Would You Please Stand If You Are The First In Your Family To Graduate From College

 

This weekend it was my pleasure to attend two graduations in California. Since this is the graduation season this must be such a small sampling of what went on in the country.

The first graduation we attended as a family was to go down to LA ( a place that I have real affection for) to watch my daughter's boyfriend gain his Master's at CalState LA. In physics with honors. He did this in little over a year. And he held down two jobs while doing that. Plus drove my daughter to her job.

Happily I got to see his mother get to see him and we really enjoyed a well run and very visible ceremony. They did that like clockwork. We parked easily, had to walk a minimum amount, got great seats and felt like the pomp was beautiful enough to leave me crying. I loved that they had a huge screen with students giving tributes on video before the ceremony.
Then the next day my daughter graduated with Honors from UCSB. Her ceremony was almost impossible to see, something I don't understand, not made visible, crowded and parking was forever away.
But in both cases I was so very proud. My daughter looked beautiful, and it was a milestone for me personally. It was a milestone in our family too because I started thinking that perhaps for their children going to college will just be normal. Two children of mine exceeding what I did-graduating in fields I admire and respect after working their tails off to get there, that felt great. Given the fact my father attended college on the GI Bill getting his PHD-from a family that came from abject poverty in East Tennessee I was processing as well my husband's accomplishment as a child from Italian immigrants-his parents not going to college.
We put a high value on education because, I think, our parents gave us that.
And, at these graduations, I met and saw families that have done the same.

I recognized sitting there that I have entered another phase of life, truly,  brought home by thinking of life as having various states. If I hadn't gotten it before, I did enjoy a bit of conversation that spoke directly to me about how we change in life. Graduations are ceremonies to mark that we change.
Roles have shifted for me now and I more fully understand that.
My daughter started, the next day, a job with a publisher-big job. It is a very big challenge.
I'm watching her- looking backwards at my life. I can't help but do that. At where I once was-and where progress in our lives took us. She has stated to me she wants to accomplish in her life. I understood those drives as well. For me my daughters represent the women of our families. Represent us.



So a funny thing happened at the graduation.
I had a shift in my perceptions. Just like the adjacent photo as my husband was asked to take a picture of a family and I took a picture of him doing that. When it hit me he was approachable to this man who asked him-he was open.

You sit a long time, you think. (I was toasting in the sun.)
At AJ's graduation the crowd was enormous. We filled a stadium. I do not know the total number of graduates, thousands. Audience-way more. But I do know the institution is public, and the families were as diverse as it gets in America. That was very close to what I do in my job teaching, hoping to lift kids to that very podium. It was interesting to me, deeply important,  and I couldn't help thinking about that-the diversity there.
It seemed to me on display were people that do not have vast amounts of money, not wealth in terms of dollars-but certainly wealth in terms of family, work ethic, sacrifice. The embodiment of our future as a nation was there. You just felt that in seeing who turned out to the ceremony, the wheelchairs, white heads, babies, the groups of people there in honest celebration.
At some point the CalState President -who I guess is outgoing of the University in LA- asked the grads to stand who were the first in family to graduate from college. 
A stadium stood-I'd say two thirds of those kids. 
He could not have made a point more clearly. Since he was retiring I think this spoke to him about What He Is There To Do. If you miss my point this expresses a vast shift in the lives of these families-education as a path to future and not just to employment, but to their quality of life. It seems to me that education changes how we consider life.

That's when it hit me.

For so long I've been listening to so much about the failure of our schools.
What is going to fix them, what they are lacking. About rigor and Common Core, and all the rest of it.

What I saw however spoke to me. It really spoke because I could SEE it.

That's a lot of people who, for the first time, went through public systems, largely, and who are graduating to go on to "be" in our world. Amazing diversity.
That's really not failure. The diversity-that I cannot emphasize enough was the heart of these graduations.
When you elevate thousands into lives their parents did not know, when education is accessible- and a way to make futures, you cannot call this failure of a system. California helped that.

It is conceivable to me that I've been operating with "a big lie."
It is no failure in American education to see so many people, so diverse, in LA graduating, as I did, FIRST in families to go to college and do so. This is no failure in education.

It's an astounding success.

Maybe even a former student or two of mine was there.
That would make it even sweeter. Loves in my life were there.

Really, more than ever before, I am going to chose to see myself, my work, education, in terms of the people who gain because of it. I want to talk about that. About how things work.