2. THEN CAME THE LAST DAYS OF MAY - How Do We Mark An Ending?

This week at school felt different than other weeks, as it does this time every year. On Thursday our Year 11s had their last day in school as they left us to start their study leave before GCSE exams. On Friday, our Year 13s had an even more significant day: their last day at school, ever.

I say that the day for Year 13s was more significant than the day for Year 11s only because their ending is more defined and permanent. For the Year 11s, following their exams and a long summer break, come September many of them will be returning to us for Sixth Form. Those that don’t have either chosen to go elsewhere (so their premature end is something they have chosen for themselves) or they have not got the grades to get back in (meaning that their real end comes on Results Day; the Thursday they left us their departure still lies in a Schrodinger state). 

For Year 13s, however, whatever their life plans following their A-levels (university, apprenticeships, careers...) what is inarguable is that they have reached the end of their time with us. They will never spend another day as a student of our school, following a timetable of lessons with the classmates they have been studying with for the last seven years. Even those students who only joined us in the Sixth Form, for whom this marks only the end of a two year journey at our particular school, the end of Year 13 still marks the end of their schooldays. For all our Sixth Form students Friday was the day the journey they started in Reception at the age of 4 - their formal schooling - comes to an end.

As students flurried around planning proms and leavers’ hoodies, as the school put the finishing touches in place for their leavers’ assemblies and the annual celebratory trip to Alton Towers, I began to wonder what it is that makes these occasions feel special. To paraphrase Plato’s old Euthyphro dilemma: do we mark significant endings because they are special, or are endings made significant and special because we mark them?

To answer the question we can run a simple thought experiment, which I tried out with my form of Year 13 leavers: would today still feel special if we took all the markings away? No leavers’ assembly, no celebratory trip, no hoodies, no pranks, no goodbye messages from teachers. Just a normal day in school but when the final bell rings, you’re done?

But this was not the way I initially worded it.  At first I asked: is there anything that you are expecting to happen today which, if it doesn’t happen, will make you feel disappointed later when looking back on your last day at school?  Their answers were full of zen-like acceptance, with all members of my class saying they expected nothing in particular of the day and were looking forward to simply taking everything as it comes.  Whatever happened was good with them.  However, when I re-worded the question and asked if they would be happy with the day just becoming a “normal” school day, with none of the celebratory trimmings, they all suddenly saw that they would not be happy at all.  There were some things which, if they happened (or didn’t), would ruin the day.

Oddly though, the nature of the specific things done to mark the occasion did not seem to actually matter.  None of the students were actually looking forward to the leavers’ assembly they were now so eager to keep.  Having sat through countless dull school assemblies for the last seven years they no doubt anticipated it to be another turgid blend of dry speeches, inexpert music, and way too much clapping.  They would be upset if it were taken away from them, but they weren’t looking forward to it.  Nor were they concerned with their parents getting the opportunity to cheer them on and take a picture of them as they received their special “leavers’ ties”.  They could give or take the ties and the applause.  But they wanted something to make this day feel different than the others.

I don’t remember my own last day of Sixth Form.  I have literally no memories of the day and its events.  I imagine those fellow students who drank alcohol (I never have) spent most of the day and subsequent evening in a nearby pub, but I didn’t.  And I have no idea what I did do, if anything, to mark the occasion.  Nor did I do anything in particular to mark the end of secondary school in Year 11.  I remember that we had a prom the night before (which I walked out of after fifteen minutes because it wasn’t my scene, took the train home and wrote a punk rock song called “Culturally Dead” about it) and that on the last day there was an assembly where our Head of Year disappointed us by revealing a “big secret” about themselves (the lead-balloon revelation that they “really liked big doorstop sandwiches”!?!) and, far more appreciated, gave us cards with our Year 7 photographs next to our recent Year 11 ones to show how much we’d grown.  But my main memory was of all these people crying about how they wouldn’t see people again as they signed each other’s yearbooks (remember - this was before social media made falling out of touch with old school friends impossible), and my friends and me thinking that they were all over-reacting: if people were important to you, you’d stay in contact with them.  If they weren’t, then it didn’t matter if you wouldn’t be seeing them again! Why all the crying?

And I think I remember one of us trying to burn our school tie when we got home, only to find out they were pretty flame retardant and promptly give up.

Each day was historically important in some abstract way - I had waited five long years to get as far away from my secondary school as possible - but neither day was particularly “special” to me.  In fact I have failed to do anything in particular to mark any of the other significant endings in my life: when I left home to go to university, I just remember my friends and I all getting mobile phones on the same network so we could continue hanging out even as we scattered all across the country.  When I left Cardiff after living there for seven happy years I mainly remember fighting with a freezer that wouldn’t defrost and worrying about how the cat would cope with the two hour drive to our new home in the Midlands.  When we left our first home here to move to our second one, I spent the day at work, waking up in one house, having a normal day, and going to sleep in another.  But then I never went to my own PhD graduation ceremony either, or my MA one.  While others excitedly put on academic robes and posed for photographs, I just got on with the next thing I was doing.  Likewise jobs I’ve left.  If I’m leaving, it’s because I don’t want to be there anymore, so the last day has always been approached with a sense of relief rather than one of celebration.  I’m not interested in parties and awkward small-talk; if you meant something to me we’ll continue seeing each other outside of work as normal, if you didn’t then it’s no great loss.  

