Out the window
The school year needs a better ending
Even with no kids going back to school this year (!!!), there’s still something about this season that makes me want to buy new pens and has me thinking about the old Staples commercial where parents gleefully shopped in store to “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.” However, it turns out there’s an even more exciting transitional rite of passage related to school: the Fenstersprung.
I just learned from a friend living in Germany about their kindergarten graduation ceremony where kids jump out of a window while everyone sings a happy German song. Apparently it’s a ground-floor window and they jump onto a mat (which is, ironically, considered safe for German kindergartners but was considered quite dangerous when it happened on my eighth-grade field trip and we swapped ground-floor motel rooms). There’s also a more adventurous variation where teachers grab kids’ limbs and swing them out the door, throwing them onto a mat.
I love the concept metaphorically and literally, but also in contrast to whatever is going on with American graduations, which, I think we need to all agree, have gotten both longer and worse. Having never been to a German kindergarten, I have never seen a Fenstersprung. I know nothing about it beyond one friend’s secondhand account that was roughly: a song, an open window, kids jumping out of one thing and into whatever’s next. Yet I have already decided it beats every graduation I’ve ever sat through, which says way less about the window than it does about the sticky folding chair I was sitting in.
A graduation is a big production with two real jobs: letting a community honor students’ achievements and letting those students celebrate and grieve the end of a meaningful shared experience. I have attended many for brothers, kids, and beloved family members. And I have yet to attend one that, for all its effort, achieved either — let alone both. Is what’s missing some light stunt work in the form of a window jump?
After the drama of parking and tickets and getting there early to “save” seats, assuming you’re situated and have a chance to look at the program, the first words you see are: “out of respect to all of the graduates, please hold your applause until everyone’s name has been called.” This is reiterated once or twice early on in the ceremony, and yet, once Aaron Adams’ name is read, his family erupts with all the joy and passion of people who are so proud of their kid, so happy to be done with tuition payments, and so grateful they can easily go to the bathroom or get a snack thanks to the ease of an early-in-the-alphabet last name.
But guess what? The next two families don’t hear their kids’ names at all since the Adams family is still cheering.
Some larger schools have given up on alphabetical order and your kid just hands a slip of paper to someone on the way up and the administrator in charge of keeping some level of order inevitably butchers the pronunciation. Although, since every other family is trying to outdo the Adams family, you can’t even hear it. Usually, there’s a level of competition in volume that goes through the Ss, but once you’ve gotten through all the Smiths and Stevensons, people really run out of steam and the Ts through Zs experience a smaller crowd that’s over it. (If that sounds like the bitterness of a T through Z, it’s by design: my maiden name started with a U and even I was over it by the time they got to me).
I’m a rule follower and there’s nothing I hate more than a rule that is both unenforceable and a buzzkill. Some families tone it down (I was able to get my dad to leave the cowbells behind for my high school graduation although I occasionally regret that), but for the most part, very few people are willing to risk their kid being the one who crosses the stage to silence. How bizarre that the institution doubles down on the most offensive kind of rule: one that criminalizes joy and doesn’t even work.
I could understand if all that individual joy is suppressed in service of a meaningful collective experience.
Except that’s not the case either.
I don’t remember the outside speaker for my high school graduation at all and I only remember the class speaker because it was me. My top memory of my graduation from college was the hot weather forcing us to unzip our black sun-absorbing robes and I didn’t have enough sunscreen on underneath and ended up with a “pearl burn” from my necklace. I know Thomas Friedman spoke eloquently about world peace or something.
Oldest’s high school commencement speaker spent the entire time celebrating the school’s girls’ basketball team for making the state semi-finals — an important achievement that was probably more relevant at one of the fifteen athletic assemblies and ceremonies scheduled throughout the year.
Often, when you look at the program, it requires a decoder ring to understand what kid won what honor and how that is manifested in the tassels and flair they’re accessorizing their $120 rented gown with. Ironically, 99% of people traveled in to celebrate the kid, whose moment lasts 0.25 seconds and can’t be heard or seen particularly well.
The best graduation speaker I’ve heard was Yo-Yo Ma, who “spoke” at my brother’s college graduation. He walked up to the microphone, said he’d asked all of his friends and not one of them could remember their own graduation speaker, so he figured we’d rather hear him play than listen to him talk. Then he played Bach for 20 minutes.
Yo-Yo has an edge because I practically know Bach’s cello suites by heart, but I mostly remember it being unseasonably chilly in Massachusetts in June, me wearing a fleece, and for those 20 minutes, I wasn’t thinking about being cold or when the ceremony would be over.
Add it up. The speakers, the flown-in celebrity, the questionable sound system, the hours, and the money are supposed to honor the kid and the class and mark the magnitude of what they just accomplished. Instead it just fills the time and drains the room of the one feeling it was built to create, when something more memorable could be achieved with so much less: a window and a mat, a man and a cello.
We are, of course, going the other way. We now hand out tiny caps and gowns after preschool, kindergarten, fifth grade, or really every ordinary year a kid manages to survive. The participation trophy has morphed into a survival milestone, except that when every year is proclaimed a milestone, none of them really are. Youngest graduated from college this past May and didn’t want to walk, so she didn’t, and I didn’t fight her on it since it was the right call for her. But I’d be lying if I said some small, stubborn part of me didn’t want the folding chair and the bad PA system and her name read out loud, just once.
Here’s what I actually want, sitting in whatever room has been selected for both its capacity and its poor air circulation: I want every kid there to be seen and celebrated; I want them and their families to have one moment they’ll keep.
And then I want to leave.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Which is why I keep coming back to the window: the moment worth keeping is the one where everybody finally admits that the shared thing is over, and a decent send-off should let you feel that ending for one honest second.
And I think it would be more fun — and, dare I say, a little cathartic — for everyone involved to watch a row of teachers grab each kid by the arms and legs, swing once, and pitch them out the door onto the mat.
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