Mascots conference

On the front of the shirt is a butter stick. Not a photograph of one, not a cartoon with a face, but the flat, printed wrapper of a quarter-pound stick, rendered as a costume graphic. The lettering runs vertically in blue capitals: SALTED BUTTER. The design is a wrapper, and the wrapper is the joke. What matters for anyone who works in a school is the word that is present and the word that is absent. It says salted. It does not say unsalted.

That distinction is the whole argument of the object, and it is worth taking seriously for a moment, because schools are in the business of naming things precisely and then watching those names drift. A butter stick is a small, ordinary object. Salted and unsalted butter are not the same food, and the difference is not decorative. Salt changes flavor, shelf life, and the way a cook plans a recipe. The shirt chooses one. It commits.

I am interested in that commitment as a piece of visual rhetoric. The graphic does not hedge. It does not say “butter” and let the viewer decide. It does not offer a bracket or an asterisk. It prints the specific word in the same blue capitals a real wrapper would use, and in doing so it turns a grocery-store distinction into a costume identity. The wearer is not butter in general. The wearer is salted butter, and the shirt expects the viewer to notice.

This is a useful thing to hold up against the way institutions name themselves. A school mission statement that says “excellence” is an unsalted butter label. It is technically true and broadly acceptable and it tells you almost nothing about what will happen in the building on a Tuesday morning. A school that says “we teach writing as a craft, and here is the folder of student revisions that proves it” is salted. The specificity is the flavor. The specificity is also the risk, because once you print the word, someone can hold you to it.

The costume form matters here too. This is a shirt designed to be worn as a costume, and the wrapper graphic borrows the visual authority of packaging. Packaging is one of the most disciplined design forms we have: it has to communicate category, variety, quantity, and brand in a space the size of a hand. When a shirt imitates packaging, it borrows that discipline. The vertical lettering, the blue capitals, the plain stick shape—these are not random choices. They are the grammar of a dairy case, transplanted onto a torso. The joke works because the grammar is recognizable.

For school leaders, the recognizable-grammar point is the practical one. Every institution runs on wrappers. The crest, the house color, the motto on the gate, the way the dining hall labels the soup—these are packaging decisions, and they carry meaning whether or not anyone designed them deliberately. The question a culture audit asks is not “do we have symbols?” Every school has symbols. The question is whether the symbols say salted or whether they say butter and hope no one asks.

I would not push the analogy further than it can bear. A shirt is not a curriculum, and a butter costume is not a governance document. But the shirt is a clean, low-stakes example of a principle that shows up in high-stakes settings: specificity is what makes a label legible, and legibility is what makes a label contestable. The unsalted label is safe because it promises little. The salted label invites the question “is it, though?” That question is the beginning of accountability, and it is also the beginning of trust.

The shirt itself is available as a standard t-shirt through the listing at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HLWLQ76T. The design is a salted-butter-stick wrapper costume graphic with blue vertical SALTED BUTTER lettering; it says salted, not unsalted. That is the observation I can make from the artwork. I cannot tell you how it wears, how it washes, or how a room full of people will react to it, and I would be inventing if I tried.

Editorial note: this publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.

What I can offer is a small experiment for the next staff meeting, and it costs nothing. Bring in three labels your school uses—a hallway sign, a line from the handbook, a phrase from the website—and ask the group one question: does this say salted, or does it say butter? The answers will not be unanimous, and the disagreement is the useful part. It shows you where the wrapper is doing work no one has examined, and where a more specific word might be worth printing.

The artwork is not subtle, and that is the point. Across the chest, in lettering that looks lifted from a storybook, runs PETER PETER PUMPKIN EATER. Beneath the words sits a farmer in a straw hat. Beside him, a spoon and a pumpkin. The palette is autumnal, the drawing flat and friendly, the composition arranged like a page from a children’s reader rather than a horror poster. This is the Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater Couples Halloween Costume from Quirky Cotton Collective, and it belongs to a genre that school leaders should study more closely than they usually do: the matching couples shirt.

Editorial note: this publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.

I want to be careful about what the shirt actually shows. The visual observation is literal: lettering, a farmer, a straw hat, a spoon, a pumpkin. Everything else—the rhyme’s history, the costume’s social function, the reason a couple might choose this over a dozen other Halloween options—is interpretation. I will flag it as such. But the interpretation is where the useful argument lives, because this shirt is doing something that schools do constantly and often badly: it is proposing a role through an artifact, and asking the wearer to accept a script they did not write.

What the rhyme asks you to accept

The nursery rhyme is short and strange. Peter puts his wife in a pumpkin shell, and there he keeps her very well. Generations of adults have recited it to children without dwelling on the arrangement. The shirt does not resolve that strangeness. It softens it. The farmer is cheerful, the pumpkin is round, the spoon is a utensil rather than a weapon. The lettering is the lettering of a bedtime book. The design takes a rhyme about containment and turns it into a couples costume, which means it asks two people to stand next to each other and let the rhyme describe them.

