Wiping out the competition

I found this story in today's Rocky Mountain News online interesting. The Boulder Valley School District will eliminate valedictorians from high school classes beginning with the class of 2010. At first I thought the story would be about our society's latest attempt to make students feel good about themselves by wiping out the competition, this time the competition for being at the top of one's class. I guess you could see it that way. According to the story students will now be bestowed with honors usually reserved for universities and colleges -- the cum laude, magna cum laude and summa cum laude designations. Those designations don't single out the top individual. Instead, the top 3 percent would be summa cum laude; the top 7 percent magna cum laude, and the top 10 percent cum laude.

Still, I'll bet a lot of students in the school district's most competitive schools will likely graduate with honors. It wouldn't surprise me, given the fact that the average grade is now a B. The students in my college classes complain when they get a C. Hey, a C is an average grade. It means they're performance is in the middle of the pack. It might as well be an F for them. I don't think it's because they're all such high performers either. A few are, but I think most are just used to getting A's on everything. "Hey, I show up to class," they think. "I should get an A."

Don't get me wrong -- I know there are school districts and universities where the competition is fierce. My high school was one of them. We had 11 valedictorians in my class of more than 500. All of those valedictorians got straight A's -- we had to vote on who got to give the speech at graduation. (This was in 1990, before school districts weighted honors classes, pushing the students who excel in those classes above a 4.0 grade-point average.) There were another dozen or two students who had gotten only one or two B's their entire high-school career. In Highlands Ranch, Colo., where I live, the high schools have a good reputation, and many students are your typical over-achievers. In poorer, more urban school districts, the challenge is to get students to graduate. Here, the pressure is great to get the best grades, be involved in all the right activities and get into the best colleges.

It's interesting to me how the pressure diminishes and the achievement holds less meaning for those who get excellent grades in college. I graduated from the University of Missouri School of Journalism with a class of about 200. Only a handful graduated with honors. I was disappointed in high school not to be valedictorian (I was one of those who got one or two B's), but in college I graduated cum laude -- the bottom rung of those three designations of graduating with honors. I was pleased with it, though. I worked my tail off. No employer ever hired me for my college GPA, but I worked hard because I loved to learn and wanted to do my best.

This brings me to another interesting thing: Why is there so much more hoopla associated with graduating from high school than graduating from college? It's never made sense to me why our culture views graduation from high school as the launching pad to the rest of your life, when you really spend the next four to six years still under mom and dad's wings. Why do all the aunts, uncles, grandparents and cousins come to the high school graduation, but students (and therefore their families) often skip their college graduation ceremonies, as if it didn't mean anything, when college graduation is actually more meaningful because not everyone achieves it?

Forgive me, I can see I've digressed. I guess this calls for a part II of this blog on another day . . . .

Where were you 10, 20 and 30 years ago?

I read this on a friend's blog today and, I'll admit it, I stole it from her. She didn't "tag" me with this "meme," and she explains below, but I think the topic is interesting and thought I'd give it a shot to remember back in my own life.

Where were you 10, 20, and 30 years ago?

In the blogging world, when you are ‘tagged’ by a ‘meme’ it means that there is some topic or (usually) a question going around that a blogger writes about and then challenges other bloggers he or she knows to answer as well. Some consider the practice silly or rude for a variety of reasons, and some bloggers refuse to participate. However, if you find the question one of interest you can search by labels, titles, or keywords – or just follow people’s links – to spend hours seeing what others have to say about that topic!

Here goes for my life:

November 1997: I was 25 and had been a reporter at the Greeley Tribune for four months. I was covering night cops (i.e. keeping up with the police beat at night), working from 1 p.m. to 11 or midnight each night. It was a very lonely time in my life. New town, new job, few friends, stressful job. Work was my entire life. I lived in a dumpy duplex apartment near the University of Northern Colorado. I had some interesting neighbors, to say the least, and I remember being a little scared when I came home at night. I tried to make that place my home, but I couldn't wait to move out, which I did the following spring. My job eventually got better, too, and I made some friends. I stayed in Greeley and worked at the Tribune until May 2004.

November 1987: I was 15, a sophomore at Arvada West High School in Arvada, Colo. I had braces and ate a chocolate shake and sour-cream & onion potato chips for lunch each day. (How did I manage to be so skinny back then? Duh . . . I was 15.) My high school at the time was only a three-year high school with 10th, 11th and 12th grades, so the sophomores were the babies of the student body. Even so, that first year of high school was a much better experience for me than my entire three years of junior high. I had a few good friends, and I'm still friends with them today, if you can believe it. I worked really hard to get good grades. Most of my afternoons and weekends were spent doing homework. I knew I wanted to be a writer and thought I'd probably go into journalism. My hardest class that year was biology. The easiest and most fun for me was 10th grade English. I remember my English teacher saying in front of the whole class how good I was at grammar and punctuation. I was mortified -- being smart wasn't "cool" (that didn't happen until college). But it was a foreshadowing of things to come. That understanding of the English language has served me well as a journalist and a journalism teacher who now is a stickler for good grammar.

November 1977: I was 5 years old, living in the home I grew up in in Arvada, Colo. My older brother was 8, and he and the other boys in the neighborhood tortured me mentally. They'd sit around on their bikes in the middle of the street. I'd come along and try to join them with my pink bike with streamers dangling from the handlebars. They'd make fun of me. Somehow, I just didn't get that I didn't belong. I also had an adversarial relationship with my little brother, who was only 1 year old in November 1977. He was too young to truly be my adversary, but I resented having a little brother (I wanted a little sister) and was adjusting to being the middle child, not the youngest anymore. (In case you're wondering, I don't think of my little brother as an enemy anymore. I'm glad I grew up with two brothers.)