Anne Graduates!
Jun. 15th, 2004 09:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsOmaha, Kouryou-chan and I watched our friend and Kouryou-chan's best babysitter, Anne Honeycutt, aka ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
swirlgrrl, graduate from high school. We arrived at Nova High (which Anne jokingly referred to as No Other Viable Alternative High) and found "Anne's Village," the thirty or so people who have in one way or another helped Anne get to where she was today.
Nova is apparently the place where they let the kids who aren't active offenders and systemic misfits rattle around until they're eighteen in the hopes that the might find something worth doing. While we sat with people dressed in native garb, naive interpretations of native garb, casual clothing, and just plain silly stuff (including one young woman who wore a Catwoman hood the entire ceremony) on the green lawn before a run down, 1930's-era school with a peeling blue and white facade decked in surly vines someone imagined festive (although the place smelled wonderful, of ancient wood varnish and lead paint, reminding me of my own finishing school), I listened and wondered just how many of these students would be labeled among "the disconnected."
Many did find something worth doing. As it turned out, the percentages held: about one in six had no plans after graduation. The rest had places to go: college, employment, travel, and one beauty school plan. Most of the young men and women up there (and one who "refused to accept a gender label") wore what made them comfortable: a t-shirt proclaiming a favorite beer, a favorite band, a favorite movie; formal wear suitable to the opposite sex; formal wear suitable to themselves; goth drag; just plain clothes off the K-Mart shelves, all in about equal measure.
Under lowering clouds abundant with summer disappointment that never materialized, I listened to the teachers list off the students' accomplishments with a growing sense of dismay: "Speaker for an anti-war protest group," "Founder of the local feminist chapter," "Leader at a local NARAL group," "Islamic studies," "Marxist studies." One young man said he was going into engineering and one of the teachers "hoped he would return to literature or social studies or something else more worthwhile." I cannot honestly claim she was being ironic.
One teacher was taking a sabbatical because he had just had a daughter, whom he was giving some absurdly long name which included somewhere in the middle the phrase "polar bear." A cute nickname, but does it really belong on her social security card? The cars in the parking lot had the same tweedy and second hand look that covered the white-haired and pony-tailed teachers, with bumper stickers that read "Free Tibet!", "Dennis Kucinnich for President!", and "The slave trade was free trade." (It wasn't, but I won't belabor that here.) Oh, and one sincere, run-down, rust-orange Volvo reminded me via a hand-lettered sticker that "Only a peaceful, planet-wide government can join the United Federation of Planets."
Some of these kids are about to get a massive dose of Reality™ in which you are only valued if you create value for others, and you only get to trade in what you're worth. Nobody gives a damn about the meat shell you inhabit or the earnestness with which you inhabit it. Some of them have already had that dose, and those that had did not look happy about it going down.
So I sat behind an exceptionally cute dyke in labrys earrings under brown hair held in a high ponytail, leather jacket smooth as vellum, librarian fetish spectacles, cheekbones that could cut glass and black hanky flagging from her right pocket, and her girlfriend in an older jacket and rainbow blond hair, and waited for Anne to graduate. Apparently, she's made herself the center of the school; nobody argued with the point. She was Nova's hamster in its wheel, pushing everything forward. Everyone was sad to see her go. But I'm glad she's got work already and has a personality that attracts opportunity; like everyone, she's going to need them. I'm pleased to have known her, and happy for her accomplishments thus far.
Congratulations, Anne! Don't let me forget: I still owe you your gift.
swirlgrrl, graduate from high school. We arrived at Nova High (which Anne jokingly referred to as No Other Viable Alternative High) and found "Anne's Village," the thirty or so people who have in one way or another helped Anne get to where she was today.Nova is apparently the place where they let the kids who aren't active offenders and systemic misfits rattle around until they're eighteen in the hopes that the might find something worth doing. While we sat with people dressed in native garb, naive interpretations of native garb, casual clothing, and just plain silly stuff (including one young woman who wore a Catwoman hood the entire ceremony) on the green lawn before a run down, 1930's-era school with a peeling blue and white facade decked in surly vines someone imagined festive (although the place smelled wonderful, of ancient wood varnish and lead paint, reminding me of my own finishing school), I listened and wondered just how many of these students would be labeled among "the disconnected."
Many did find something worth doing. As it turned out, the percentages held: about one in six had no plans after graduation. The rest had places to go: college, employment, travel, and one beauty school plan. Most of the young men and women up there (and one who "refused to accept a gender label") wore what made them comfortable: a t-shirt proclaiming a favorite beer, a favorite band, a favorite movie; formal wear suitable to the opposite sex; formal wear suitable to themselves; goth drag; just plain clothes off the K-Mart shelves, all in about equal measure.
Under lowering clouds abundant with summer disappointment that never materialized, I listened to the teachers list off the students' accomplishments with a growing sense of dismay: "Speaker for an anti-war protest group," "Founder of the local feminist chapter," "Leader at a local NARAL group," "Islamic studies," "Marxist studies." One young man said he was going into engineering and one of the teachers "hoped he would return to literature or social studies or something else more worthwhile." I cannot honestly claim she was being ironic.
One teacher was taking a sabbatical because he had just had a daughter, whom he was giving some absurdly long name which included somewhere in the middle the phrase "polar bear." A cute nickname, but does it really belong on her social security card? The cars in the parking lot had the same tweedy and second hand look that covered the white-haired and pony-tailed teachers, with bumper stickers that read "Free Tibet!", "Dennis Kucinnich for President!", and "The slave trade was free trade." (It wasn't, but I won't belabor that here.) Oh, and one sincere, run-down, rust-orange Volvo reminded me via a hand-lettered sticker that "Only a peaceful, planet-wide government can join the United Federation of Planets."
Some of these kids are about to get a massive dose of Reality™ in which you are only valued if you create value for others, and you only get to trade in what you're worth. Nobody gives a damn about the meat shell you inhabit or the earnestness with which you inhabit it. Some of them have already had that dose, and those that had did not look happy about it going down.
So I sat behind an exceptionally cute dyke in labrys earrings under brown hair held in a high ponytail, leather jacket smooth as vellum, librarian fetish spectacles, cheekbones that could cut glass and black hanky flagging from her right pocket, and her girlfriend in an older jacket and rainbow blond hair, and waited for Anne to graduate. Apparently, she's made herself the center of the school; nobody argued with the point. She was Nova's hamster in its wheel, pushing everything forward. Everyone was sad to see her go. But I'm glad she's got work already and has a personality that attracts opportunity; like everyone, she's going to need them. I'm pleased to have known her, and happy for her accomplishments thus far.
Congratulations, Anne! Don't let me forget: I still owe you your gift.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-06-15 09:58 am (UTC)One in six left out is not a bad ratio considering it's NOVA. One in six for society as a whole... is a sad commentary on what public indoctrination is doing to our children. Thankfully, your podling is curious enough in her own right that that shouldn't be a problem, though I hope for *my* sake that she can have better than mere public school... I want people like her taking over the world when I'm old and worn out.
Yes, I can say enlightened self-interest. :)
no subject
Date: 2004-06-15 11:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-15 02:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-18 11:28 pm (UTC)As if you didn't know, you've been friended. :)
...now if I could only spell correctly the first time through... :)
James
no subject
Date: 2004-06-15 02:25 pm (UTC)Maybe...
Date: 2004-06-15 04:33 pm (UTC)-Nirrad