Sumner's Moving Up

Sumner "moved up" into the first grade today. He and his kindergarten buddies had a little graduation like ceremony at school. They sang a few songs to canned music and walked across the stage when their names were called.

When getting dressed, Sumner, excited not to have to wear his uniform, donned his loudest Hawaiian shirt and shorts and a green sequin vest that has been in the family costume collection for a couple generations. The green sequins didn't make it to school, but the loud shirt did.

The craziest thing about the ceremony was that they gave out academic awards to the kids. Sumner got an award, along with two others, for Reading Achievement. In my estimation, this means he is the Best All Around Reader in his class. I am thrilled. Three others got awards for Most Improved Reader. There were Writing, Math, Science, Music, and Computer awards that followed the same pattern. No kid got two awards. Do kindergarteners even know what Most Improved means? I hope not! They shouldn't. We should be valuing all of these kids as whole people and respect their individuality. We need to make room in our schools for nurturing other things with the academics--like their creativity and personality. After the academic awards, they gave an award to all the rest of the kids as for their Haley Peacemaking. Finally they gave out a Best All-Around type of award, for the two smartest and nicest kids. The whole thing was just bizarre.

Phil leaned over and told me he was going to call the principal. "First of all," he said, "Obviously Sumner deserved the academic achievement awards not only for Reading, but for Writing, Science, Math and Computer. This thing is fixed." We laughed. Although he never got to the "Second of all", I think he would have agreed with me that we just need to let the kids be kids. They can earn academic awards later.