To farewell year 12, students at my old school would draw a yellow brick road in chalk through the playground, then form a guard of honour for sobbing girls who knew that once outside the gate, they would be school students no more.played over the speakers. Twenty-five years later, I still tear up when I hear that song.The yellow brick road tradition has survived for decades – until this year.
Leaving school is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. There will be another corporate party; another milestone birthday. Christmas will come again next year. You can even get married a few times but most students only get one shot at year 12.COVID-19 has cancelled the joys of that experience, and left the drudgery. It's no wonder that parents, teachers and mental-health experts are reporting an increasing sense of hopelessness and despair among the Class of 2020.
It's not enough for us adults to shrug and say, "toughen up, snowflake". Few of us at that age had faced such huge upheaval, and today's year 12s do not have our decades of life experience to know that these challenges will, eventually, pass.Nor should we leave it to students to figure out how to cope.
A few times a year, however, I still have dinner with girls who walked with me down the yellow brick road. We laugh until we cry about our memories of school. In the long run, friendships are the most precious, lasting momentos of year 12. And even COVID cannot take them away.
JordsBaker And completely unnecessary
JordsBaker Those of us who grew up before the Cold War ended had daily to live with the perceived threat of nuclear war
JordsBaker Sounds vaguely American. Ignore it
JordsBaker way bigger upheavals in the 20th century . . . 1960’s Vietnam draft...WWII....Great Depression....1918 Spanish Flu....WWI......so toughen up snowflakes!
JordsBaker Well we never dressed up in gowns ...we just ran out the gate and were finally free.
JordsBaker John Birmingham on scottyfrommarketting fake vaccine story auspol
JordsBaker My grandfather graduated in September 1939. By mid 1941, he was in a POW camp in Germany. While there, he got typhus.