Heh, at the graduations I've attended where boys and girls wore different colors, it was the boys who had to wear the godawful school color and the girls got to wear white or black. If you're gonna discriminate, thanks for not making me wear fucking kelly green, sez I.
This is the first graduation I've been to where the genders wore different colors. We wore white for my high school graduation and black for college. The yellow looked totally ridiculous (and unflattering!)
You have to respect school colors that say, "Mess with us, and we will briefly cause you acute pain at the expense of our own lives".
At my hs graduation, the girls wore white, but of course it was a Catholic high school. And god knows you couldn't put Catholic girls in green gowns.
An no one should have ant clothes on under the gowns. Also, no graduation ceremonies or diplomas. Also, each graduate should be assigned to a much older person as part of their sexual initiation.
Neither ant clothes nor any other clothes.
Was this a high school or college graduation, Becks?
7 - High school graduation.
4 - The Catholic high schools sure love to put girls in white, don't they? At mine (an all girls school) we all wore white and actually had to line up for inspection before we were allowed to put on our robes to make sure we were wearing pure white from head to toe. If you were wearing something like a white dress with some pink trim, you weren't allowed to walk. It had to be all white.
Yeah, at my HS graduation, the girls got to wear white, and we boys got to wear bright purple. I guess that was because we were all gay, though.
At my HS graduation everyone wore (really ugly) green robes. College graduation it was all black.
8b: Good gawd. My Catholic HS was really pretty liberal; we didn't even have uniforms, just a dress code.
At my HS graduation, the men mostly wore suits or sports coats, and the women wore spring dresses. I think I ended up wearing my senior prom dress (which was sort of peachy flesh-colored) with a little sweater on top.
Always same colors, so far as I remember black. My daughter's eighth grade is in a picture on the fridge I've just gotten up to look at: a sort of silver sheen, but boys and girls both wearing it. Muslim girls in head scarves under their mortar boards provide some contrast; particular colors may be important at least for the scarf, so that they didn't have a choice.
Mine had white gowns for girls and black gowns for boys, which is sexist, but the women totally benefitted from not having to sit in the hot sun in a black gown & hat. Memories of my grad: the cheap foam mortarboard of the valedictorian melting and drooping in the heat.
What kind of podunk school gives boys and girls different colors?
I wore maroon when I graduated from college because I was part of a l33t corps.
My high school had dark green for boys and white for girls, and I was bitter over having to buy all new white clothes to wear underneath my cheap, thin, white gown.
the cheap foam mortarboard of the valedictorian melting and drooping in the heat.
That's awesome, Cala.
It's not a mortarboard, that's a board for carrying mortar; it's an academic cap.
Honestly.
19: But the cap is called a mortarboard, is it not? I mean a porkpie hat is not literally a pie made from pork, but.
19 is making a claim about names, Clown.
See wikip"æ"dia: "The square academic cap, very commonly called a mortarboard (from the French mortier, a type of toque), is an item of academic headgear".
At my high school graduation, the boys wore black robes, and the girls wore their ridiculously expensive white May Day dresses.
I mean a porkpie hat is not literally a pie made from pork
My high school was all-male, so the gender coloration issue was moot. We all wore white tuxedos, with little flowers in the chest-pocket. I don't even think we actually "walked" they just called our names and we stood for a second. ... I guess walking is not for "gentlemen."
(Gayer than all the gayness in this thread put together!)
Didn't have a high school graduation, college graduation had everyone in black. Never got the purpose of the gender-distinguishing robes; it's not like boys and girls take separate classes or anything.
For high school, boys were in blue and girls in white. It was a school tradition to decorate the gowns, though, and mine worked better on a white gown.
Little Hippie U. had everyone in nonsexist blue.
Huh, this is the first time I've ever heard of different robes for boys and girls. And my Catholic HS had red graduation robes (a school color).
Huh, this is the first time I've ever heard of different robes for boys and girls.
Me too.
The high school I went to is a public school in the bluest part of a blue state, so it's not just some weird Catholic school thing.
Am I the only one who blew off HS graduation?
We hated the place, but after much discussion my best friend and I attended, stoned on weed bought from the guidance counsellor.
