Pomp and Circumstantial Evidence

https://tinyletter.com/grahammoliver/letters/pomp-and-circumstantial-evidence

Friends,

Did you know the name of Pomp and Circumstance (which gets italics because it’s a series of marches for orchestra, not an individual song) comes from a line of Shakespeare? I did not.

Act III, Scene 3, Othello :

Farewell the neighing steed and the shrill trump,
The spirit-stirring drum, th’ear-piercing fife,
The royal banner, and all quality,
Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war!
And, O you mortal engines, whose rude throats
The immortal Jove’s dead clamours counterfeit,
Farewell! Othello’s occupation’s gone!

A little bit more martial than I was expecting, though apparently the march has been primarily associated with graduations since its composition 1901: the first use was at Yale’s 1905 graduation ( Wikipedia !). While the phrase “Pomp and Circumstance” fits graduation well, the scene in Othello is about Iago convincing Othello that Othello’s wife is having an affair, and Othello is regretting getting married and longing for the days when all he had to worry about was waging war. Which, if there’s a metaphorical connection to graduation, I’m not quite English-teacher enough to get it.

All of that to say that graduation is in three days.

It’s a weird time of the year. If I remember high school correctly (a big if), the second semester of senior year in the United States is largely a time to have fun, with few academic responsibilities, and big to-dos around things like spirit week-type events, prom, field trips, skip day(s), etc. I had to research a little because I didn’t have the experience of senior year myself and I couldn’t really remember, but it seems like normally in the US graduation is about a week after final exams. My former student at TxSt and now dance instructor extraordinaire Katie reports a good amount of “snacking and watching movies” happened towards the end.

For my students, final exams concluded the last week of April, but for some reason they’re required to continue to come to class until the day before graduation (this Thursday). As teachers, this means a balancing act, trying to find productive and/or fun things to do (but not too fun, admin is still watching) for a group of students who have no extrinsic motivation to work and are emotionally exhausted. The futility/tediousness of this is exacerbated by the fact that the seniors are currently learning online: other students have returned, but during an in-between hybrid phase so few seniors came in that they no longer gave them that option. As a semi-involved onlooker, it’s kind of sad, because it seems to have taken a lot of the excitement of the situation and dragged it out into a numbness, and makes their final interactions with the school a sort of meaningless spinning of wheels. I asked a few people and apparently this large gap is not limited to our school; it’s apparently SoP in Taiwan. I’m guessing it has something to do with a more direct link between high school exams and university acceptance than the US, I think there’s some kind of exam in July, but I wasn’t able to find out why for sure — if you know, please enlighten me!

I’m kind of surprised more parents haven’t just given their students permission to stop attending these online classes, but apparently the general attitude is if they’re logging into online class they’re not getting in trouble or getting Covid. At least they’re getting a little bit of fun in: I’ve heard great stories about learning to drive and got to see several students perform an informal concert in a venue that made me a little homesick with its very odd sound quality, cases of empty beer bottles, and thick layers of stickers on everything (this month’s picture is from the riverside near National Taiwan University where the concert took place). They even played “Hotel California” just to make me question who, exactly, these kids think they are. I guess the main differences between it an the impromptu Concerts of My Youth were that the lighting was really professional and there wasn’t a constant stream of people going outside to smoke.

I think I’ve written this before: teaching low-level undergraduate courses is so much different from teaching high school for many reasons, but the most drastic is how my perspective of the students changes. In university I’d see the vast, vast majority of students in class two-three times a week for fourteen weeks and one-three times outside of class, then they’d disappear almost entirely. A tiny handful would come say hi the next semester or take a second class from me, but that’s it. I didn’t find out how they grew after that class, or what path they took, or anything. But as a high school teacher I’ve seen the students who are about to graduate literally hundreds of times. On days that were some of their best and some of their worst, on days that were some of my best and some of my worst. I’ve seen them grow, and learn, and become more comfortable with themselves in so many ways that add up to the people about to be on their way out of here. It’s… humbling, and a little stressful, and mostly just overwhelms me a simultaneous gratitude for being a part of something meaningful and a sense of wishing I could’ve done a little better job with it.

I wonder how, in their eyes, I’ve changed in these three years. At all? More grey hair from the many downsides of teaching high school I am purposefully not mentioning at this time?

So graduation. It’ll be livestreamed. Parents aren’t allowed but yours truly will be reporting live. If it’s like two years ago (last year’s was cancelled), there’ll be videos with montages of photos that abruptly jump between super silly and super sentimental, both with the photos and the background music. There’ll probably be an uncomfortably long speech or two. I actually don’t remember if they’ll play “Pomp and Circumstance.” I’ll be a mess. I started teaching this crop of students shortly after arriving Taiwan, and have seen them go from anxiety-riddled new high school students (high school is only 10th-12th here) to finally getting a brief glimpse of what kind of people they’ll be when their lives are less centered on the next exam date, and now they’ll disperse to the far corners of the world (all but two are headed to the US or Canada, I think). It’s a new chapter for them and for me. Well, hopefully I get to hear how their stories are going every now and then.

Further reading:

• I read Piranesi by Susanna Clarke this month, which has gotten a lot of buzz, and found it… deserving of all the buzz! Such a weird, great short novel. If you want something a little weird, a little fantastic, and perfectly paced, highly recommend checking it out.
• Bo Burnham released an hour long cut of outtakes/unused material from his masterpiece Netflix special Inside . The new video is in itself a sort of sequel/second special, and is a fascinating look into the creative process by seeing what he cut from the original and what he was trying to do with variations. Go watch the original special first, which you should have already done!
• I loved reading Brandon Taylor livetweeting through a viewing of When Harry Met Sally , and am sad to report the movie is not on Taiwan’s Netflix.
• I really appreciated this article about the complications being online has had on university courses, why the accompanying lowered standards might do more harm than good, and how there are no easy answers to the next step forward: “My College Students Are Not Okay” by Jonathan Malesic . I’ve always been of the opinion that students are adult enough to decide their laptop usage in class, but I think there’s more and more evidence that the class as a whole benefits when they’re put away. In small discussion-heavy classes, at least, I might rethink my policy.
• I don’t know what to say about Uvalde, except that it’s a choice, and Tressie McMillan Cottom unsurprisingly gets close to putting words around it.
• After the Taiwanese-American church shooting last month, there were a bundle of good articles diving into the complicated conversations around the shooter’s identity. I recommend Michelle Kuo+Albert Wu at Broad and Ample Road , Brian Hioe at New Bloom , Cindy Chang at LA Times , and SueAnn Shiah at The News Lens .
• Excited that my friend Lili’s short story, “Enemies,” was published by Chapter House Journal . We read about Lili’s characters, Dawei and Lanlan, during our graduate school workshops, so it’s wonderful to see them find a home for this segment of their story.
• Also, my coworker Bea Chang also published a wonderful memoir essay, “Homesick Island,” at Emerson’s Redivider . It’s about travel and home and the distance between the two.
• Finally, Natalie Tai, who has been my student in some form or another on and off for three years now (time is flying), resumed posting on her site Societeas with a really thorough and compellingly written breakdown of the steps forward Taiwan has taken in terms of LGBTQ+ inclusivity in education and what still needs to be done. Highly recommend.

Next week is our Taiwanniversary: three years in the country as of June 11. I don’t know what to say that I haven’t already said + the cliche “it doesn’t feel like three years at all!” The downside and upside of Taipei summer has arrived: heat and mangoes. Today we had mango sticky rice after lunch and it was practically sinful.

Hope you’re having a sinful treat every now and then as well.

-g

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