Senior Awards Rants

nj2011mom · June 9, 2010, 1:51pm

here’s an interesting one…at our HS Sr awards evening last week, my D was mentioned as being outstanding in the AB Calc class and challenging the BC test. Hmm…she’s a Jr! Someone told her the following day. We wonder if they are giving her a diploma next week.

Yearbook rant…our HS has 1900 kids and the yearbook is a disgrace. It’s just 400+ pages of posed individual pictures and candid with no words except the names next to each kids’ individual picture. They don’t even put the names of people on sports teams or clubs under the group shots (if they have them!), nor the schedules or records. When they pick up these wastes of paper in 10 years, no one will remember who did what. 30+ years later, I get amused looking at my HS yearbook (all girl school of 200) and comparing pics to current Facebook pages.

TheGFG · June 9, 2010, 1:52pm

I’m so sorry, michone. You have my complete sympathy.

Stories like yours are why I think the pizza analogy is imperfect. I’m sure it fits sometimes, since we all know parents and kids who are never satisfied and want it all. And if we’re honest, at times we are not immune to occasional selfishness about our children.

But in other cases, the hard-working, accomplished kid is not some greedy carnivore, eating more than his fill while the meek and mild-mannered herbivores look on hungrily in the shadows. That’s a nice story for the Barney crowd, but is simply isn’t that black and white. No, it’s more like the Key Club and other EC’s are the pizzeria. So long as a student does his “chores” and his “homework”, his parents and coaches/EC advisors give him an allowance which he can spend to join the pizza-eating club. The plain cheese pizza is available regularly to all members who pay their dues.

The cheese pizza being offered the members is the fun of belonging to a group, the satisfaction of working together toward a common goal, the joy of keeping physically fit and/or staying involved in the community, winning a team competition or completing a service project. So long as the student pays his dues by showing up to meetings, practices, and other principal events of the organization, he can eat the cheese pizza along with his club friends.

Now, there are some students who have noticed that in other pizza-eating clubs, certain kids are getting to eat pizza with special toppings. Those slices cost more money, however. So these pizza-loving, dedicated pizza club members decide to find a way to earn more allowance so they can order pizza with sausage or mushrooms. Maybe they put in more hours of community service, they perform special duties for the “pizzeria”–the equivalent of sweeping the floors, washing the pans, or answering the phones. Maybe they stay late at work too (they run extra miles, lift weights when practice is over and everyone else has gone home, or make phone calls to area pizzerias looking for the best deals on pizzas with toppings.) They show up not just for the mandatory meetings, but they love belonging to the club so much that they do many optional activities as well. Because of the extra hours they work, their allowance is increased, and they save that allowance so they can pay for more pizza and some toppings.

There are other students who aren’t happy just eating pizza all the time. Nearby there’s a candy shop, where they can buy a bag of Skittles or an Air Head while spending less allowance than they’d have to for a slice of pizza. So sometimes these students skip the pizza club meeting and go to the candy store instead. Others opt to eat at McDonald’s because the Happy Meal comes with a fun toy and the pizza doesn’t.

One day at the pizzeria, the restaurant owner presented each of those few extra-dedicated pizza club members with a supreme personal pan pizza, which they earned via the loyal customer club. Boy, did those supreme pizzas look yummy! Some of the other members became a little unhappy, and grumbled under their breath. “They’re so lucky,” they exclaimed. “It’s not fair! We’re club members too! We want a supreme pan pizza like they have.” “It’s not our fault we don’t want to eat pizza all the time. We could have been as well-fed as they are if we were like them, but we’re not. Frankly, they’re a little extreme.” When the parents arrived to take their children home, they learned what had happened to their poor children who had only gotten to eat plain pizza. They felt a little upset, and a little angry at the pizza club advisor for allowing this to happen.

Seeing the unhappy faces of the club members, and the angry faces of the parents, the advisor felt a bit unsettled. But what could he do? “They do have point. Why should only a few club members have gotten the supreme pizzas? I know they worked a little harder, but it’s not like the others didn’t eat a lot of pizza there too!”

