Brunswick High School’s Dual Enrollment English 101 course was given an assignment to write a persuasive essay about a topic of their choosing. The Garnet & Gold Gazette staff chose their top 10 editorials to publish on our site. Staff used elements of news such as proximity, reader impact, human interest, and prominence within our community to publish relevant and enticing information on our site.
The essays chosen did an amazing job informing readers on the content and creating persuasive arguments on the chosen topics.
“It’s Just a Cap”
Being a high school student, one thing I’ve always looked forward to is decorating my graduation cap. After going to my aunt’s graduation in elementary school, seeing all the decorated caps, and then seeing one hung on my walls, I was excited to do that myself. Now, it’s my senior year and I realize that it’s not allowed and the reasons just don’t make much sense. I believe that students should not only be allowed to decorate their graduation caps, but it should be encouraged. Decorating a graduation cap allows for celebrating achievements, individuality, and expression of creativity.
Though uniformity among schools and their students is an important thing, the only true uniformity among high school seniors at their graduation is the color of their gowns and, in some Frederick County Public schools, gowns are not even all the same color. Beyond the color of the gowns, every student has different cords, medals and pins on display, setting them apart from the person they’re next to. Each cord a different achievement, each medal a success, each pin a membership that the child to their left or right may not share. In a survey conducted at Brunswick High School, 88% of students said they believed that decorating graduation caps would not disrupt the uniformity of students. With all of this, the argument of disrupting uniformity is invalid.
Expression and creativity is another strong reason that students should be encouraged to decorate their graduation caps. Allowing students to showcase not only their creativity but their interests as well. Given the opportunity, students could decorate their caps with characters, quotes or even their future plans (whether they be pursuing a diploma or trade). Some may believe it creates a sense of competition to display a school you’re going to or your future plans; however, the shouting of “highest honors” vs just a student’s name sets each child apart from the next. In a recent survey, 96% of students said they would decorate their caps if given a chance. Many of these students said they would add simple things, only to make their caps slightly different and more personalized.
Decorating your graduation cap is a small reward for a student’s hard work and the claim that it would take too long to check for inappropriate images falls short. A supposed reason against decorating caps may be due to lack of time for an approval process; however, administrators already go through a similar process to approve senior quotes and senior’s “future plans” for the yearbook. Would it really take all that long to quickly check a graduation cap while students are being checked for everything else? Not to mention, though some teens are not to be trusted, I believe that the majority of the student body would not risk being able to walk at graduation over something as silly as a graduation cap. Even students who answered in the survey that they would not decorate their cap believed that others should be allowed to do so saying, “Just because I wouldn’t doesn’t mean that nobody should.”
Though there are many arguments for and against the decoration of a graduation cap, among the student body, the majority believe that we should be allowed to decorate our caps. After all, it’s our ceremony. It’s not for teachers or administrators, they had their time when they graduated high school and college. We pay for our caps, they are completely ours. If it is our ceremony, our graduation, why not let us showcase our interests, talents and achievements with something as simple as decorating our caps?