That is a costume contract. One person wears the words; the other person, presumably, wears the pumpkin, or the spoon, or some complementary garment. The shirt alone does not complete the joke. It requires a second body. This is the first thing that makes it interesting for anyone who thinks about school culture: it is an artifact that only works in relation to another artifact. A blazer works alone. A house badge works alone. A couples shirt is a paired symbol, and paired symbols are how schools organize so much of their ceremonial life—prefect and charge, captain and vice-captain, teacher and student, the one who speaks and the one who is spoken about.

The farmer as an institutional type

Look again at the farmer. He is not Peter as a menace. He is Peter as a type: the man in the straw hat, the cultivator, the one who tends and keeps. In the visual language of the shirt, the farmer is a role, not a person. He has no expression worth describing. He is a sign. And signs of this kind are everywhere in schools: the caretaker with the key ring, the head prefect with the badge, the house captain with the tie. These are not individuals in the moment of display; they are positions made visible.

I have written before about the caretaker’s key ring as the real map of a building. The farmer on this shirt belongs to the same family of objects. He tells you what kind of person is supposed to be standing here. He does not tell you what that person feels, or whether the role fits, or what happens when the pumpkin is empty. That gap between the role and the person is where school culture work actually happens, and it is why a shirt like this is more useful as a teaching object than as a joke.

The spoon and the pumpkin as props

The spoon is the detail I keep returning to. It is not a weapon, not a tool of punishment, not a symbol of authority. It is a utensil. In the logic of the rhyme, the spoon is what you eat the pumpkin with—or what you use to scoop it out. On the shirt, it floats beside the farmer like a prop waiting to be picked up. Props matter in ritual. Victor Turner’s account of liminality, developed from his fieldwork among the Ndembu in what is now Zambia, describes how ritual objects condense meaning and give participants something to handle while they are between states. The spoon is that kind of object. It is small, ordinary, and slightly absurd, and it gives the wearer something to point at when the joke needs explaining.

The pumpkin is the larger prop, and the more ambiguous one. In the rhyme it is a container. On the shirt it is a shape. In a school, the pumpkin is already a seasonal marker—harvest festival, Halloween, the autumn display table in the reception area. The shirt borrows that familiarity and uses it to make the couples costume legible. You do not need to know the rhyme to read the shirt; you only need to recognize the pumpkin as autumn’s mascot. The lettering does the rest.

What the shirt proposes to a pair

Here is the argument I want to make. The shirt is not really about Halloween. It is about the pleasure and the risk of being publicly paired. A couples costume is a small ceremony of affiliation. It says: we are together, we are willing to be seen as together, and we are willing to let a third thing—a rhyme, a joke, a pumpkin—describe us for an evening. Schools run on the same ceremony. House colors, paired desks, the buddy system, the reading partner, the mentor and mentee. Every one of these arrangements asks two people to accept a script and stand next to each other inside it.

The shirt makes that script visible, and because it is a nursery rhyme, it makes it harmless. That is the shirt’s real function. It gives adults a low-stakes way to practice being a pair in public. The farmer and the pumpkin do not have to mean anything. They only have to be recognizable. And recognizability is what most school rituals trade in—not deep belief, but shared legibility. A house badge does not prove loyalty. It proves membership. A couples shirt does not prove romance. It proves that two people agreed to be read together.

The question a leader can borrow

I am not going to pretend this shirt is a culture audit tool. It is a shirt. But it raises a question that is genuinely useful for anyone who designs or stewards school symbols: when we hand someone an artifact that assigns them a role, do we also give them a way to step out of it? The farmer on this shirt can take off the shirt. A prefect cannot take off the badge quite so easily, even when the badge is only a pin. The pumpkin shell in the rhyme is a container, and containers are hard to leave.

So here is a small experiment, runnable next week, no budget required. Take one paired symbol from your school—a buddy system, a house captain and vice-captain, a mentor pair, a prefect and charge—and ask the two people in it to describe, separately, what the pairing asks each of them to do. Do not ask whether they like it. Ask what the script is. Then ask what the exit looks like. If there is no exit, you have found a pumpkin shell. That is worth knowing before the next ceremony, and it is worth knowing before you order the matching shirts.

The farmer, the spoon, and the pumpkin are not deep. They are legible. And legibility, in schools as on a Halloween shirt, is the beginning of every ritual we ask people to wear.

The shirt says TWEEDLE DUM across the chest, and beneath it, in smaller letters, I’M WITH DEE, with a right-pointing arrow. That is the whole design. No illustration of the character, no Carrollian flourish, no teacup or flag or bell. Just a name, a claim of companionship, and a direction. The arrow points right, which means the wearer is telling you that the person they belong with is standing to their right—or, more precisely, that the wearer has agreed to be the left half of a pair.

I have been thinking about this shirt less as a Halloween costume and more as a small, wearable diagram of a problem every school leader knows: how institutions assign identity by pairing. The Tweedle Dum half is not complete on its own. It is a role defined by adjacency. The arrow does not point at the wearer; it points away, toward someone else. The shirt is a contract in cotton.