At the end of the year, the pizza club held its final meeting. Being fond of the members, the advisor wanted to purchase some pizza-shaped key chains to give to the club members. But there wasn’t quite enough money left over in the club account, yet she really wanted to buy those cute key chains. So she decided that she wouldn’t give one to everyone. First, anyone who didn’t show up to the final meeting wouldn’t get one, and neither would anyone who hadn’t attended at least half of the club events–except for the principal’s son. But there still wasn’t enough money. Finally, the advisor decided that she would not give key chains to the kids who had gotten the supreme pan pizzas, since that had been a special reward that others didn’t get. And so that is what she did.

momfirst3 · June 9, 2010, 1:59pm

Missypie, my son is not one of those kids. He is a four year letterman of the tennis team (2 time captain), with many EC’s (NHS, CSF, Mu Alpha Theta and Teen Screen - a club which educates teens on the dangers of melanoma). He is very quiet. He was the first Scholar of Scholars in the HISTORY of the school to never receive an achievement award. A teacher said it best in that he described my son as “a kid you don’t see until you see what he has done.” Please don’t generalize. Not all valedictorians are stuck in their room doing nothing buy studying. My son was a scholar athlete. He received two awards - Scholar of Scholars and the Scholar Athlete of the Year. That was perfect. That’s what he should have received. I was happy for everyone that night. All deserved their awards.

momfirst3 · June 9, 2010, 2:01pm

Hmmm… I read your post again. I think you were saying that the Valedictorian award was plenty. That I totally agree with… I’m so tired… It’s been a long couple of weeks. Please forgive me for misunderstanding your post. :-)

geek_mom · June 9, 2010, 2:12pm

momfirst3, I understand that sentiment, applaud and congratulate your son, and completely agree with you – savor the moment!

All credits are unweighted at geek_son’s high school. They’re convinced that weighted grades make college admission officers upset, and it never occurred to them that class rank doesn’t reflect course rigor until I mentioned it in our last board meeting where the administration shared its plans to (finally!) offer its AP-level courses under the AP rubric (they didn’t want to do the paperwork when my son attended).

After a heck of a race last year, geek_son ended up as the sal. He took the toughest courses available, from the toughest teachers, and he went beyond the school’s offerings. His As in Calc 2, Classics, and self-studied Computer Science were exactly the same as the val’s As in self-studied French horn which (on campus, at least) consisted mostly of staring at her lips in a mirror. Both students were into just about every EC, though she was more involved in sports than he was. She was one of the jack-in-the-box students, and the one who “received a forty thousand dollar scholarship!!” at a religious college that is much less demanding academically, but absolutely perfect for her because it offers the major she wants and it’s in the mountains with lots of recreational opportunities. We’re happy for her, and her family is happy for us. Both are great kids. Both are doing well.

At the time, there was some angst – probably more on the part of us parents than on the part of the kids. In the end, our families are still very friendly, our kiddos are still good friends, and each of them went where (s)he wanted to go. It just didn’t matter. :)

momfirst3 · June 9, 2010, 2:18pm

Sounds like the race this year for my son. He and one other boy have been neck in neck all the way through school… My son passed him up at the end of junior year. Both are extremely bright and were not paying any attention to the race for valedictorian. They just took the classes that fit their intellect best which happened to be the AP classes… My son ended up Valedictorian in the end with his friend being very happy for him. The #2 got many scholarships and is off to UPenn to study econ. My son got his share of scholarships and is off to UC Berkeley to study engineering. It all worked out perfectly and everyone was happy.

And yes, I savored every single moment.

missypie · June 9, 2010, 2:19pm

Momfirst3, I can understand your tiredness, but I had no intention of generalizing. I said, “We’ve had a few Vals and Sals with literally no ECs.” These kids are not fools and made a conscious choice to do what it took to be val. And unfortnuately, if one student gets 100 in swimming and another get a perfect grade in an AP class, the other has 112.5 points in the GPA (vs. the swimmer’s 100 points). Sadly, quite a few kids at the very top of the class who are in sports will drop them junior and/or senior year to take two more AP classes instead.