We hated the place
stoned on weed bought from the guidance counsellor
Couldn't have been that bad.
35 comments, all variations on "my school made us all dress up like twats for no very good reason". Wasn't somebody defending this tradition? Remind me who it was again, I could do with a laugh after the weekend I've had.
That was me, dammit, and I wasn't defending the purple gowns.
23: Sorry, I'm still scarred from having referred to it as a mortarboard in my first week, and being told forcefully by my tutor that it was a cap, not a mortarboard, and calling it a mortarboard was a terrible faux pas on the level of talking about "dogs" to a MFH or referring to the "bathroom" (or worse still, the "front end") aboard ship.
MFH?
Mother Fucking Hata?
Mata Fucking Hari?
I recall that the chair of my faculty appeared at graduation in what she claimed to be the robes of a PhD Strategic Studies, Aberdeen, but which looked uncannily like a Sexy Santa outfit..
and how does a master of foxhounds refer to his dogs?
i skipped my hs graduation too. i dropped out partway through my last year and got a job, then it turned out i had enough credits to cruise past the finish line in absentia.
enjoyed my ba graduation, tho, more than i would have predicted.
how does a master of foxhounds refer to his dogs
Presumably as "hounds".
44 -- is that the same guy that does the interesting rock n roll sessions on BBC?
I don't think so. The interesting rock and roll guy would have had to be 228 when he died if they were the same person. Personally, I regret the passing of the latter rather more than the former.
May Day dresses? What?
At the all-girls school with which my all-boys school later merged, there is a tradition that, in early May, all of the seniors put on big poofy white dresses and dance, with ribbons, around a large May pole. Each senior first comes out accompanied by a junior to curtsy to the crowd and receive a bouquet before they get into a circle and, tra-la-la, be-ribbon the giant phallus.
It's quite something. During my senior year, my friends and I made a video interspersing the May pole dance with footage of about ten of us dancing around a huge concrete pipe that we decided to call the May cave. Ah, high school.
Or, if he is terribly upper-class, as "hinds". (See "The Queen"; he may also go fishing for trite or shooting grice.)
"fishing for trite"
Awesome alternate title for Lileks' "Bleats".
We didn't wear gowns at my highschool graduation. The girls wore any white dress that they wanted. Boys wore trousers (tan, I think), school ties, blue blazers with the school crest on them. At Groton, I think that the boys have to wear boaters.
I guess that they could have made us girls wear jackets, and English school girls often wear ties, but I liked teh white dress.
My reaction is pretty WTF? to the whole gender-color split. Dark blue across the board in high school, Carolina day-glo-cyan universally in college. It's worth noting, though, that at my high school graduation the valedictorian had to wear a white robe if I remember correctly. This was probably so that they were easier to spot when it came time for the ritual human sacrifice after the formalities.
I guess I've been pretty lucky in this department. My high school colors were white and (a lightish shade of) green, so the guys wore green and the girls wore white. Roughly equally frivolous. I don't remember the details of my college graduation -- not that I wasn't paying attention, just that there were a number of permutations for various groups and societies that didn't significantly effect me or any of my friends -- but I'm pretty sure we were all in black with about a quarter of the graduates wearing a pin or two or a purple sash or whatever.
Perhaps we should ask for many colors, a dozen or a hundred, to allow for all nuances of sexual orientation and gender identification.
Just got to work from my son's eighth grade graduation. Everybody in the school's purple color gowns. Actually a dignified ceremony, with the principal the only adult speaker, talking generally about public schools and the commitment we all share to them, the decision to teach everyone to the same curriculum as the highly selective program my son belongs to, and the excellent results from that decision.
Some hooting out, but on the whole real satisfaction on the part of all classes. My wife referred, watching some families, to the description of eighth grade graduation in I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. I hadn't thought of it that way.
A happy, reinforcing day.
My high school did the two colors thing: red for one gender, yellow for the other. I didn't like it, borrowed my sister's cap from a couple of years before, and wore both colors.
51: Putting the valedictorian in a white robe does indeed have a rather Wicker Man feel to it.
"And now we will sing the school song, Summer Is Icumen In".