Category Archives: School

William’s Sixth Grade Picture

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It’s fall, so it’s time for school pictures. This year’s photographers turned things around very quickly: Picture Day was September 9, and we had the digital copies in our inboxes in under a week.

Willow Glen Middle School requires students to wear uniforms every day, so Picture Day was special in that William had a small measure of freedom to choose what he wore. He ended up going with the same new shirt that he wore to our family photo shoot (more on that soon), so I guess that purchase was a winner.

There’s a small version embedded here, but you can find the full-size photo in his gallery.

William smiling in a green shirt

Gallery: William’s Class Pictures

Back to School 2025

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It’s August in San José, so that means one thing: it’s back-to-school season. Summer vacation here always seems impossibly short, and this year was no exception: William’s first day of sixth grade—and his first day of middle school—was August 7, which feels incredibly early. As always, there are pictures.

Will’s introduction to middle school actually started the week before with WEB (“Where Everyone Belongs”) Day, the official orientation for incoming sixth graders at Willow Glen Middle School. At WEB Day, the kids learned some of the nuts and bolts of middle school, including key information like: how to get from class to class; where to find lunch; and the school dress code.

On the actual first day of school, William walked around the corner from our house to meet up with his friends Elsa and Soren on Malone Road. The three of them were gracious enough to allow Julie and me to accompany them all the way to the corner across the street from the school, but not a step further. William is generally an agreeable kid, but he is nearly twelve, and his tolerance has its limits.

His first day went smoothly, as have the days since. He’s still mostly socializing with his friends from Booksin, but I expect that they’ll start to mix with kids from the other schools that feed into Willow Glen Middle soon. William has always been socially adaptable, so we don’t expect any real problems on that front.

The end of the set includes a couple photos from the KCAT Film Festival, which is an end-of-summer celebration for kids who went to summer camp at KCAT, the local television station run out of Los Gatos High School. The film festival presents the short films made by the campers over the course of the summer. KCAT is William’s favorite summer camp, by far—he attended several week-long sessions this year—so he was excited to see some of his work on the big screen. I’m sure he’ll want to return next summer.

Gallery: Back to School 2025

Fifth Grade Promotion / Farewell to Booksin

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On August 17, 2009, Julia started at Booksin Elementary School; that occasion is captured in the photo below. Last week, almost sixteen years later, William closed out our family’s time there with his fifth grade promotion. We’ve recorded the moment, as we are wont to do, with photos and even a few videos.

We had a student at Booksin for fifteen of those sixteen years, missing only the year between Joe’s move to middle school and William’s entry into TK. That makes for fifteen Back to School Nights, fifteen Open Houses, and fifteen Walkathons (more or less: Covid and wildfire smoke played havoc with Walkathon in a couple years). But no more: William is headed to middle school next year.

The week leading up to promotion was hectic. The fifth graders had activities almost every day, and Julie was one of the co-chairs of the promotion committee, so her days were extremely full, as well.

One of the highlights of the week was a class trip to Golfland for around of miniature golf on Tuesday. Wednesday featured a fifth graders vs. teachers kickball game, which was won by the teachers, though William insists foul play was involved. On Thursday, the last full day of class, the students gathered for the fifth grade breakfast, during which they received their yearbooks and sang along with a slideshow of photos (assembled by Julie earlier in the week). To commemorate our final pickup after school on Thursday, Julie treated William to a special surprise: she arrived at his classroom in an inflatable dinosaur costume. He was embarrassed, of course, but notably less so than Joe was when Julie wore the same costume to meet him at the airport when he returned from Belfast. Everyone else loved it: kids were lining up to say hello to the friendly orange dinosaur.

The promotion ceremony was scheduled to start at 9:00 on Friday, but the proceedings were delayed a bit by problems with some of the decorations, much to Julie’s frustration. It didn’t help that it was forecast to be the hottest day of the year so far: a heat advisory was in effect, and the high was supposed to be in the upper 90s. No one wanted to be out there when it started to warm up.