This is the Dum half of a matched set. The companion shirt presumably reads TWEEDLE DEE with I’M WITH DUM and an arrow pointing left. Together they form a closed loop of mutual reference. Separated, each is a fragment. That is the design’s argument, and it is worth taking seriously as a piece of visual culture rather than dismissing as a novelty.

Schools run on paired identities. Prefect and deputy. House captain and vice-captain. Mentor and mentee. The buddy system in the early years, the lab partner in the middle years, the thesis supervisor and candidate in the final years. We assign students to roles that only make sense in relation to another role, and then we ask them to perform that relation in public—on a badge, in a lineup, on a stage. The Tweedle Dum shirt makes that logic literal and slightly absurd, which is exactly what a good costume should do.

The arrow is the interesting part. It is a deictic gesture—a pointing word made visual. In semiotics, deixis is the way language anchors itself to context: here, now, you, that one. The arrow on this shirt does the same work. It says: the meaning of this garment is not on this garment. Look to the side. The shirt is a sign that points to another sign. That is a useful reminder for anyone who designs school symbols. A badge, a tie, a house color—these are not self-contained meanings. They are relational. They point.

I am not claiming that the shirt’s designer had semiotics in mind. The visual observation is plain: two lines of text and a right-pointing arrow. What I am suggesting is that the form invites a particular reading. The pairing is explicit, the direction is fixed, and the identity is conditional. You are Dum only insofar as you are with Dee. That is a fragile kind of identity, and it is also a very common one in institutional life.

Consider the way schools handle new students. The buddy system pairs a newcomer with an existing student, and for a week or a term, the newcomer’s social identity is partly borrowed. They are with someone. The arrow points at the buddy. Then the pairing dissolves, and the newcomer is expected to stand alone. The Tweedle Dum shirt holds that moment still: the arrow never retracts. It is a permanent declaration of adjacency. That is either comforting or claustrophobic, depending on your view of dependence.

There is a small industry of matching shirts for couples, friends, and siblings, and the Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum pairing is one of its older tropes. The design here is not subtle. It uses distressed lettering and a blunt arrow, and it relies on the viewer recognizing the Carroll reference. If you do not know Through the Looking-Glass, the shirt is just two names and a direction. If you do, it carries a faint air of nonsense and threat—the Tweedles are not exactly benevolent figures. They are comic, but they are also obstinate and a little menacing. That ambiguity is part of the appeal.

For school leaders, the useful question is not whether the shirt is funny. It is what kind of pairing it models. The arrow points right, which means the wearer is the left-hand member of the pair. In a left-to-right reading culture, the left position is often the subordinate one—the setup, the introduction, the one who defers. Dee comes first in the phrase, and Dum comes second. The shirt assigns the wearer to the second position. That is a small thing, but it is the kind of small thing that accumulates in institutional culture. Who gets named first? Whose name is on the plaque? Who stands on the left in the official photograph?

I am not arguing that the shirt is a commentary on hierarchy. I am arguing that it is a useful prompt for noticing how pairing works in your own setting. The next time you design a buddy system, a mentor program, or a house competition, ask what the arrow points at. Does the pairing give both parties a stable identity, or does it make one party dependent on the other? Does the relation dissolve cleanly, or does it leave one person holding a shirt that says I’m with someone who has moved on?

The shirt itself is available as a standard t-shirt through the listing at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HLT879NW. It is the Dum half of the pair, and the design is exactly as described: the words TWEEDLE DUM and I’M WITH DEE with a right-pointing arrow. There is no claim here about comfort, fit, or durability, because I have not worn it. The observation is visual, and the argument is about what the visual form proposes.

Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.

If you want a small experiment for next week, try this. Take a piece of paper and draw an arrow pointing at the person you rely on most in your role. Then draw a second arrow pointing at the person who relies on you. Look at the directions. Are they symmetrical? Do they cross? Does one arrow point at someone who is no longer there? The Tweedle Dum shirt is a joke, but it is also a diagram. It shows that identity is often a matter of where you stand and who you stand with. The question for a school is whether the arrows we assign are temporary or permanent, and whether the people wearing them had any say in the direction.

The shirt does not say Tweedle Dee and stop. It says TWEEDLE DEE across the chest, then I’M WITH DUM beneath it, and beside that second line a single arrow, pointing left. That is the whole design. Two names, one possessive phrase, one direction. If you are wearing the Dee half of the pair, the arrow is aimed at the person standing to your left, and the sentence is doing the introducing for you.

I want to take that arrangement seriously as a piece of culture work, because it is a small masterclass in how a costume assigns roles. The shirt is not a picture of a character. It is a set of instructions about where to stand and who you are standing with. The visual observation is plain: paired text and a left-pointing arrow, the Dee half of a matched set. Everything I say below is interpretation of that form, not a claim about the original Lewis Carroll illustrations, Disney’s designs, or anyone’s sales figures.

The arrow is the argument

Most matching costumes rely on symmetry. Two people wear the same graphic, and the pairing is inferred from repetition. This shirt does something more interesting. It makes the pair directional. The arrow converts a wearer into a signpost. You are not simply labeled Dee; you are labeled as the person whose left side belongs to Dum. The costume only closes its circuit when a second body occupies the indicated space.

