And The Award Goes To...

Tuesday was Awards Day in my oldest daughter’s class at school, two days before school let out for the summer. I asked E if it was just for the class or if parents could attend. E hates it when I come to her school. She is in fourth grade and getting close to that age when kids prefer to think they spontaneously burst into existence, rather than the truth, that they were excreted out of their mother’s vagina, the very same vessels which received their father’s sperm after he shoved his penis in there and moved it around. No wonder kids are hesitant to associate themselves with people who abuse their bodies in such horrible and embarrassing ways. She told me it was just for the class. I decided to not trust her on that, checked with another mom, and found out that not only could parents attend, they were actually encouraged to do so, by individuals other than their own children. So I went. I left my giant foam finger and air horn at home. I didn’t want to humiliate her.

When I was in elementary school, Awards Day was a school wide event. Only the older students would get awards, with the exception of those younger over-achievers with perfect attendance or straight A’s. And the whole school would sit in the auditorium, bored out of their skulls, waiting to go back to their desks and stinky lunchboxes. But times have changed. First of all, they don’t even have auditoriums in elementary school anymore. But more importantly, the point of recognizing actual achievement has been totally lost in our effort to build up every child’s self-esteem. Seriously, some of these mouth-breathing knuckle-draggers’ greatest achievement was mastering the art of ass wiping. Do we really need to print out a certificate of recognition for that?

With all the bogus undertakings to recognize, Awards Day would have to turn into Awards Week. Instead, the children are now kept in their own classrooms. Who has time to acknowledge every honor and identify every level of participation? So I along with the rest of the parents sat on top of our kids’ desks while their good natured but pregnancy-induced scatterbrained teacher called out the names of the kids and handed them an assortment of hastily prepared certificates of achievement, all bearing the impersonal stamp of a Microsoft Word template.

There were the A honor roll kids, the A-B honor roll kids, the perfect attendance kids, the kids were good in art or music or physical education. Some kids were in the garden club, some in chorus, some in the instrumental percussion group and the student council. Awards were given freely and often. The students even voted on awards for each other, an elementary take on superlative awards in high school. The sweetest, the best citizen, cutest smile, best writer, most artistic, sporty spiciest, best vajayjay,and on and on. Luckily, their teacher was as over all the awards as much as the parents, so she flew through them, barely stopping to pronounce each child’s last name. She even requested we hold all applause until the end. Flash photography was frowned upon. Had the teacher stuck to such a tight schedule all school year, perhaps the kids might have learned the full gamut of the proposed fourth grade syllabus.

My mind began to wander, as it does when I am over- or under-stimulated, so I came up with some pretty special awards on my own. These are, after all, a bunch of nine and ten year olds, on the very edge of puberty. They are a special bunch. And by that, I mean “Special.” One boy seemed to get more awards than any other boy. I remembered him from the Christmas party, at which point I would have voted him “Most Likely in Need of a Shower.” Now, he was in the running for “Most Unfortunate Eyebrows.” There was also another boy who was “Biggest Crybaby,” and the oldest kid in the class, “Most Likely to Advance Because How Many Times Can He Repeat the Fourth Grade, Anyway?” A cute girl was the clear winner of “Give Her a Sandwich.” A girl near her was a shoe-in for “Give the Cute Girl Your Sandwich. Don’t You Think You’ve Had Enough?” There was yet another girl, “Little Miss Stop Texting, You Are the Only Kid with a Phone.” Another girl got the “I’m Sorry You Look So Much Like Your Mother” award. One buck-toothed individual clearly was the best choice for “When Do You Get Your Braces, Anyway?” Another would get the “Just One More Year of Speech Therapy!” prize. Half the boys were tied for “We All Look Alike…How Can You Tell Us Apart?” Except for one boy, who qualified for both “Look at Those Head Handles” and “Stop Staring At Me. You’re Creeping Me Out.”

Before I knew it, all my fun was over, as was the awards ceremony. We couldn’t have any refreshments, as the school has no budget for such luxuries, but we were allowed to take our children home with us, even though it was only 9 a.m. Awards Day was all that was on the schedule for the third to last day of school. All the textbooks had been collected, all the “No Child Left Behind” testing completed. Why the kids went to school at all was a mystery to everyone, especially themselves.

Meanwhile, over at the Montessori school, my other child, S, and her friends had the freedom to create a new game, since they have full days and no time to waste on frivolities like Field Day and Awards Day and How Many Hours Do They Have to Attend to Count as an Actual School Day luau. So in between pruning the classroom plants and scrubbing the desks, they invented The Kick. The Kick was a more violent and clandestine version of tag. Whoever was It was said to have The Kick, and the only way to get rid of it was to kick another classmate in the shins. Then that kid would have The Kick, and so on and so forth until everyone had banana legs.All this had to be done as secretly as possible, lest the teacher catch on to all the kicking and put a stop to it. This is why private school is totally worth the money.

My daughter, E, won six awards, but she miscounted and thought she won seven. The Math Award was not among the six. My other daughter iced her shins when she got home from school. Both of them make me very proud.