The proceedings finally kicked off around 9:15, and things went smoothly from there. William was wearing his well-loved navy suit, which is definitely too small for him at this point, so he looked dapper as he collected his promotion certificate. At the end of the ceremony, the newly minted middle schoolers stood and faced their families and sang a song they learned at science camp: Shooting Star, which is a long-standing fixture at Camp Campbell. As camp songs go, it packs an emotional punch.

After that, there was nothing left to do but for the kids to return their chairs to the classrooms, sign out for the last time, and say goodbye to their teachers and friends. It took us a while to get away from the school—Will and Julie both had a lot of people to bid adieu—but we eventually escaped and met up a short time later for brunch with some of his friends and their families.

It’s going to feel very strange this fall when the school year comes around and we won’t be preparing to send someone off to Booksin. William will be biking or walking to school with his friends, so our days of daily drop-offs are behind us, at least for now. And we won’t be looking forward to spending a hot day in October watching kids walk endless laps around the school yard. Middle school will be an entirely new adventure—one William is very much excited about—but there’s still a sense of loss from knowing that the Booksin phase of our lives is at an end.

Gallery: Fifth Grade Promotion / Farewell to Booksin

Julie’s Birthday and a Visit from Joe

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We’ve had a busy spring so far: William has baseball, the school play, math olympiad, and chess; Julie is the chair of the fifth grade promotion committee; and Felix has had terribly uncontrolled diabetes, which has at times led him to use parts of the house, such as the landing going up to the second floor, as an open-air latrine. It’s really very unpleasant.

But one of the highlights of the spring so far was a visit from Joe, who opted to spend his spring break with us. He flew in on the last day of February and stayed through March 8. Naturally, we have pictures, including a few from Julie’s birthday a couple weeks before his arrival. This set actually wraps around the contents of the previous collection, which covered a few specific events during Joe’s visit.

Joe had a fairly relaxing stay: I think some downtime was just what he wanted after the intense first few weeks of the semester. The opportunity for a break from the cold Boston weather was probably also a draw. His local friends were mostly out of town—their breaks didn’t line up with his—but he made time to connect with a few of them online to chat and play computer games. He also offered me a look at some of the work he’s doing in his first-year computer science class. Parts of the curriculum seem to have been designed based some of the same principles that underlaid COMP 210 when I took it at Rice eons ago (in fact, some of the same people may have had a hand in designing both courses), so I found it fascinating. It almost made me want to go back to school.

William, of course, was over the moon at Joe’s return. For weeks leading up to the break, he asked when Joe was arriving on a nearly daily basis, even though he knew the answer hadn’t changed since the last time he asked. I think he just enjoyed thinking about Joe’s upcoming visit. He was ecstatic when he woke up the morning after Joe’s arrival—the plane from Boston landed at SFO after midnight—and the two of them found ample opportunities to play and roughhouse while Joe was here. William loved it, and, I’m pretty sure Joe did, too. We’ve long held that William is as good for Joe’s mental health as Joe is for William’s.

The album also contains some pictures from William’s spring musical performance, his (and our) last ever at Booksin. Naturally, he dressed up for the occasion, as he loves to do, and his friend Sam joined him in wearing a suit. The class sang and played recorders—I hope to post video soon—and that was that. We’re well into the era of “lasts” at Booksin, and it’s a strange feeling to know that we’ll soon leave this part of our lives behind after so many years as part of the school community.

On Joe’s last night here, he, Julie, and I went to Symphony San Jose for a performance of Beethoven’s Eroica. Julie had reserved the tickets weeks before, looking to indulge Joe’s love of music, and made sure to book his return flight late enough that we could deliver him to the airport after the end of the show. I don’t think I’ve ever been to the symphony before, so I have no basis for comparison, but Julie and Joe, both of whom have deeper musical knowledge and experience than I do (which is to say, more than none at all) enjoyed it, which I take to mean that it was an impressive performance.

After the concert, we zipped home, changed out of our fancy symphony clothes, and gave Julia and William an opportunity to say their goodbyes before we drove Joe up to SFO to catch the redeye back to the East Coast. The next morning, he was safe and sound in frigid Boston, and we were back to missing him.

