I Went to My Son’s 8th Grade Promotion Ceremony. It Was Awkward, Sad, and Hopeful.

I was happy for him, but also a bit jealous... and annoyed at his “facial modification.”

Last week, my oldest son “graduated” from middle school. Or, as his school was careful to point out, it wasn’t really a “graduation” but a “promotion ceremony.”

That makes sense since he’s not done with school yet—he’s just moving from middle school to high school. Either way, though, it was a celebration of the class completing eight years of schooling and moving on to their final four.

This was very interesting to attend, and I had lots of feelings. In the past, I haven’t often been able to attend events like this, especially when they celebrated being “promoted” from elementary school to middle school, because the school usually schedules those for some weird time during business hours, like 11:15 am on Thursday morning.

So, my wife normally goes to those. But the “big ones” are the ones I usually try to attend.

For my oldest child (my oldest daughter), I wasn’t able to come to the promotion ceremony because everything was canceled due to COVID-19. That was really sad. The school tried doing some lame Zoom meeting with a slide show, but it obviously wasn’t even close to the real thing.

My second child (my second-oldest daughter) had a promotion event, but her school was really small, and her class was even smaller, so I barely remember the event at all.

This time, though, it was an event to remember. The class size wasn’t all that big; 25 kids in all, but the whole event was about two hours long and they made it a big to-do, so it was memorable for me, my wife, and (hopefully) for my son as well.

I had lots of thoughts and feelings as I sat there watching the slide shows and listening to the various speakers.

Eighth graders are so awkward.

My first takeaway was that it was all so funny to watch: eighth graders are all so awkward that it’s almost comical to watch them do anything at all.

They’re in awkward physical stages as they’re maturing. They walk funny, talk funny, and act funny. The boys, especially, are skinny and gangly but have disproportionately long limbs, and they walk around like they’re blind, not paying attention, bumping into people, and tripping over things. It was hard not to laugh out loud at times.

Their haircuts were funny too: some of them had hair that looked really silly, and it was funny thinking about how they think they look so cool, or old, or handsome right now, but I know that in 10 or 20 years, they’ll look back at pictures of the evening and think: “Oh my goodness, I can’t believe I wore that,” or “I can’t believe my parents let me get that haircut!”

My own son, for example, decided to play a trick on us and, when getting a haircut, the day before the event, secretly asked the barber to give him an “eyebrow slit.”

What on earth is an eyebrow slit?

Apparently, it’s something very trendy right now with middle school boys. Many of them have it. But it looks VERY STUPID.

My son asked me for months if he could get one, and I always said “No.” But he found a way to be sneaky and get one anyway, right before his promotion, so here we are now, taking photos of an important night in my son’s life with pictures that will last forever, and he looks like he lost a knife fight in a bar brawl.

Not cool, my son. Not cool.

Also, just listening to the goofy things the boys said out loud that they thought were so funny was… awkward. They said such wacky things that weren’t funny at all, but it sure made them laugh. That was kind of embarrassing but also kind of endearing.

Eighth graders are awful at giving speeches.

This part was just delightful. Four or five students came up to the lectern and gave speeches on different topics, and with different perspectives. Some of them did a decent job, but most were just terrible. Comically bad.

They stared down at their notes. They didn’t make eye contact. They spoke so quickly their words all ran together and were indecipherable. They spoke too quietly for the microphone to pick up what they were saying.

One kid made a joke but flubbed the last two or three words, which happened to be the punchline… so when he left the stage, everybody wondered what on earth he had said. Only when the principal came up to the stage after him and said: “In case you didn’t catch that, what he said was…” and repeated it, did we actually get the joke.

That was all very funny to me. I’ve done public speaking many times over the years, and I’ve done my fair share of criticism of public speakers, but I told myself: “They’re kids… let it go. This is funny.”

The girls are MUCH taller than the boys, which is super awkward.

The height disparity between teenage boys and girls, it seems, is at its highest at this life stage. This is really something to behold: seeing boys and girls, who are all ostensibly the same age or very nearly so, with such wildly varying heights.

It was even awkward for me: my goodness, some of my 14-year-old son’s female peers are taller than me! I’m not a very tall man, but wow, there were two or three girls his age who were over six feet tall that seemed to tower over me, and I’m a 5’ 10” 38-year-old man.

How does that even happen? I have no idea. It’s very strange.

But it’s also strange to see my son, who is also in the same class, clearly dwarfed by these girls his age who are more than a foot taller than him.

I keep telling him, “Just wait. In a year or two, you boys will catch up.”

Right now, all the boys are baby-faced skinny little guys without facial hair who will shoot up like a weed in a year or two and it will all make sense and look right by the time they finish high school.

But in the meantime, boy, does it ever look lopsided.

These kids have NO idea how good they have it.

I try hard not to be a grumpy old man always saying, “You kids these days… you don’t know how good you have it,” but in this case, it’s just the truth.

I was homeschooled. I never had any sort of promotion or graduation ceremony at all in my entire schooling experience. Not in elementary school, not in middle school, and not in high school. No photos, no parties, no ceremonies, no yearbooks, absolutely nothing.

I can’t even imagine what it must be like to stand proudly on a stage, pose for a photo with a teacher who cares about me, and smile as I think about the good experience I’ve had with my classmates for the past eight years. I don’t have even the smallest clue about what this is like.

My wife knows what it’s like—she did have the “school experience”—but she went to an enormous public school, ten or twenty times bigger than my son’s school. Her graduating class alone had over 400 students. Her teachers could barely remember her name.

In contrast, my son goes to a small, private Christian school. His graduation class had 12 girls and 13 boys. That’s it.

All the teachers know him by name.

They know him well.

They love him.

They care about him.

They pray for him!

His classmates are some of his best friends. I look at his little group of friends at his school and I feel insanely jealous of what he has.

He has no idea how good he has it.

None of these kids do, actually.

They’re about to find out—some of them, when they advance to larger public schools in the area where the class sizes alone will shock them to their core, where they’ll walk into a room, and nobody will know (or care) who they are.

They have a good thing going now, but there will be a culture shock in the future. They won’t know until many years later just how good they have it now, and by then, it will be in the past.

I felt like an emotional weirdo, and I shot almost 100 photos.

Again, as somebody who never was able to participate in any sort of ceremony like this growing up, I didn’t know what “the good parts” were or what I should take a picture of. So, I just started snapping photos of everything.

When I was happy, I took pictures. When I was sad, I took pictures.

I wasn’t sure what my son would want pictures of: which friends he wanted to pose with and whether he just wanted solo shots or group photos, so I just took pictures of everything.

I just counted them: I took 87 shots in all. I have no idea which will be meaningful to him in the future, but there are plenty to go around when he’s ready.

…although I do have a feeling that in 10 years, he’ll say, “Hey Dad, do you have a picture of me and so-and-so from eighth-grade promotion?” and I’ll look through my files and realize that so-and-so is the one person I don’t have a photo of.

Oh well. I did the best I could.

Most kids literally look like exact clones of their parents. It’s almost overwhelming.

As a father who doesn’t often see my son’s peers (and who sees their parents even less often), I was absolutely shocked at how easily I could guess who went with whom.

The blonde girl with light skin and freckles had a mother with the exact same shade of blonde hair and freckles.

The girl with tanned skin and dark hair had a mother who looked exactly like her and also had tanned skin and dark hair.

The only redheaded girl in the class had a mother who—you guessed it—was the only woman in the audience with red hair.

The enormous young man with huge facial features and a massive build looked like a carbon copy of his enormous father, who also looked like a football linebacker.

The only Asian boy looked like… the only Asian parents in the audience (obviously).

The only African boy looked like… the only African parents in the audience (obviously).

It was uncanny: the boys all looked like miniature versions of their fathers, and the girls looked like miniature versions of their mothers. Really, if this were a game, I could have matched EVERY SINGLE ONE of them to their parents just by looking at them without having ever met any of them.

It almost seemed like we were all part of a game where we were “Little People” or Lego characters in a game where a giant, cosmic child was building perfect little neighborhoods of perfectly matching parents and kids.

“I’ll have one blonde family, one brunette family, one redheaded family, one Asian family…” and so on.

When did this happen? How did this happen?

I don’t remember any of this from when I grew up: I don’t think I look that much like my parents at all, and I don’t remember any of my friends being so clearly stamped from the same mold as their parents either.

I don’t think my son looks exactly like me either: we have different hair colors and different facial features… so this whole thing was just, very, very weird to observe.

Why did all my son’s friends look like tiny clones of their parents? That was totally bizarre, and I really have no explanation for it.

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In all, it was a great evening. I’m glad I went. I felt happy, sad, inspired, and accomplished. We’ve done something great as a family. My son has done something great as a student. That is all worth celebrating. So, we did. I gave him his very first iPhone as a present, and my wife and I took him out to dinner to celebrate.

It was great.

Now, I look forward to the day he graduates, when it will all really be over… and I have no idea how I’ll feel about it then. But I know I’ll take a lot of pictures.