Carne Vale
The gorilla and the thunderbird wrestle in the classroom. Freddie Krugar walks the halls. A teacher goes to lunch dressed as a dinosaur. An assistant principal attends meeting in a tux. Three football players go to class dressed as a girl band. Homecoming week can be interesting.
The after school carnival became quite the success with a highlight of the principal in a dunk tank, take your aim. The whole week was carnival really--Carne Vale. The carnival is Latin for "goodbye to meat." There are other theories of the origin of the word; there is, after all, no authoritative ancient resource on the origin of names. It was a holiday related to the seasons, and became a celebration in Roman Catholicism before the 40 day Lent fast.
Carnival has come to mean something quite different over time. It has become permission violate social norms. For a while, those norms are suspended and people play with alternative identities and behavior.
Our school is a "no hat or headgear" school, yet this Homecoming week the rule was suspended and students wore everything from the normal baseball caps to outrageous, unidentifiable, homemade somethings. It was difficult not to feel the ingrained enforcement voice spring out, "Please remove your headgear." This week, just this week, it was ok. What would be the reaction to a football player dressed in drag in any normal week? Yet, this week, there was no taunting, no suspicions, no calls to the principal's office. You can learn a lot about individual students in this one week, and they learn about each other. Everyone seems to be more tolerant and realize that the world really doesn't fall apart because someone does something strange. Hopefully, some of that tolerance will seep into the weeks to come.
It's a tremendous amount of work behind the scenes to pull off an entire week of events, dances, carnival, the final homecoming football game, work that mostly goes unnoticed. It's an important week in the life of the school community. It will have, for many, more impact than a lesson on Socrates or General Andrew Jackson or the inverse of a matrix. It has its place, and we can't forget that.
The after school carnival became quite the success with a highlight of the principal in a dunk tank, take your aim. The whole week was carnival really--Carne Vale. The carnival is Latin for "goodbye to meat." There are other theories of the origin of the word; there is, after all, no authoritative ancient resource on the origin of names. It was a holiday related to the seasons, and became a celebration in Roman Catholicism before the 40 day Lent fast.
Carnival has come to mean something quite different over time. It has become permission violate social norms. For a while, those norms are suspended and people play with alternative identities and behavior.
Our school is a "no hat or headgear" school, yet this Homecoming week the rule was suspended and students wore everything from the normal baseball caps to outrageous, unidentifiable, homemade somethings. It was difficult not to feel the ingrained enforcement voice spring out, "Please remove your headgear." This week, just this week, it was ok. What would be the reaction to a football player dressed in drag in any normal week? Yet, this week, there was no taunting, no suspicions, no calls to the principal's office. You can learn a lot about individual students in this one week, and they learn about each other. Everyone seems to be more tolerant and realize that the world really doesn't fall apart because someone does something strange. Hopefully, some of that tolerance will seep into the weeks to come.
It's a tremendous amount of work behind the scenes to pull off an entire week of events, dances, carnival, the final homecoming football game, work that mostly goes unnoticed. It's an important week in the life of the school community. It will have, for many, more impact than a lesson on Socrates or General Andrew Jackson or the inverse of a matrix. It has its place, and we can't forget that.
posted by curtis @ 4:33 PM
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