Gallery: Julie’s Birthday and a Visit from Joe

Last Walkathon

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This year’s Booksin Walkathon was bittersweet: it marked William’s last as a student and our last as a family. Our first was all the way back on October 10, 2009, when Julia was in kindergarten:

Hailey and Julia at the Booksin Walkathon in 2009

This was our thirteenth Walkathon. Starting with our first in 2009, we didn’t miss a year until 2017, when Joe had moved on to middle school and William was still in preschool. We picked our streak up again in 2018, but lost a couple years to the pandemic and bad air quality. In the end, we’ve spent a lot of hours over the last decade-and-a-half listening to music and watching hundreds of kids walk in circles in the sun. Naturally, we have pictures of this year’s festivities.

This year, William went in with a mission: he wanted to earn the top prize, an LED-adorned, light-up frisbee, which would require him to walk 20 miles over the course of the five-hour event. This would make him the first Wong to reach the highest prize tier: neither Julia nor Joe ever pulled that off, which would have required 25 miles in their day (though they would have had a couple extra hours to reach that milestone).

William had never come particularly close before: the lure of chasing friends around the playground was always too strong. But he told us weeks ahead of time that he was committed to making it happen this time around, so we let him skip his soccer game so he wouldn’t miss two critical hours. We arrived at school in plenty of time for him to be ready at the start (Julie had already been there for a couple hours, running the registration desk), and he walked or ran more or less the entire time, stopping only for bathroom breaks and to grab a hot dog for lunch. In the end, he made it to his goal with a little under 15 minutes to spare and, exhausted, claimed some well-earned rewards. Julie and Julia were there at the finish line to congratulate him as they wrapped up shifts punching lap cards.

Thus concludes our Booksin Walkathon story. William will most likely want to return as an alumni walker at some point, and he may work some volunteer shifts to fulfill high school graduation requirements, but our days of dedicating an entire Saturday in October to celebrating the Booksin community are behind us.

Gallery: Last Walkathon

Last First Day at Booksin

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It’s the beginning of August in California, and that means one thing: after an all-too-brief summer, it’s back-to-school season, and as usual, we have a collection of pictures.

School started on August 8 in San José this year, which feels even earlier than in years past. This particular first day was poignant because it wasn’t just the start of William’s seventh and final year at Booksin, but also the beginning of our final year as Booksin parents. Our time there started with Julia in kindergarten all the way back in 2009; all told, we’ve had fourteen distinct school years at the school, with a year off between the time Joe moved on to middle school and William started TK.

Of course, none of that mattered a bit to Will, who was much more concerned about what fifth grade was going to bring than what things were like during Obama’s first term. His teacher this year is Mr. Lau, and he’s lucky to have some good friends in class with him. Hanging around in the school courtyard before the first bell, he derived obvious energy from being around his pals after two full months away.

We took the usual assortment of pictures in front of the car before we left the house, and you can see the first signs of adolescence starting to creep in at the edges of the posed shots. He remains a joyful, amazing kid, of course, but it’ll be just a couple short years before he’s officially a teen.

Gallery: Last First Day at Booksin

Fourth Grade Spelling Bee

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William had the opportunity to try something new in January, something I remember well from my own childhood: taking part in the school-wide spelling bee. The linked album contains pictures from the occasion, as well as a video consisting of compiled clips of his part in the competition.

I don’t remember Julia and Joe participating in anything like this, so the format was new to me. They recruited the top two spellers from each of the fourth and fifth grade classrooms and put them together in one big contest. As a result, the field was large, numbering more than twenty students in total. The competition also differed from the spelling bees of my youth in that the student following an eliminated participant was not required to spell the word that knocked the previous kid out. This prevents a single difficult word from knocking out the bulk of the field, but also slightly increases the role of luck in the contest: a kid who draws an extremely challenging word can’t cling to the hope that they might be saved if it wipes out everyone else.

