Pomp and Circumstance

Today I had the pleasure of attending the ninth grade graduation ceremony. This ceremony is the reason we are all in school this week. For some reason they can't graduate at the actual end of the semester and have to come back in the middle of vacation to do it.

After talking to Miss Kim yesterday I thought we had four classes, and then the ceremony would be around 12. However, this morning it turned out that we had no classes (in fact the other grades didn't even come to school) and the ceremony was at 10:30.

So at the proper time we traipsed over to the gym/auditorium for the excitement. I believe ninth grade graduation here is a bigger deal than in the States because school is only mandatory in Korea up through ninth grade. After this the students will go to various high schools, or perhaps none. Some will go to a regular high school to prepare for college, while some will attend trade schools to prepare for life in the real world. This is why there is so much studying even in middle school, because your grades here determine what high school you get accepted to which determines where you go to college which determines how successful you'll be later in life. So unlike in America, where the rumor that a girl once told me that colleges looked at grades from middle school is false, here in Korea it couldn't be more true.

The ceremony didn't have all the pomp or ceremony of the high school graduations we're used to. Some students came in their uniforms, some came in regular street clothes, one boy wore a suit, but that's because he got a special award and gave a speech. There were seats for the students (all 316 of them) while the rest of us (parents, teachers, friends, relatives) milled around in the back. No one listened to the ceremony, there was various chit chat and poses for pictures. The best was the fantastic bouquets of flowers that everyone brought for the graduates. I've never seen anything over the top. They were mostly comprised of a few flowers (or sometimes none at all), voluminous amounts of netted fabric in various bright colors, and various doodads sticking out like candy, little people in witches hats, or giant feathery hearts. I amused myself for most of the ceremony by taking pictures of the best ones as sneakily as I could.

Other highlights included the music teacher conducting a recording whose music was set to a picture slide show of photographs of nature and at the end happy Korean kids (I realized later that he was conducting the audience, we were supposed to sing along, but since no one did, I thought he was just crazy. He came out again later and this time the music was projected onto the screen and I realized we were supposed the sing along. Finally, on the third song, some people joined in.) And outside the auditorium there was a man selling cotton candy.

The Koreans really are the best when it comes to making things fancy and over the top. Why have a bouquet of flowers unless it is wrapped in what looks like a balloon animal? In fact, who even needs the flowers when we have all this other great stuff? I make a jest about the bouquets, but in fact I'm a big fan and wouldn't mind taking home several for myself.