As I’ve mentioned, our school makes a big deal about the Top 20 in each graduating class. My D pointed out the three who were in double blocked classes all four years (cheer, swimming and band). The kids who land very near the top of the heap while pursuing a very busy EC schedule are the ones she admires.

sacchi · June 9, 2010, 2:24pm

Here’s another rant. S wasn’t recognized at the Senior Awards for a state-wide award with an objective set of criteria which he met (Top 10% of class, SAT M+V>1260).

At awards night he was sitting with a bunch of his friends, rather than with his parents. When the Bloustein award recipients were called, every single other kid he was sitting with got up, and he was left sitting alone, shrugging his shoulders.

He didn’t care, as he got other, more meaningful awards that night, including one that was a big surprise. But it bugged me, seeing him sitting there alone with a confused look on his face, watching the huge group of his friends go up on stage. He worked so hard to break into the Top 10% his junior year, after just barely missing it after his sophomore year.

I know it doesn’t really matter. So, I’m ranting here to get it off my chest and put it behind me.

geek_mom · June 9, 2010, 2:52pm

IMHO TheGFG’s pizza story is a much better metaphor than the original pizza metaphor offered on this thread. People lose sight of the fact that team captain, first chair, and all those things are earned – not handed out like slices of pizza for the greedy carnivorous kid to consume. What criteria are used to determine them, well, we could go in circles on that – but they’re still earned according to those criteria.

I think that was TheGFG’s original intent too… a healthier thing to do than ranting to one’s kiddo, for sure! And something we often do in the parents forum. I say, rant away… just mind the kiddo’s privacy when discussing specifics. By the way, congrats to your son on making that top 10%!

momfirst3 · June 9, 2010, 3:10pm

Missypie, Yeah - I know. That’s why I apologized for misunderstanding your text. I got your point. My son did not drop his athletics though. It can be done, but boy it was a lot of hard work…

FallGirl · June 9, 2010, 3:36pm

Not a good analogy in my house. D has lots of friends but was not “uber popular” so she never expected to be elected h.c queen (she wasn’). We did think that with her high overall grades as well as really high grades in certain classes, she might be recognized for that.

geek_mom · June 9, 2010, 3:54pm

OMG, homecoming queen! This year’s homecoming queen was the subject of a rumor that she’d been selected by the administration over the students’ popular vote for family reasons. I don’t know whether that’s true, and I really, highly doubt it (both are lovely girls with cheerful demeanors and circles of friends that don’t intersect very much). But the other girl’s mom is still ranting and raving (publicly) that her daughter was the real homecoming queen. The daughter was elected prom queen. The mom’s captions and comments on the Facebook photos were all about – you guessed it – the injustice that she wasn’t homecoming queen too.
Seriously?

Pizzagirl · June 9, 2010, 3:59pm

OMG, get a life!! LOL.

missypie · June 9, 2010, 4:00pm

The girl who was something like #17 in the class who did a sport and choir and senior year, half of her classes were unweighted. We figured that she must actually have had the highest grades in the class because there is no way a student could achieve a class rank so high with that many unweighted classes unless her AP grades were 100s or close to it.

missypie · June 9, 2010, 4:08pm

At least at our school, student-voted awards like homecoming court, class officer, NHS officer, etc. are only representative of how many friends the candidate could actually get to vote at all. My son didn’t vote for homecoming king the year his best friend was a candidate; he did not even vote f rhomecoming king senior year when HE was a candidate.

[Just to veer off topic a bit, I LOVE the way our HS selects the homecoming king/queen candidates. Any organization that wants to can nominate someone…so in addition to the representatives of the football team and the cheerleaders, you have the representatives of the gymnastics team and the band and the yearbook and the choir, etc. Those students are all announced and reconized a pep rally. It’s touching to see students called up who have never received a bit of recognition before.]

FallGirl · June 9, 2010, 4:42pm

^
That is nice. It’s a good way to have a lot of diverse social groups represented.

TheGFG · June 9, 2010, 4:45pm

Homecoming court and king and queen, as well as the senior superlatives for the yearbook or newspaper, are supposedly voted for at lunchtime by anyone who cares enough to do so, which isn’t many people. One reason the students don’t care is because of the triviality of the title. But the main reason kids don’t bother to vote is because the students in charge (student govt. kids, or yearbook or newspaper staff) actually end up picking who THEY want anyway. This is not idle speculation on the part of disgruntled children and their parents. The kids themselves are blatant about erasing votes right after a ballot is submitted, and bragging audibly about helping their friends or themselves get elected. The girl who helped herself get the title “Most Likely to Be President” is the school tramp. Could be, could be.

