Kore­ans, Fil­ipinos, Per­sians, and a lot of Indi­ans. Many Indi­an par­ents work here as IT, MD, and they have good cars — Mer­cedes and Tes­las.

The grand­son’s grad­u­a­tion was com­bined with anoth­er third grade class. First, the chil­dren came out and sang a few songs, then they were tak­en off the stage. Next they went out one by one in square hats and they were award­ed a grad­u­a­tion diplo­ma. So then they again all togeth­er went on stage, the direc­tor con­grat­u­lat­ed them and the event end­ed there. True, the day before they had a par­ty after their par­ents work­day. All five third grade class­es gath­ered in the park. A sup­plies list was shared with par­ents to bring sand­wich­es, fruits, drinks, sweets, cook­ies, sliced cheeses. The chil­dren ran and ate while the par­ents talked.

The whole last week the chil­dren actu­al­ly had enter­tain­ment. They wrote tests before May 20, and from the 22^nd to 25^th they went to school only for half a day. They were divid­ed into projects. The grand­son got into the Har­ry Pot­ter Club. In this club they have watched movies about Har­ry, then they answered ques­tions, solved cross­word puz­zles, made crafts, cast spells and every­thing on the same top­ic. Of course, he had read six Har­ry Pot­ter books before and is now in line at the library for the next book…

When I came to them for the first time, I thought he would nev­er learn to read or write, but now I look at these books and am impressed: huge, thick, 700 – 800 pages each. Com­pared to the first grade, there have been dra­mat­ic changes, the child does the tasks on his own, he is not even checked. As he wrote, so he wrote. At the end of last week, he brought his final test reports issued by the Ari­zona Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion in math­e­mat­ics and in the human­i­ties. Each report con­tains a chart show­ing the min­i­mum and aver­age scores by state, dis­trict, and school. Their school per­forms bet­ter than the aver­age score than the dis­trict and state schools. Mark scored the high­est pos­si­ble on the math test, but on the lib­er­al arts test, his score was below the school aver­age but above the state aver­age. Says he acci­den­tal­ly skipped one sheet in the test.

But at the end of the year, he still brought a cer­tifi­cate that he entered the club of excel­lent stu­dents — “90s club” (issued to those chil­dren who have an aver­age score for the whole year of 90% or more). There was no end to his joy, because all year long col­lect­ed mon­ey for a pro­gram­ma­ble robot, and his par­ents promised him to add the rest amount if he fin­ished the year per­fect­ly. We ordered a robot on the Inter­net. Sat by the win­dow for half of Sat­ur­day, wait­ing for some­one to bring it 🙂 Now he sits pro­gram­ming it on his iPad.