That is a different kind of social technology from a shared logo. A shared logo says we are the same kind of thing. An arrow says this relation has a geometry. One person is the referent, the other is the reference. In the language of ritual, you could call this a small script: it tells both wearers and onlookers how to read the pair without anyone having to explain it aloud. I would not push the analogy to van Gennep’s rites of passage too hard here—this is a party shirt, not a rite—but the underlying move is familiar. Costume is one of the oldest ways human beings announce a temporary role, and the clearer the role, the less the wearer has to perform it in conversation.

The leftward direction matters more than it might seem. An arrow pointing left is not neutral. In a culture that reads left to right, a left-pointing arrow reads as a backward gesture, a nudge toward the person who arrived with you rather than the crowd ahead. Whether the designer intended that connotation is not something I can verify. What I can say is that the arrow gives the shirt a front and a side, and that spatial grammar is what turns two separate garments into one costume.

What the words do that the picture cannot

Notice that the design carries no portrait of Tweedle Dee. No round belly, no propeller beanie, no cartoon face. The identification is entirely typographic. That choice has consequences. A wearer is not asked to resemble a character; they are asked to declare one. The shirt is closer to a name badge than to a mask.

This is where the design becomes useful for anyone who thinks about school culture. Schools are full of typographic identity markers—house-color lanyards, prefect badges, name tapes sewn into collars, the printed role on a staff lanyard. Those objects work the same way this shirt does: they tell you what to call the person before you have spoken to them. The difference is that a school badge usually assigns a status, while this shirt assigns a relationship. I’M WITH DUM is not a rank. It is a public claim of affiliation, and it is deliberately a little self-deprecating.

That self-deprecation is worth pausing on. The phrase borrows the old joke format—I’m with stupid, with the arrow aimed at a companion—and softens it into nonsense. Dum is not an insult here; it is a role in a matched pair. The humor depends on the wearer being willing to be the straight man and the fool at once. In a staffroom, that is a recognizable social move: the colleague who volunteers to be the butt of the joke in order to make the group cohere. I am not claiming the shirt was designed with staffroom dynamics in mind. I am claiming that its grammar is the same grammar.

The costume as a temporary institution

Halloween costumes are interesting because they are institutions with a one-night charter. They convene a role, assign a partner, specify a direction, and dissolve by morning. The Tweedle Dee shirt is unusually explicit about that charter. It names the role, names the counterpart, and points to where the counterpart should stand. It even implies a rule: if you are wearing Dee, your Dum is to your left. Break the rule and the joke misfires.

I find that legible rule-making is what separates a costume that works from one that merely matches. The best paired costumes are not identical; they are complementary, and the complementarity is visible from across a room. This design achieves that with almost no ink. Two words, one phrase, one arrow. The economy is the point. A more elaborate illustration would tell the wearer what to look like. This tells the wearer what to do.

If you are considering the Tweedle Dee I’m With Dum matching costume shirt, the practical question is not whether the graphic is funny—that is settled by the arrow—but whether you have a willing Dum. The shirt is the Dee half of a pair, and its meaning depends on the other half being present. Worn alone, it becomes a different joke: a signpost pointing at empty air. That is not a flaw in the design. It is a reminder that some artifacts are built to be incomplete without their counterpart, and that incompleteness is a form of invitation.

A small experiment for the culture-curious

Here is something a school leader could try next week, and it costs nothing. Take an inventory of the paired objects in your building—the lanyards, the badges, the house shirts, the signed photographs in the corridor—and ask of each one: does this object tell the wearer what to do, or only what to be? The Tweedle Dee shirt is a useful benchmark because it does both in a single line. It tells you what to be (Dee) and what to do (stand to the right of Dum, arrow left). Most institutional artifacts manage only the first. The ones that manage the second are the ones people actually use.

The shirt is a joke, and I do not want to inflate it into a theory of everything. But jokes are compressed social contracts, and this one is unusually well drafted. It knows that a costume is not a picture of a person. It is an agreement about where two people will stand.

Editorial note: this publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.

The first thing I notice is the mouth. Not the orange—orange is the ground, the given—but the mouth, cut as a jagged line that rises and falls like a bad EKG, with two triangular eyes set above it at slightly different angles. The whole face sits on a plain shirt like a mask that has been flattened and pinned to the chest. It is a scary jack-o’-lantern, the kind children carve when they want to prove they are old enough to hold the knife. The graphic does not smile. It does not wink. It does not have eyelashes or a heart-shaped nose. It is a face built to be read at a distance, in the dark, by someone who is not sure whether to laugh or step back.

That ambiguity is the design’s real subject. A jack-o’-lantern is a threshold object—a face placed at the boundary between inside and outside, between the harvested field and the lit house. In the school calendar, Halloween sits at a similar boundary: a moment when the ordinary rules of dress and decorum are briefly suspended, when children are allowed to be someone else. The scary jack-o’-lantern shirt belongs to that suspension. It is not a costume in the full sense—there is no hood, no padding, no prop—but it proposes a role. The wearer becomes the face on the porch. The wearer becomes the thing that is looked at.