Prom king and queen are voted on as the kids enter the hotel where the event is being held. At that point they haven’t seen most of their classmates, so it has nothing to do with who looks the best. I’m not sure if that was the point of that title or not, but I had thought so. I saw Homecoming Queen and King as more of the really nice kids who best represented what is good in young people, while the prom royalty was the most attractive or the best couple.

geek_mom · June 9, 2010, 4:54pm

:D:D:D

At geek_son’s high school, both were popularity contests. The administration may have attached some meaning to each title, but nobody else could articulate it. They’re just popular votes by slightly different segments of the student body.

TheGFG · June 9, 2010, 5:30pm

I think we as democratic Americans, are a little uncomfortable with the implication that some people just might be “better” or “more deserving” than others. That sounds too much like the social hierarchies that we disapprove of in other cultures (caste systems, for example). We believe in equal opportunity, and the egalitarian pursuit of happiness. Furthermore, teachers and coaches tend to be sympathetic people persons. Therefore, I think sometimes they attempt some social engineering. They feel the need counteract inequities in talent, intelligence, or skill. They really are quite uncomfortable if Johnny or Susie is too much smarter or gifted than their peers. One reason is that it makes it hard for them to remain impartial. Often, it even makes them a little angry. They may not actually be angry at the child, but it can seem that way.

calmom · June 9, 2010, 5:58pm

I think everyone in the “fairness” boat is assuming a level of accuracy in record-keeping at most high school’s that simply doesn’t exist. In the spring of my daughter’s junior year, she had several teachers congratulate her on her impending graduation… when of course she had another year to go. I don’t know for sure where that came from – but for some reason her teachers seemed to think she was a year ahead. I’m sure that issue happens in other contexts as well – especially if a junior is taking a class that is typically filled with seniors (like AP Calc).

The same is true with recognition based on a certain criteria. Sometimes there are forms that need to be filled out ahead of time to submit the info. That may be the g.c. responsibility, but it could also be a teacher responsibility or some form the student was supposed to turn in. In a different context – I remember hearing some ranting and raving by some parents at my d’s high school about how “unfair” the process was to get into the sophomore honors English class. Well, the process involved submitting an application essay by a date certain – and the ranting parents turned out to be totally unaware of that. Their kids simply had not applied. Of course, when the parents did find out, then they were upset that the school had not notified them, as opposed to simply telling the students or giving them a handout in school.

So I kind of wonder if it is possible that the kid who has a certain GPA + test score and is supposed to get a certain level of recognition because of that might have been overlooked because of missed paperwork, either because of an error from the gc or because the kid didn’t turn in some sort of paper or another along the way.

In California there is (or was) a system where the GC must certify students in the top 12% of their high school at the end of junior year to the UC system, and then UC recalculates GPAs according to their standards and figures out to top 4% from each high school, who in turn get preferred admission status to the UC system. My son didn’t get that, and I don’t know why-- he had straight A’s in all the classes that would have been included in the calculation. Five years down the line, knowing that my son had been somehow missed, I encouraged my d to ask her g.c. about the process in the spring of her junior year - then it turned out that at her school, part of the process was that the g.c. sent a paper home requiring parental permission to forward the data to the UC system. So who knows? Maybe my son’s g.c. messed up, or maybe he was handed a piece of paper for my signature that he never gave me. My d. was always very proactive about that sort of stuff and attentive to details, my son not so much. (I never really followed up because my son’s test scores were so high that he didn’t need any admissions boost for UC in any case - it was more of an issue in my mind for my daughter, who had weaker test scores)

I think its fairly likely that many award-getters are proactive in letting the award-givers know that they want to be considered. I wouldn’t read a lot into every omission; mistakes get made. I mean, in terms of bureaucratic efficiency, teachers and school administrators are generally far from perfect.

Senior Awards Rants

CONNECT WITH US