By Emily Prucha
@halfnhalfprague
It’s seven o’clock on a Thursday evening three weeks before winter school holidays and six full months before my daughter’s anticipated high school graduation. Just off Wenceslas Square in downtown Prague, a line forms outside the historic Lucerna Great Hall. Designed by former Czech president Vaclav Havel’s grandfather in 1907, tonight, this iconic venue, where Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald once performed, will host my daughter’s high school graduation ball. This is no American prom. Nor is it a typical awards recognition ceremony, although all the students gathered are high achievers.
Dressed in formal ball attire, parents, siblings, grandparents, and family friends are ready to waltz, polka, and rumba alongside the school’s students and their high school teachers. While graduation is months away (and contingent upon a series of stringent oral and written examinations in various core subjects), the atmosphere tonight is festive. Although it seems strange to my American sensibilities to celebrate pre-exams, on the other hand, all the glitter and shine has me eager to kick up my heels.
Attending classical dance lessons is a Czech cultural ritual in the second year of high school (around age 15), so nearly everyone here can dance. Girls twirl other girls, and boys waltz with boys. Parents brush off dusty dancing shoes to show their protégé their own skills, honed decades earlier, in similar formal lessons. Pairing the right steps is the focus.
After six years studying together in a bilingual French/Czech curriculum, my daughter’s Senior class of 30 is a tight knit unit she calls “family.” They are radiant in brilliantly colored gowns, black pant suits, and dress coats with bowties. They smile when I ask if I can take their pictures. As a tune from the fairytale, Tri orisky pro Popelku (Three Wishes for Cinderella) plays, the graduating classes process into the ballroom, forming four circles, one for each class.
The annual maturitní ples is an official school event; on some levels it’s very formal, with a live orchestral band, an introduction by the school’s principal, a “sashing” ceremony for prospective graduates, and a “pinning” ceremony for the incoming classes. Czech students pass competitive entrance exams to attend specialized high school programs, and welcoming incoming classes is just as important as saying farewell to the leaving classes. The graduating students plan the evening, selling tickets for the event, raising money for expenses connected with it, and preparing skits. Late in the evening, each graduating class carries a parachute through the dance hall, inviting spectators to throw small change to help cover extra costs.
In the Czech Republic, like in many European countries, schools practice looping, which means students typically have the same lead teacher and core subject teachers for multiple years. Looping can be a powerful tool as Adam Grant explains in his book, Hidden Potential, and in a recent Op-Ed for the NYT. Data shows looping often benefits weaker teachers and lower achieving students, allowing them more time to identify weaknesses and capitalize on strengths.
At this ball I notice something, which I suspect links to looping, that I believe is far more important in a holistic sense of education than improved test scores: it’s the benefits of publicly engaging in play. I’ve seen the ways my daughter’s teachers have shaped her intellectual, social, and cultural growth. Now, I am delighted to witness how my daughter and her classmates infuse their academic role models’ lives with silliness and sparks of joy.
From an early age, Czech teachers are given significant responsibility to educate their classes outside the school’s walls. In preschool, teachers lead daily walks in all weather, excursions to Prague’s center, and outdoor trips in the countryside. Annual school-in-nature trips include weeks spent skiing, canoeing, and cycling. Teachers, in the jack-of-all-trades manner that is common in this country, instruct their students in survival skills, sports disciplines, and general life skills, often combining the three (i.e. traveling by train to nearby Germany to raft a river). These out-of-school trips form an integral part of the Czech educational curriculum; they are affordable; and students are expected to participate.
Perhaps, in part, thanks to looping, which starts in preschool and continues through the high school grades, trips out of school are, by and large, wildly successful – no one is lost, hurt, unduly homesick, or, when they are, the group has the skill set to respond effectively. My own three children always returned from school-in-nature having established deeper bonds, both with their classmates and with their teachers. Problem-solving skills evolve as teachers and students work their way through the years together.
Now, high school student-organized weekends in the mountains often include drop-in visits from favorite professors. Because the Czech Republic has a 13th academic year, Anna and her classmates became legal adults during their Junior Year. Tonight, professors and students toast one another, some with legal alcoholic beverages, as they celebrate having journeyed so far together.
As Anna and her class receive their sashes, a few students wipe away tears. Their sashes are emblazoned with the words, Sportu zdar, a greeting that is a shout out to their Geography professor, also an orienteering coach. There is no procession across a stage. There is no calculation of GPA, no Valedictorian. The students stand in a circle, shoulders touching, clapping when another student is sashed.
After this ritual, they give their lead teacher his gift: a personalized t-shirt with their addresses marked on a map. Excited, the class calls their other professors down from the balcony for a collective photo. Like a sports team, they huddle in a circle and chant. Then, they split into pairs and begin waltzing, switching off after a few whirls so each student has a chance to dance with the professor.
Later, these same professors strip off their ties and long gowns to breakdance, perform martial arts, and don period costumes in skits their classes have dreamed up. They’re lifted on their students’ shoulders and dance in synchrony. It’s a bit unbelievable to see these esteemed teachers wielding swords in a mock battle. At times, I can’t tell them apart from Anna and her classmates. The interactions are playful and funny, and everyone in the class has a role.
This is what impresses me most about the evening.
When I watch the teachers laugh with their students, I sense them saying, “You’ve got this. We’ve got you.” When I see the students’ genuine affection for their teachers, my heart swells. Planning and executing the ball is a huge responsibility, and it’s not one these students would have learned if teachers took care of the preparations, while students buried their heads in books. The day will soon come for the prospective graduates to buckle down for their final exams. Everyone knows this.
But, on this night, no one is thinking about exams. Instead, we are honoring these graduates, their teachers, and the surprising vitality of a formal Czech cultural ritual, at once deeply meaningful and refreshingly light-hearted. It is an evening to celebrate and to be silly. The intersection of the two in an academic setting seems both rare and precious.
Photo courtesy of the author.
Emily Prucha teaches English in a small village outside Prague, Czech Republic. She delights in playful interactions with her students and her own three Czech American teens.
Like what you are reading at Motherwell? Please consider supporting us here.
Keep up with Motherwell on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and via our newsletter.