By not marking these occasions with any special events I continue to remember the fact of the event, unclouded by fond but potentially deceptive memories of marking those facts.  But it also occurs to me that the sheer power of each day, in search of missing signifiers, has elevated the mundane to the meaningful.  Doorstop sandwiches, defrosting freezers, average days at work, and awkward small talk…  With nothing better to symbolise these important moments, the mind takes what’s there and tries to sprinkle significance into the everyday.  How many times have I tried to find meaning in the arbitrary fact that the last conversation I had with my father before he died was about the movie “Born on the Fourth of July”?  When it’s all you’ve got, it’s all you’ve got.

The subject of death is worth thinking about here, because there is no day more final than that.  And most of the time the day someone dies in unexpected, so there is no possible way for them to mark the occasion of their last day on earth (nor any reason, given that they will not be around to look back on it).  But for the living we have invented funerals precisely to be able to give that awful day, retrospectively, the significance and solemnity it deserved.  Something must be done to say a formal goodbye, even if the person we are saying goodbye to can no longer hear it.  For we do go on and we will want something to look back on.  Both my parents died unexpectedly.  There were no bedside scenes of sad farewell, just world-shattering phone-calls informing me of the facts.  But each of their funerals marked those endings clearly and give me something to think back on often whenever I miss them.

And perhaps that marks the true crux of this issue: to mark an ending we must first concede that an ending has actually occurred.  When I ask do we mark significant endings because they are special, or are endings made significant and special because we mark them? I am making a massive assumption that the events mentioned are significant endings.  Some students saw through this straight away and questioned my initial premise: “but this isn’t the end, sir.  I’m still coming back for exams until June.”

When I didn’t mark my own end of school days, it was because I was glad to be leaving and knew that everything important about my time there (the friends made, the interests nurtured, the education gained) would be coming with me.  All I was leaving behind was a building I didn’t like and people I didn’t care about - the important stuff continued.  When I didn’t mark the end of my time living at home as I travelled off to university, it was because the things I loved about home still existed.  My family was still there to be visited often, my friends at the end of the phone.  I didn’t attend my graduation ceremonies because the ritual of the ceremony didn’t change the facts of the world: I already had the qualification whether I walked across a stage and shook someone’s hand or not.  Nothing vital was lost.  Likewise, when I finally left university and moved back to the Midlands, I didn’t mourn Cardiff because the best bits of Cardiff (my wife, my cat, my life) were coming with me to Birmingham.  The friends I left behind would stay in touch and didn’t vanish just because we put a motorway between us.  Again - nothing important was lost and rather than an ending it felt like a new beginning.  As has every bad job I’ve ever left, or relationship that I’ve ever ended.  No matter how people may try to mark these occasions as significant and convince me of their endings, the abstract fact of a nominal “end” bears little significance in practice so long as everything that is important about the thing which has allegedly “ended” continues, albeit in new or changed circumstances.  

Death is the only ending of any real significance because it really is the end.  That person will not continue on afterwards because they are dead.  Yet the power of funerals, if they are any good, is their ability to celebrate someone’s life and remind us of all the things that will continue despite a person’s passing.  They work precisely because they remind us that even death is not the end of everything.  Whether its belief in an afterlife, or simply the notion that you can keep someone alive in your heart and your memories, funerals mark an ending by reminding us that it is not an ending at all, and that much of the deceased friend or relative’s impact on our lives will survive their physical death.

So back to our dilemma - do we mark significant endings because they are special, or are endings made significant and special because we mark them?  After consideration, I don’t think there really are any endings to mark, despite the number of significant events we will experience in our lives and groups of people encouraging us to mourn them.  We have invented the concept of an ending, and as a construct, we have equally constructed arbitrary but formal structures intended to mark these fictional terminal-points and give them their supposed meaning.  They are neither necessary nor unnecessary; they are simply part of the furniture within our collective fabrication.  But we mark events in our lives because it’s always fun to celebrate things, whether they need to be celebrated or not, and because such occasions allow us to pause and reflect on what is important, giving us a chance to appreciate all that we will be taking with us once this particular phase of life has moved on.  We also mark events to give all those left behind a chance to do so too.  Just as a funeral is for the living and not the dead, our leavers’ assembly is not really for the students, but for the teachers and parents who will be left behind as all these young people move on with their own lives and finally out of ours.  As parents, they get to feel proud of all their child has done, confident they are ready to soon leave the nest, and comforted that they will still be part of their growing child’s life even as they leave their schooling behind.  As teachers, we get to share fond memories and tell old stories, give hope for the future, and by doing so remind ourselves that all these memories, stories and hopes will remain with us even after the last student has gone.  And that outside the hall there are hundreds more students waiting for us to guide them through the years and get them to their own final day which they may, or may not, mark as significant. 

My students wanted something to mark their last day at school (even an assembly they didn’t really want) simply because that is what we do. They would have felt cheated out of the acknowledgement other leavers before them had received if we decided to cancel it on a whim. It was more an issue of fairness than of meaning. They didn’t want to mark it because they had to in order to give the occasion it’s gravitas. Nor did many of them believe the day actually had any of the gravitas we teachers kept imposing on it. As the students gathered around afterwards laughing and taking photographs for social media, making plans for the summer with each other, and gradually walking off the school site and towards their future, it was clear to me that nothing important had ended that day for any of them. The friends they cared about they would keep, and from the ones they didn’t there would be liberation. The teachers who were important to them, for a few years at least, would still be at the end of an email. The knowledge they’d taken from this place - all that was worth remembering anyway - was now theirs forever, encoded deep in their brains. Yes our door was closing to them, but so many others were opening.  They were simply starting to embark, as we all really do with each perceived end-point, onto the next chapter of their ever-evolving, ever-adapting lives.

AUTHOR: D.McKee