Graduation Ceremony

One of the most exciting things that happened this week was receiving an e-mail from Betty Williams, my advisor at Whitworth, telling the special education department that our petition to sit as a department in the graduation ceremony this year was approved.

Let me explain why this is so exciting for us.

In years past, the School of Education (elementary, secondary, and special education) has been chunked as one big group at graduation. Many secondary majors chose to sit with their content area (e.g. math or science) because secondary education is technically a "certification program," not a major (it's kind of silly). As special education majors, Whitworth requires us to get an elementary major as well, so it made sense to have us all sit together... At least, it made sense in the eyes of the people running graduation.

This year, there are seven people graduating from the special education department. Two of us will be done this spring, while the other five are coming back to do their final student teaching in the fall. Six of the seven of us have had a large chunk of our classes together and have become a very tight-knit community. All of us are passionate about our special education classes and futures and have every intention of being special education teachers... One who wants to do secondary resource room, one who is really interested in Behavior Intervention, three with early childhood certifications as well, one who is getting an additional endorsement in Deaf education, a few of us who really want to go to grad school, a couple who want to work with people with severe disabilities... We are a varied and wonderful bunch. It's not that we don't love general education, the professors we have had, and the people we have our block classes with. All of us will student teach in general education classrooms and we love our kids to pieces. And the people I have gen ed classes with are some of my favorite people at Whitworth. I'm in San Fran with 12 of them right now, for goodness sake! But we wanted to be able to sit with our department at graduation because these people and this major are what we love.

So we had to petition.

We stayed for an hour and a half after Tuesday night class one night to pump out a petition to go to the Education department.
Then three of us had to meet with Betty.
Then the Education department had to approve it.
They did.
The the Graduation committee had to approve it.
I heard they weren't going to.
Then they did.
And now we have changed thing for the better.

Students have asked about sitting with special education in the past and they were denied.
They said "But we're a separate major! Business, marketing, and accounting might all be in the business department, but they get to sit separate... Math gets separated by a BA and a BS... Why are we the exception? Why can't we sit with the major we want?"

Now we can.

Somehow the group of us became affectionately known as the "Dream Team" by our professors. At first, it made me really uncomfortable. We are just students who love what we do! That's the way it should be.
But these people are some of my favorite people from Whitworth.
I love phone calls from Morgan that usually have to do with what cute thing a small child is doing.
I love Azteca dates after finals where we laugh until we cry, and two hours later realize we're the only ones left in the room.
I love sitting on the ground during night class because Dana says "do whatever you need to do to be ale to learn!"
I love "friendly review games" that turn into cutthroat competition. Though that might have been my fault.
I love Cy's animal facebook pictures that come up as a constant source of conversation.
I love taking food from the Psychology lounge during night class and hoping it wasn't important to one of their experiments.
I love that we have a Facebook group called Dana's Groupies and Dana both knows about it and finds it funny.
I love that our professors are our educators, our mentors, our employers, and our friends.
I love that our professors trust us with their children.
I love that we have bonds and experiences and future career paths that can keep us in touch for many years to come.
I love our acronyms and our inside jokes and our endless conversations about data and interventions and reinforcement of our roommates and ourselves and our pets.
I love how nerdy we are together and how well we embrace it.
I love these people and the roles they have played in my life.
Dream team for the win.