203 Graduation Button

203 Graduation Button

Object: Button from Middle School Graduation

Acquired: June 5, 1997

From: James Coleman Wright Middle School

Notes: Maybe I'm a middle-class snob or something, but even when I was graduating from middle school (or fifth grade, for that matter), I didn't think it was all that great of an accomplishment. But I did get this lovely button.

My middle school was a 'magnet' school, which meant we had to write an essay to be accepted, and there were only 80 of us in my grade level.  It was also a brand-new school, so we were only the second group of kids to go through it, and didn't have a building.  In fact, when I started, it didn't really even have a name.  We called it "Madison Middle School 2000," so you can imagine that there was set time by which it needed to be renamed.

The tried to get us really involved in everything from picking class topics to having us plan architectural ideas of what we wanted for the new school.  And then, of course, they didn't go with any of our suggestions (or they altered the topics we chose to what they wanted).

It wasn't a bad school, and they meant well, but they wanted too big and neglected to realize that the average middle schooler wasn't really prepared to pick what they wanted to learn--not in the setting they had picked out, at least.