I am interested in what kind of face this is. The triangular eyes are the most conventional element: they are the eyes of a hundred paper cutouts, the eyes a child draws when asked to make something spooky. The jagged mouth is less settled. It could be a grin, but the points are too sharp for joy. It could be a grimace, but the symmetry is too deliberate for pain. The design holds the mouth in that unresolved place, and that is where its meaning lives. A scary jack-o’-lantern is not a monster; it is a warning that has been made cheerful enough to display. It says this is a game and this is not entirely a game at the same time.

Schools are full of faces like this. The prefect’s badge, the house captain’s sash, the lanyard that marks a visitor—these are all threshold objects, worn on the body to tell others what role the wearer is playing. They are not costumes, exactly, but they are not ordinary clothing either. They are props in a ritual of belonging, and like the jack-o’-lantern they work best when they are slightly ambiguous. A badge that is too friendly loses its authority. A badge that is too severe becomes a joke. The scary jack-o’-lantern shirt sits in that same narrow band: it is funny enough to wear to a party and sharp enough to make the wearer feel a little dangerous.

I would not claim that the shirt teaches anything. It is a graphic on cotton, not a lesson plan. But it is a useful object for a staff discussion about the faces we ask students to wear. Every school has its own version of the jagged mouth—the house color that must be worn on sports day, the tie that must be knotted a certain way, the lanyard that must be visible at all times. These are not neutral. They are designs, and they carry connotations. The jack-o’-lantern shirt makes that visible because it is so obviously a design: a face that has been cut, not grown. It reminds us that the faces we hand out are also cut to a pattern, and that the pattern is always someone’s decision.

If you want to run a small experiment with this, try it in a staff meeting rather than a classroom. Ask each person to bring one object they wear at school that tells others who they are—a badge, a key ring, a particular lanyard. Lay them on a table and look at them the way you would look at the shirt: what is the shape, what is the color, what is the expression? Then ask which of these objects is closest to the jagged mouth—the one that is funny and sharp at the same time. The answer will tell you something about the tone of your school’s culture that a survey cannot. It will also tell you which symbols are doing the most work, and which ones might need to be retired before they become a joke no one is in on.

The shirt itself is available here: Scary Jack O Lantern Face Halloween Costume Pumpkin. I have not worn it, and I do not know how it fits. What I know is what the graphic shows: an orange face with triangular eyes and a jagged mouth, a design that holds a small, useful tension between the playful and the unsettling. That tension is the point. A school culture that cannot tolerate it is probably too rigid; one that cannot see it is probably not paying attention.

Note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.

The graphic is an orange pumpkin face, carved into a smile, with two curved eyelashes rising from the top of each eye. That is the whole design. No text, no slogan, no secondary motif. A jack-o’-lantern, but one that has been given lashes — the small, conventional mark of a cartoon face coded as feminine, or at least as cute rather than fearsome. The mouth is a smile, not a jagged grin. The eyes are wide and round. The effect is a pumpkin that has been softened at the edges, made friendly, made legible to a child.

I want to take this object seriously as a piece of visual culture, because it does something that school leaders spend a great deal of energy trying to do: it takes a symbol with a long, slightly threatening history and reissues it in a form that a broad audience can accept without anxiety. The jack-o’-lantern, in the North American and Commonwealth Halloween context, is a carved root vegetable with a candle inside — a lantern, in the old sense, meant to ward off or represent something uncanny. The eyelashes do not erase that history. They bracket it. They say: this is the friendly version, the one for the classroom party, the one you can wear to the office on the last Friday in October.

That is a design decision worth naming. In semiotic terms, the eyelashes are a connotation — a secondary layer of meaning that attaches to the primary sign (the pumpkin) and shifts how we read it. Roland Barthes made this distinction in Mythologies (1957), and the useful part for school culture work is that connotation is not decoration. It is argument. The lashes argue that the pumpkin is approachable. The smile argues that the threat is theatrical. Together they produce a mask that is safe to wear in public.

Schools do this constantly. The house mascot that is a wolf but drawn with round eyes. The crest that includes a sword but points it downward. The annual tradition that began as a mild hazing ritual and has been gradually softened, year by year, until the current version is a costume parade with a permission slip. Each of these is an eyelash on a pumpkin: a small visual or procedural adjustment that changes the emotional register of an inherited symbol without requiring anyone to admit that the symbol needed changing.

What I find interesting about this particular shirt is that the softening is not hidden. The lashes are prominent. They are the most stylized element in the design. A viewer who knows what a traditional jack-o’-lantern looks like will immediately register the difference. The shirt is not pretending to be a pumpkin; it is pretending to be a cute pumpkin, and it wants you to notice the performance. That is a different move from the institutional habit of quietly sanding down a tradition and hoping no one remembers the original. The shirt is honest about its own revision.

There is a practical lesson here for anyone who stewards school symbols. When you change a tradition — retire a chant, redesign a crest, replace a mascot — the community will read the change through whatever connotative markers you leave visible. If you soften a symbol without explaining the softening, people will fill the gap with suspicion. If you make the revision legible — if the eyelashes are clearly eyelashes, not an accident of the carving — you give people something to react to, and reaction is the beginning of consent. The shirt works because it does not ask you to forget what a pumpkin is. It asks you to enjoy the version it has become.

