Eighth Grade
Started: 2023-07-27 21:19:25
Submitted: 2023-07-27 22:39:19
Visibility: World-readable
Middle school was a thing that happened.
Calvin finished eighth grade in May, after three of the weirdest years to attend middle school.
Three years ago Calvin started middle school, remotely, from the top of the Santa Cruz Mountains. He struggled to remain engaged in remote classes (and we struggled to figure out whether he had turned in any of his homework; grading in at least one of his classes was months behind). He stayed all-remote until spring. A couple of weeks after Julian started attending kindergarten in person, Calvin started going to school in person a couple of days a week. (It appears that I neglected to document it at the time, but if I recall the school set up a cohort system to limit attendance in-person to two days a week. I don't recall that it worked especially well, but it was better than nothing.)
In the summer of 2021 we moved to Santa Cruz and enrolled the kids in Santa Cruz City Schools. Calvin started seventh grade at Branciforte Middle School, conveniently located a mile from our house (close enough that Calvin got to walk home every day). (There was a separate disaster involving the local elementary school not having room for Julian, which they forgot to tell us until the day school started and Julian was turned away at the school gate, so the district found space for him instead at higher-performing Westlake Elementary on the other side of town.) By this point Calvin was fully vaccinated, and school was full-time in-person, still aggressively masking indoors.
Calvin's school held an event to mark the completion of eighth grade that they called, in various communications, a "promotion ceremony" or "graduation". Kiesa's parents flew into town for the event (and ended up bringing COVID-19 with them).
The graduation ceremony was held in the middle of the athletic field at the back of the school grounds, with visitors sitting on rows of chairs set out on the artificial turf. The ceremony began promptly at 15:00 and featured students, teachers, administrators, and county education officials talking about the school experience and congratulating the students on their achievements.
Calvin's achievements included being named in the program as one of sixteen students "Awarded for Academic Excellence (3.5 and above GPA)".
Finally the students lined up to walk across the graduation stage to have their names read, fist-bump the principal, and get their graduation certificate.
I found a spot off to the side of the seats where I could get a reasonable view of the stage with my telephoto lens.
The ceremony wrapped up right at 16:00 and the first song on the PA was "Time of your Life", which I remember as a staple of graduations in the the 1990s and is apparently still in rotation.
As we walked out through the open-air breezeways connecting the classrooms (an architectural feature brought to you by coastal California's mild winters) I realized that this was also an ending of sorts for me. I don't spend a lot of time at Calvin's school, but I do drop by every once and a while. (Julian still has three more years of elementary school before he starts middle school, long enough for an entire group of kids to cycle through the school.)
In front of the school I staged a picture of Calvin with the school sign, and (without the mask and googles he wore to school every day) with his grandparents.
With the post-graduation pictures complete, I nodded goodbye to the red-painted colonnade in front of the school (where I dropped Calvin off before school one day a week for the past year) and departed.
