One of the great joys of the end of school (although school
is still in session around here, but it’s close enough) is the end of the
encomia. First off, there’s the students happy to be hitting the road to
dreamland, AKA graduating and going off to college. Surprisingly, and happily,
there aren’t too many of these. (I’m going by Facebook, of course. That seems
to be the place where people are at their sappiest, unless I’m just not plugged
into where the real sap flows.) Most students are just happy to cast off from the port of high school and
disappear without a wave to the next adventure. Nothing wrong with that.
Next up are the speech and debate students. Here we get the
endless thank-yous to their stream of coaches and mentors and advisers and the
like, and we begin to realize that behind every successful forensician, there
is an army of myrmidons. We see this occasionally when there’s the announcement
that so-and-so won something, and then it lists their coaches, always in the
plural, and often running over to the next page. When our little LD hero
finally hangs up the gloves, every one of them must be noted at length. Parents
also come in for a little pat on the back, despite the fact that most parents are
happy to get rid of their little forensicians for the weekend so that they can
dedicate themselves to reading online articles about how to pay for college on
their miserable middle class salary. (Come to think of it, you can have a
miserable upper class salary and still not be able to pay for college nowadays.
In fact, the more money you make, the less likely you are to get financial
assistance: while you know that you’re barely getting by, the powers that throw
money off the top of the administration building think you’re rolling in it.) I
do believe that these little essays are heartfelt. However, they are, shall we
say, a little less than compelling. They never reveal any deep dark secrets
about you-know-who, they never really dish the dirt, they just thank you from
the bottom of their hearts. Bleech!
Finally there are the coaches. This is the time of year when
they all start weeping like seven-year-olds at a Bambi screening (or sixty-year-olds at an Up screening) and pulling up sighs from the bottoms of their
intestines and— I’m sorry. I can’t talk about it. These are grownups, for God’s
sake. 99% of them are starting the next day at some debate camp or other to
wrest muchos dineros from the sweaty hands of the parents of the next
generation, the ones who should be salting away funds in the college savings
program, and are instead assuming that forensics will get their little scamps
into even better (and more expensive) colleges. (Word: after you turn about
thirty no one on earth will care where you went to college, except the college
itself, who will never let up asking you for money as a happy alum, money you
probably don’t have because you’re still either paying off your loans because
your parents never did save enough although they probably would have if they
hadn’t thrown away all that money on speech and debate camps, or else you’re
already starting to save for your own spawn’s college expenses, which—I hate to tell you this—will be at least twice what you paid in twenty years or so.)
So, I’m swearing off Facebook for a couple of weeks, until
everyone settles down again. I want to see pictures of glorious vacations in far-off places. I do not want to read accounts of planes not getting back from Salt Lake City until the 4th of July. I do not want to see pictures of people arriving at camp, leaving camp
or teaching camp. I don’t want to know that there are
now 4,328,127 students pre-registered for Middle School TOC.
I just want to enjoy the summer.
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