The object itself is a standard t-shirt from Quirky Cotton Collective, sold under the title Cute Eyelashes Jack O Lantern Face Halloween Costume Pumpkin. The design is a costume in the shallow sense: it turns the wearer into a pumpkin for a day, with no commitment beyond the fabric. That is the liminal pleasure of Halloween dressing, and it is the same pleasure that makes spirit days work in schools — the temporary, low-stakes adoption of a role that everyone agrees to read correctly. The shirt is available at the Amazon listing for anyone who wants the object itself.

Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.

If I were running a culture audit this week, I would use this shirt as a prompt in a staff meeting. Not to discuss Halloween, but to ask a simpler question: which of our visible symbols have been given eyelashes, and who decided? The answer will tell you where the institution has already revised itself without saying so — and where the next revision is waiting to be named.

The Ring That Knows the Building

Walk into almost any school and you will find two maps. The first hangs in the front office: a floor plan, laminated, with room numbers and a legend. The second hangs from a caretaker’s belt or sits in a custodian’s pocket—a ring of keys, fobs, and sometimes a proximity disk, jingling against a thigh. The first map tells you where the walls are. The second tells you who can move through them, when, and unobserved.

That second map is the one leaders rarely read. It is not a secret, exactly. It is just not the kind of document that gets discussed at a leadership retreat. But it is a document nonetheless—an artifact of institutional trust, written in metal and plastic, updated by hand, and audited (if at all) on a schedule that has more to do with the fiscal year than with the culture of the building.

This article argues that the key ring is a better map of a school’s real hierarchy than the org chart, and that a key-control audit is not merely a security exercise but a piece of culture work. The evidence here comes from written access policies at three institutions—a Canadian school district, a Colorado school district, and a U.S. university—not from direct observation of any particular building. That limitation matters, and I will return to it. But the policies themselves are revealing: they show how institutions formally imagine trust, and where that imagination tends to break down.

What the Written Map Says

Start with the formal hierarchy. Abbotsford School District, in British Columbia, sets out a tiered system in its Administrative Procedure 519. The district allots an exterior building master key or key fob, an interior building master key or key fob, a building main entry key or key fob, a building zone key or key fob, and a staff alarm code (Abbotsford School District, AP 519, revised May 2023). The tiers are not decorative. Each one corresponds to a different radius of movement: the exterior master opens the shell; the interior master opens the rooms; the zone key opens a slice; the main entry opens the front door and nothing else.

Aurora Public Schools, in Colorado, uses a similar but more elaborated vocabulary. Its policy ECAB-R defines an Aurora Public Schools master key (opens any door on that campus, except proprietary systems), a building master key (all doors in a specific building), a custodial housekeeping key (most doors in a building, considered the same level as a building master), an area master key (a series of doors), an exterior door key, a proprietary key (high-security area only), an interior door key, and miscellaneous keys for desks, files, cabinets, and padlocks (Aurora Public Schools, ECAB-R, revised August 2021).

Read those two lists side by side and a pattern emerges. The formal map is not a simple binary of has access and does not have access. It is a gradient. And the gradient is not organized around seniority in the usual sense. It is organized around a principle of demonstrated need. Abbotsford limits after-hours entry to personnel “who have obvious need to enter” (AP 519, section 1). Aurora states the principle plainly: “Building keys will be issued only where there is a demonstrated need for persons to have access to Aurora Public Schools facilities. Mere employment does not justify the issuance of keys” (ECAB-R).

That sentence is worth pausing on. It says that the org chart is not the access map. A teacher with twenty years of service and no after-hours responsibilities may hold fewer keys than a first-year custodian. A principal may hold the building master; a department head may hold only an area master. The key ring, in other words, records operational trust rather than status trust. It answers a different question than the one the org chart answers.

The Custodial Exception

Both districts carve out a special category for custodial staff, and the carve-out is instructive. Abbotsford’s policy states that “the custodial department maintains its own key inventory,” tracked by a spreadsheet and a hard-copy key history for every custodial staff member, with a full inventory completed every spring break (AP 519, section 6). Aurora lists the custodial housekeeping key as “the same level as a building master key” (ECAB-R, Key Terminology).

Why would a custodian hold a key equivalent to the building master? The answer is in the work. Custodial staff move through the entire building, often outside instructional hours, often alone. They enter rooms that teachers lock, storage areas that administrators rarely visit, and mechanical spaces that appear on no org chart at all. The formal policy recognizes this by granting a radius of movement that matches the actual geography of the job.

This is the first place where the written map and the lived map begin to diverge—not because the policy is wrong, but because the policy is a floor, not a ceiling. It establishes the minimum trust tier for a role. It does not describe what the person actually does with the ring, what they know about the building, or which doors they open for other people.

The Gap Between the Map and the Building

Here is where the key ring becomes analytically interesting. A policy can specify who should hold which key. It cannot specify the informal economy of access that grows up around the ring.

