No Walk In, No Skip Day

By ABBY FOSTER ‘19

I vividly remember the senior walk-in of my freshman year. It was a normal Monday morning assembly; as Mr. Ball went up to the podium to begin one of his famous speeches, students sunk into the ACC bleachers, drifting off into thoughts of exhaustion and the long week stretching ahead. Suddenly, the partition behind Mr. Ball lifted, revealing a handful of senior boys almost entirely encased in large, inflatable plastic balls. As these boys ran into and bounced off of each other, the crowd around me perked up, laughing and pointing. The next moment, the rest of the senior class flooded into the FCC in a mess of color and sound. Everywhere I looked, there was something new to see: a group reenacting the last supper, a cluster of Disney characters, some nuns, and a large number wearing the red and white striped get up of Waldo. Music was playing and people were cheering, and I was glad to be part of something so strange and fun.

I can’t wait until I’m a senior, I thought. I can’t wait to do this.

For the past three years, my idea of seniorhood has been based entirely around the traditions that the senior class got to participate in. Along with walk-in, some of the more obvious ones were senior skip day and senior showcase. In my mind, participation in these activities was a rite of passage: a sign that you had ‘made it.’

In our senior year, the Class of 2019 did not get a walk-in, a senior showcase, or a skip day. There are different reasons for why these events didn’t happen—scheduling issues, predominantly. However, I can’t help but feeling like I was robbed, at least in part, of my senior year. Class unity is so heavily emphasized at the end of junior year (especially at C2R) that it feels strange that our class hasn’t had any of these bonding experiences; what is uniting us? What shared experiences have we had? Aside from processes like applying to college or creating a senior project, there have been no touchstone moments that would create a common experience. I was looking forward to my walk-in. I was looking forward to running around the FCC in some crazy costume, reveling in the sheer strangeness of the whole event, and being energized by the students around me, students who were all sharing in that experience.  

After we didn’t have our walk-in, I began to reflect a lot on the power of tradition. The fact that I could go up to any Milton student or alum and reference a Class IV talk is significant; school traditions make it so we’re not just a group of teenagers who learn together. Tradition creates community.

I’ve also come to realize that there are different types of traditions. There are those that are for the school, and there are those that are for the students. Every new Milton student signs the book at convocation—that’s a tradition. But that wasn’t a tradition that made me feel any more connected to my classmates. The traditions that create real connection are the ones that are for the students, the weird and strange traditions that I’m sure seem ridiculous to the faculty. For example, I know many teachers who are anti-Gotcha. I can appreciate that; for one week, their lives are turned upside down for a borderline violent game that students love fiercely.

Gotcha is a tradition for the students—made for us and by us. And maybe it’s better that some adults don’t understand, because then it’s like the student body shares a collective secret, something special and untouchable.

I feel like the traditions at Milton are dying off, or more specifically, the student traditions. There are still some left, like Gotcha or singing the Twelve Days of Christmas song before Winter Break, but in my time I feel like I’ve seen many drift away and just disappear forever. This is my thirteenth year at Milton, and there are some traditions I remember witnessing before I even entered the Upper School, like the Swap-It dance. Again, this is something I never experienced (although I was well acquainted with Swap-It itself), but from what I’ve heard it was a tradition beloved by the student body. Swap-It was a sort of community yard sale, where people from every part of the school would bring items to the ACC and swap them around. At the Swap-It dance, students would wear costume pieces they found at Swap-It. From the pictures I’ve seen, it looked stupid and weird and fun—something I would have loved.

Just as class wide traditions create class unity, school-wide traditions lead to school spirit. Once again, I mean student oriented traditions, not those traditions that are more for the sake of the institution.

I don’t think it will be a shock for anyone when I say that the amount of school spirit I’ve seen in the upper school has been laughable. When I was a freshman, I couldn’t understand why more people didn’t get in to Spirit Week; it seemed like one of those traditions that, if people threw themselves into it, could be super fun. But now I understand the lack of enthusiasm. Spirit Week feels like the only time that Milton is asking for our genuine enthusiasm: not our time, not our attention, but our enthusiasm. It’s hard to be excited about going to a school when you don’t have many chances to get excited. I think the same is true about participation in activities during assembly. Am I saying that getting a senior skip day would make me more likely to play musical chairs on a Tuesday morning? It might sound strange, but yes, I am. I’d be more invested in those kinds of activities if I felt like the school wanted me to be invested, and showed this desire for my emotional investment by letting the student body participate in the activities it wants, despite whether or not adults understand the activities.

As I mentioned earlier, my class was given a reason for the lack of a walk-in this year; we were told in an email from one of our class deans, “We don't have Convocation on a Friday this year, so there is no Monday morning assembly at the start of school during which the infamous 'walk-in' can occur.” Then, the date for the walk-in was set for October 29th, a month or more later than a walk-in usually happens (and only a few days before early college applications were due, as many students noted). In the end, our class was asked to vote on whether or not we wanted the walk-in, and the majority voted no; the general consensus I heard was at that point, it wasn’t even the same event anymore.

It’s possible that the class below us, the Class of 2020, will get a senior walk-in. But the cynic in me can’t help but think that this tradition will be swept under the rug and cut from the Milton experience, as so many other beloved traditions have.