Left for Dead :: Personal Narrative Teaching Education Papers

Left for Dead In 1988, my last year of high school, twelve years before the start of the new century, some genius in L.A.U.S.D. thought it would be a grand idea to dress all the kindergarten students in Graduation outfits with 2000 streaming across their chest. And have them presented to the rest of the students as the future graduating class of the year 2000. The students, some gazing off into space, others fidgeting with their cap and gown, a few looking a bit lost 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 top of the stage. Cookies were on a lot of these future Twenty-First-Century minds. The little guy next to me couldn't 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 schooling, and I was finishing twelve years of schooling. The beginning meets th e end. I wanted those cookies too. I began to imagine him remembering this day twelve years from now on his "real" 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 job? I suddenly felt time wrapping around me, shaking thoughts from my mind. How many of these students will finish school? How many will drop 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 couldn't help but think the future looked far away even for me. I could only imagine it must be forever 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 thought 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 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.