Consider a few ordinary patterns, offered as illustrations rather than as findings from any particular school:

• A teacher who has lost a classroom key borrows a colleague’s key to make a copy at a hardware store, despite a policy forbidding duplication. The copy never appears in the inventory.
• A custodian opens a storage room for a club advisor on a Saturday morning. The room is not on the advisor’s key tier, but the custodian is present, and the door is opened. The event is not recorded anywhere.
• A departing staff member hands a key to a successor rather than returning it to the facilities office, because the handoff feels more efficient than the paperwork.

Each of these patterns is a small deviation from the written map. None is dramatic. But cumulatively they mean that the ring in a custodian’s pocket may open doors that the inventory does not account for, and that the inventory may list keys that no longer exist in the form described.

Shepherd University’s facilities page addresses the handoff problem directly: “Keys are issued to a specific individual and are not to be ‘handed down’ to a successor or ‘loaned out’ without going through the Facilities Department so records are updated” (Shepherd University, Facilities, Keys). The sentence exists because the practice exists. Policies are written against the grain of ordinary human convenience.

Shepherd also notes a limitation that is worth quoting in full: “Authorized employees should not rely on Campus Police when after hours access is needed; the University police officer may not know whether a person is authorized” (Shepherd University, Facilities, Keys). This is a small admission with large implications. It says that the institution’s own security apparatus does not hold the full access map. The map is distributed—partly in the facilities office, partly in the custodian’s ring, partly in the memory of whoever has been at the building longest.

Why the Ring Is a Culture Artifact

In semiotics—the study of signs and how meaning is made—an artifact is not just a tool. It is a carrier of meaning. A key ring carries several meanings at once. It signals belonging (this person is trusted with the building). It signals role (the number and type of keys indicate a radius of movement). It signals history (a ring with many old keys, some no longer functional, records the building’s past configurations). And it signals relationship (who lent whom a key, who opened a door for whom).

This is why a key audit is not just a security exercise. The annual audit required by Abbotsford—schools return all keys to a designated key cabinet by the end of the first week in July, and send a completed audit to the manager of structural and grounds (AP 519, section 4.6)—is formally about accounting for metal. But the conversation that surrounds the audit is about something else. It is about who has been trusted, who has left, who has arrived, and which doors have become informal thoroughfares.

Aurora’s policy requires all staff to turn in keys at the end of each school year by a time set by the site administrator (ECAB-R, section 16). That deadline is a ritual. It marks the end of one access cycle and the beginning of another. It is also an opportunity—rarely taken—to ask what the ring has been doing all year.

A Key-Ring Audit as Culture Work

What would it look like to treat the key audit as culture work rather than as compliance? The following procedure is a recommendation, not a research finding. It is designed for a school leader or facilities manager who wants to use the audit to surface what the org chart hides.

1. Inventory the formal map

Collect the written policy, the current key inventory, and the list of issued keys and fobs. Note the tiers, the named holders, and the dates of issue. This is the baseline. It is also, almost certainly, incomplete.

2. Walk the building with the ring

Ask the person who holds the largest ring—usually a lead custodian—to walk the building with you, door by door. At each door, ask three questions: Does your key open this? Should it? Who else opens this door, and when? The walk is not an inspection. It is an interview conducted on foot. The goal is to record the lived access map, not to catch anyone out.

3. Note the informal doors

Pay attention to doors that are propped, doors that are opened for others, and doors that are opened on a schedule no one has written down. A storage room that is opened every Tuesday morning for a club meeting is an access fact that the inventory does not capture. Record it.

4. Ask about the retired keys

Every long-serving staff member has a story about a key that no longer opens anything, or a lock that was changed without the inventory being updated. These stories are diagnostic. They tell you where the formal system has drifted from the building.

5. Reconcile, do not punish

The purpose of the audit is to update the map, not to assign blame. If a key was handed down without paperwork, the fix is to regularize the handoff, not to discipline the handoff. The policy exists to keep the map accurate; the audit exists to find where the map has drifted.

When the Map and the Building Disagree

The hardest cases are not the small deviations. They are the moments when the building itself changes: a rebrand, a merger, a relocation, a closure. At those moments, the key ring becomes a problem of symbolic and functional retirement.

Consider a merger. Two schools combine into one. Each brings its own key hierarchy, its own master keys, its own custodial rings. The new building may have locks that neither legacy system opens. The old keys become artifacts of a former institution—still carried, still meaningful, no longer functional. What happens to them?

The policies reviewed here do not address this scenario directly. Abbotsford’s policy covers the return of keys on termination or extended leave (AP 519, section 4.2). Aurora’s policy covers return on transfer, leave, termination, retirement, resignation, or request (ECAB-R, section 14). Shepherd’s policy covers return on leaving the university or when the key is no longer needed (Shepherd University, Facilities, Keys). But none of these documents describes a protocol for retiring a set of keys when a building or institution changes identity.

This is a gap worth naming. A retirement protocol for access artifacts would need to do three things: account for the keys (the security function), mark the transition (the ritual function), and preserve the record (the archival function). The first is standard. The second and third are culture work.

