Left for Dead :: Personal Narrative Teaching Education Papers

Left for DeadIn 1988, my last class of high train, twelve years before the start of the bracing century, more or less genius in L.A.U.S.D. thought it would be a grand conceit to dress all the kindergarten students in Graduation fall outfits with 2000 streaming across their chest. And carry them presented to the rest of the students as the emerging graduating class of the year 2000. The students, some gazing bump off into space, others fid passing with their cap and gown, a few projecting a bit garbled and confused, were to be trumpeted that day and given cookies at the end of the assembly. So I was informed by one of the honorees sitting next to me on outstrip of the stage. Cookies were on a lot of these future Twenty-First-Century minds. The itty-bitty guy next to me couldnt wait for this stuff to end so he could get the cookies he was promised for wearing his cap and gown. He wondered aloud if I was going to get any cookies. He was entering twelve years of teaching, and I was finishing twelve years of schooling. The beginning meets the end. I wanted those cookies too. I began to intend him remembering this day twelve years from now on his satisfying graduation. Will he be this excited about graduating high school as he is about the cookies, or will he look forward to pizza afterwards with the family and some dead end furrow? I suddenly felt time wrapping around me, vibration thoughts from my mind. How many of these students will finish school? How many will bring down out or quit? Glancing around at the future citizens of a new time, a new beginning, a new world, a new era---well something like that---I couldnt help but think the future looked far onward even for me. I could only imagine it must be evermore for these little guys. I was from this same elementary school as these little tykes and I was about to step up to the podium and give a speech because some genius at the school found out I was Student Body President. I guess they tho ught I represented what was right about L.A.U.S.D. All this thinking about the future started to depress me. I will be thirty-one when these guys leave school. The cookies were looking at to be the better part of that day. Invited back to my alma mater, Fair Avenue Elementary, I was asked to say a few words, any words, on high school and graduating.