Bumping right into a new era without school

MY last day of school coincided with my 17 th birthday. Back in the day, when public liability insurance probably wasn’t that big or detailed a thing, and when I weighed around half the weight of my leg now, I was duly administered the then obligatory birthday ritual, the bumps. The bumps, lest it has escaped you, was where a group of people would fling you into the air the number of times that correlated with your new age.

To mark the end of school, someone had brought in shaving foam so that was liberally dispensed and there was probably an assembly and a speech by the principal but bar the bumps, the shaving foam and the probable assembly, there was no ceremony to mark the end of our education. We just wandered off home. The Leaving Cert would finish on different days for different people so essentially the school life that had defined most of the years that we could remember, fizzled to an end.

Now they have formal ceremonies to mark the end of primary school and secondary and while a few people grumble about the Americanisation of school days, it is, I think, a good idea.

My daughter graduated from secondary school last week and it was nice to mark the end of her 14-year school career. Nice for her and for her friends, for the teachers who have seen many of the children become adults, and for the parents.

Especially when it’s your youngest child, as it was for me, it marks the end of an era. Last week was not only the end of her schooling, it was the end of school in my life, goodbye to the school year which has shaped my life for the 13 years of my own schooling and the 19 of my children’s. May the next era be a good one.