William is generally a fairly confident and unflappable guy, so it’s unusual to see him looking nervous. In this instance, however, he looked downright scared. It’s possible that I’m reading more into his facial expressions than he actually felt, but I thought he looked genuinely spooked as he sat on stage waiting for the competition to begin.

He needn’t have worried, however, as he did very well considering that he was up against older kids as well as his own classmates. We spent some time preparing in the weeks leading up to the event—the printed list of spelling words in multiple columns brought back some powerful, visceral memories for me—and he cruised through the first eleven rounds of the contest. He was finally tripped up in the twelfth round on the word “antechamber”, with fewer than ten competitors remaining alive.

He remained on the stage for the rest of the round, after which he was ushered out of the auditorium. We left through the rear entrance and met him outside. He was downcast and visibly upset, and our attempts to console him fell on deaf ears. His mood only brightened when a fifth grader named Paxton came over to share his own story of being eliminated and cheer him up. It was at once heartwarming to see and a sobering reminder that William is fast approaching an age at which the having the approval of his friends and peers will feel more important to him than feedback from Julie and me.

For posterity, here were William’s words:

  1. again
  2. endless
  3. expressway
  4. disdain
  5. ambush
  6. wafting
  7. replica
  8. bunions
  9. nondescript
  10. spawned
  11. boba
  12. antechamber

Gallery: Fourth Grade Spelling Bee

Joe’s Senior Portraits

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As Julia did before him, Joe sat for a set of senior portraits with a professional photographer, Christy Wright, this fall. He was nervous and self-conscious at first, but the photographer did an amazing job of getting him to loosen up during the session: you can see him relaxing and growing more comfortable as the shoot progresses. Check out the pictures here.

The photographer employed a number of wardrobe changes and picturesque locations to create a dynamic collection of photos. She begins the set with Joe wielding his clarinet in his band uniform at the Los Gatos Civic Center and then moves to Vasona Lake County Park, where she took advantage of the diverse terrain and late-afternoon light to capture Joe in a variety of fun and visually distinctive contexts.

There are some behind-the-scenes pictures and videos that Julie took during the shoot that we’ll share at a later time. In the meantime, we’re happy to have this artifact capturing Joe at this very specific point in time, as he prepares to move on to a new phase in his life.

Gallery: Joe’s Senior Portraits

William’s Fourth Grade Picture

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We sent out Joe’s school pictures a bit early this year, so now that William’s have finally come in, he’s on his own for this post. There’s a small version embedded here, but you can find the full-size photo in his gallery.

Booksin changed photographers this year, so the William’s portrait has a bit of a different look; it has a much more dramatic feel than his earlier school photos. Of course, he took pains to dress up on picture day so that he would look dashing: that much is unchanged.

William's fourth grade picture

Gallery: William

Fall Firsts

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It’s the second half of August, and for the last thirteen years, that’s meant one thing to us: it’s back-to-school time, and we have the pictures to prove it.

The gallery contains the traditional first-day-of-school shots in front of the car, of course, but it also includes a few others, including William jumping for joy at some exciting news; Joe absolutely wiped out after his first day of senior year; and William’s first soccer game (hence the somewhat forced “Fall Firsts” moniker for the photo album).

The year is off to a fast start. William seems to be enjoying fourth grade with his teacher, Mr. Tejada. He’s especially interested in the class reading goals: if everyone reads 40 books by May, the whole class gets a party. William is already almost halfway there.

Joe is working with his small ensemble on some pieces they might play at band competitions in the spring. He’s also enjoying having an open first period on Mondays and Wednesdays, which lets him get an extra hour or so of sleep. If anything, he’s enjoying it a little too much: there have been a couple days in which he cut his arrival at school for second period a little close.

His relaxed mornings may not stick around for long, however. He’s planning to take vector calculus at a nearby community college, and the section he wants meets at 6:30 am. He’s currently on the waiting list for that section, but if he gets in, it will mean lifestyle adjustments for all of us.

Julia’s plans for the fall are still somewhat up in the air, but we’re hoping to have a more concrete idea of what she’ll be doing imminently.

Gallery: Fall Firsts