Saturday, July 02, 2005

Graduations

In Thursday's For Better or For Worse, John makes a comment rather denigrating the validity of an eighth-grade graduation. Reminds me of something my father would say, although I'm a bit surprised to hear it from John. Some of the posters in rec.arts.comics.strips also seemed a bit derogratory towards the idea of an 8th grade graduation, kind of sneeringly implying that the kids haven't really accomplished anything yet, so they don't deserve a graduation.

Yes, grade eight is not a big deal in the adult scheme of things. A grown adult would not be at all feted for having an eighth-grade education. However, these are not grown adults, they are 13-year-olds, and graduating from grade eight is a perfectly valid accomplishment for a 13-year-old.

One of the things I've learned in my professional life is that the most important ingredient for being able to achieve great things is having experience, and experience is the one thing I cannot expedite. I just have to sit there, do your work, learn as you go, apply what you learn, and accept the fact that I'm not going to be nearly as good as my co-worker with 30 years' experience any time soon. But that doesn't matter, no one expects me to. I just have to be good for an employee with two years' experience, and when I get stuck draw on the vast experience of the senior memebers of my team.

Similarly, you can't hold a 13-year-old to accomplishments by adult standarda, and sneering at them for celebrating age-appropriate accomplishments would be like a senior co-worker sneering at me because I feel proud of having successfully translated a new genre of text that the senior co-worker has translated in hundreds of times. Now that I think about it, the adults who disapprove of graduations for "minor" milestones sound almost insecure in their adulthood, like they feel sub-consciously driven to be competitive with and show that they're better than mere adolescents.

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