We can't just throw them into a new environment. We have to tell them they are ready for it, they are going to succeed. A stressful child can't learn as well as one who's confident. Teachers tied 1,000 bright blue balloons into an archway over the blacktop playground behind the school and roped off the surrounding grassy area for the audience. The pint-sized mortarboards came with elastics to fasten under the chin, but no one, sighed Josephine Covais, a teacher, wanted to wear them.
Elastics are so preschool.
And indeed, the graduates were feeling cocky. The teachers here chose Gabriel to deliver the message from the graduates because he could read, and so he dictated a few brief sentences expressing the graduates' thanks to the school. Before the procession, their teachers reminded the graduates to wait for the music to begin, and advised the girls to hold up their dresses as they walked up the grassy hill. Remember, those are only your mommies and daddies out there. The underclassmen marched in first, linked by a rope.