Graduation gifts: The moving boxes of elementary school days

Graduation gifts for elementary school? The most meaningful mementos come in the "moving boxes" full of experience that we take from one school year to the next – the cumulative fun, growth, fascination of art projects, friends, social studies and language arts.

|
AP
Graduation gifts for the elementary school set are lifetime memories. Garrison Head received his diploma from Paxton (Florida) School Principal Beth Tucker during a ceremony May 24, 2012 for the school's 40 kindergartners.

We are packing. Each of us has a box with our names on it. Perhaps it is the box of 2nd, 4th, 6th, or 8th grade ... or parenting a child therein.

Into these boxes we place the carefully wrapped, delicate (or sturdy) sealed packages of language arts and science and social studies. Don’t forget the box of P.E. and art and band and music and sports! The box of recess, lunch, and homework club too. The box of friendships. The box of meetings and parent-teacher conferences; conviviality, joy, consternation, frustration, and even heartache – but mostly triumph and fulfillment.

In June, the schoolhouse begins to fill with these real and imagined boxes that come in all sizes. They are the vessels for all we have experienced, learned, made, sung, acted, danced, run and cherished between September and June, and they begin to pile up in anticipation of the big move to a new year.     

It’s like moving a house we’ve grown accustomed to. There are book boxes and china boxes and wardrobes – small boxes for a few heavy items, and bubble-wrap and tissue paper for the breakables; wardrobes for all those costumes that are put to use every day, plus the extra-special costume day we call Halloween. Sometimes they are disguises, sometimes just character or scene changes. Everything we need for the next place is being prepared for loading. The truck is here, idling.

We are only moving around the corner to a new neighborhood: September 2012, and a new school year. It’s not far, but nonetheless all of these boxes must be carried home, or loaded onto the school bus. Some go into storage, and some just get immediately reopened in a new location – at your house, at camp, grandma’s house, tree houses, boats and minivans.

Perhaps new things will be added in July and August? Good! There’s always room for the box to expand.  Just be sure to bring it back to school in the fall, when it will be time to unpack and move our belongings into School Year 2012-2013.

New room? Same room? New teacher? Same teacher? It’ll be different for each of us. But there are always new costumes … and always new boxes to fill. The new kids in this neighborhood might look familiar – even the same names as the old school! – but I guarantee they’ll be different. We’re all going to be new kids by September – it’s just one of the laws of summer.

If this move is like all the prior ones we’ve experienced, September will mix new discoveries of old things, reunions with favorite toys and experiences, and perhaps a few insurance claims for broken glassware that the movers packed inconsiderately or that fell off the truck.

The unpacking script might go like this: Now where are those math skills I put in an easy-to-find place? I know I put the comma rules in here somewhere … I just hope the box isn’t under the box spring mattress! The French vocabulary was in a big box with “Français” across the top in big letters. Ou est-il? Uh-oh: the science box is leaking. I wonder what I packed in there? Perhaps it should have been double-sealed? And the papiér maché mask and puppets I worked so hard on in art class? Crumbled. No worries; time to make new ones … I’d choose different colors this time anyway. It’s the making of it that’s the most precious cargo.

Our belongings are ourselves. We are what we pack and unpack. For a while in June it feels as if we are living in two houses or in two years at once; departing and arriving at the same time; to and from the same destination. Packing up the present school house is inextricably bound to our expectation of unpacking in the new one, next year’s, particularly since so much of what we have packed was chosen with the new one in mind. We may even find that some of the things we most cherished have lost their value over the summer, during the move, and we’re ready for entirely new, unanticipated treasures. It’s one of the benefits of moving, of changing, of growing: finding that we can be new and old in knowledge at the same time.

We're packing the house of friendship too – which is much harder to box up. It goes on the truck last. It wants to stay unpacked until the last minute, but even this most sacred belonging needs a little time away from school to rejuvenate and grow. The new kids in this neighborhood might look familiar – even the same names as the old school! – but I guarantee they’ll be different. We’re all going to be new kids by September – it’s just one of the laws of summer.

You know the forwarding address. See you at the new place.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Graduation gifts: The moving boxes of elementary school days
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Family/Modern-Parenthood/2012/0529/Graduation-gifts-The-moving-boxes-of-elementary-school-days
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe