It is the time of year in my part of the world when football teams at the college and high school levels are having their homecoming celebrations. Schools and their surrounding communities take on festive, carnival atmospheres, bedecking themselves in streamers, ribbons, trinkets, and flowers to celebrate their foremost athletes and public representatives, and stadia and gymnasia fill during the week and on game-days to give people space and time in which to voice their support as football players and other athletes are paraded out and praised.

For the colleges I attended, homecoming games this year come on 19 October and 9 November 2024; I don’t think I can make either event or much if any of the celebrations leading up to them. For the high school I attended, the game is 11 October 2024; I doubt I’ll be there, either. But I was at the homecoming game–as well as the community pep rally a couple of days earlier–for the high school where I live, which took place on 20 September 2024 and which, alas, the home team lost. My daughter was, as well, and I have to note that her engagement in homecoming events this year, as well as in the past several years, have been markedly different than what my own were at her age (and throughout my school career).

My daughter, Ms. 8, is much more heavily involved in school culture than I was when I was her age. (As I write this, she is in fifth grade.) Although it was the case that each of the elementary schools I attended had its own mascot, colors, school song, and the like, overt attempts by the school district I attended to foster in-group identification, school spirit, and competition, I…didn’t really get into things at that point. I didn’t participate in the inter-campus rivalries that seemed to be promoted and that I later learned were actually in force to some extent among my contemporaries. (It was an admittedly limited extent, given the limited opportunities for direct competition, but it was there.) I didn’t have much to do with extracurricular activities at that time; I took part in a few academic events, but those were inter-district, not intra-district, and they were more in the spring than the fall, in addition to being quiet, individual events that do not often attract much attention, if any. More broadly, I didn’t feel school spirit; I didn’t feel like I was part of some larger thing, certainly not the way I was told, directly and by saturation in the media at work in the time and place, that I ought to feel it. (I still have…some unease with it, although I feel it more now than I did then. I am aware of having…missed much, and the gaps tell.)

Ms. 8, though, is steeped in her school’s culture and life. She cheers, and in an official capacity. She plays in the band, and she can see how doing so can continue for her. She is on the student council, even if she doesn’t have the office on it that she had hoped to have. She is part of things, and in a deep way that already helps her avoid some of the problems that I faced (no few of which I made for myself, but she does not have the incentive to make problems for herself the way that I did). She is the kind of person, or acts as if the kind of person, who will delight in returning to what we expect will be her high school for a parade of decades, who might well return to the district in some professional capacity as no few of its teachers and staff have.

In short, like many of the people I saw in the lead-up to 20 September 2024, Ms. 8 gives every sign that she feels now and is poised to feel later on like her school is a home to which she can return, rather than some place she might visit from time to time as a guest whose welcome is, frankly, dubious. And I love that for her, though not nearly so much as I love her.

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