A simple version: when a building closes or merges, collect the legacy rings, photograph them, label them with the building and date, and store them with the institutional archive. Do not simply discard them. A ring of keys is a compact record of how a building was trusted. It belongs with the plaques and the photographs, not in a landfill.

What the Ring Cannot Tell You

It is important to be precise about the limits of this argument. The evidence here is drawn from written policies at three institutions. It shows how those institutions formally imagine access. It does not show how access is actually practiced in any particular school. The informal patterns described above are illustrations, not observations. They are plausible because policies are written against the grain of convenience, but plausibility is not evidence.

To make claims about lived practice, a leader would need to do the walk described above—and record what they find. That is the point of the audit. It converts a plausible story into a documented fact about a specific building.

There is also a theoretical limitation. The semiotic reading of the key ring as a carrier of meaning is an interpretation, not a finding from the sources cited here. It is consistent with the way anthropologists and semioticians treat artifacts, but it is not established by the policy documents. Treat it as a lens, not a conclusion.

The Ring as a Question

The caretaker’s key ring is not a metaphor. It is a physical object, heavy in the pocket, warm from the body, jingling against a thigh. It opens doors that the org chart does not mention. It records a history of trust that the inventory does not capture. And it asks a question that leaders rarely think to answer: who actually moves through this building, and what does that movement tell us about how we trust?

The next time you walk past a custodian with a full ring, consider asking for a tour. Not of the building—of the ring. Door by door, key by key. You may find that the map in the front office and the map in the pocket are not the same map. And you may find that the second one is the one that tells the truth.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is a key audit really culture work, or just security compliance?

It can be both. The formal purpose is accounting for metal. The culture-work purpose is surfacing the gap between the written access map and the lived one. The audit is the occasion; the conversation is the work.

What should we do with legacy keys when a building closes?

The policies reviewed here do not specify a protocol. A reasonable recommendation is to collect, photograph, label, and archive the rings alongside other institutional artifacts, rather than discarding them. This preserves the record of how the building was trusted.

Our policy forbids key duplication, but staff do it anyway. What should we do?

Treat the duplication as diagnostic data. It usually means the formal process is slower or more cumbersome than the work requires. The fix is to regularize the process, not to punish the workaround.

Can we learn anything from the number of keys on a ring?

The number and type of keys indicate a formal radius of movement. They do not indicate what the person actually does with the ring. For that, you need the walk.

Sources

• Abbotsford School District. Administrative Procedure 519: Keys and Alarm Codes. Revised May 2023. https://abbyschools.ca/administrative-procedures/AP519
• Aurora Public Schools. Policy ECAB and Regulation ECAB-R: Building Access Control Systems (Key, Proximity Card and Security Intrusion Alarm). Revised August 2021. https://harmonyridge.aurorak12.org/UserFiles/Servers/Server_3217444/File/policies/ECAB.pdf
• Shepherd University. Facilities Management: Keys. https://www.shepherd.edu/facilities/keys

The orange face is not trying to frighten anyone. It is a carved pumpkin, rendered in flat orange, with one eye squeezed shut in a wink and a tongue lolling out of the corner of its jagged mouth. The expression is closer to a playground taunt than a Halloween threat. I am looking at the artwork for the Goofy Jack O Lantern Face Halloween Costume Pumpkin shirt from Quirky Cotton Collective, and what strikes me first is how thoroughly it declines the genre’s usual contract. A jack-o’-lantern is supposed to be a warning: a face cut into a gourd, lit from within, placed at the threshold to keep something out. This one is a comedian. The wink is conspiratorial; the tongue is rude in the way a seven-year-old is rude. It is a mask that has forgotten it is supposed to be scary and decided to be funny instead.

That shift matters more than it might first appear. In school culture work, we spend a great deal of time on symbols that carry weight—crests, mottoes, honor boards, the particular brass of a plaque. We spend much less time on the symbols that carry lightness, the ones students and staff use to signal that a moment is not serious. And yet those light symbols are often doing the most delicate cultural work: they mark a threshold, they license a temporary inversion of the ordinary rules, and they give a community permission to be silly together. The goofy pumpkin is a small case study in that permission.

The carved face as a threshold object

I want to be careful here about what I am and am not claiming. The visual observation is straightforward: an orange jack-o’-lantern face, winking, tongue out. The retail title calls it a costume. I am not asserting a history of the jack-o’-lantern tradition, nor am I claiming this shirt participates in any documented ritual. What I can say is that the design borrows the grammar of a threshold guardian—the carved face at the door—and then deliberately deflates it. The wink is the tell. A guardian that winks is not guarding; it is inviting.

In the vocabulary I use for school culture, this is a liminal mask: an object worn or displayed at the edge of a transition, whose function is to mark the crossing without solemnizing it. Arnold van Gennep’s 1909 work on rites of passage described the threshold phase as one in which ordinary social rules are suspended; Victor Turner later developed the idea of liminality and communitas—the temporary, egalitarian bond that forms among people passing through the same threshold together. A goofy pumpkin shirt is not a rite of passage. But it belongs to the same family of objects: it says we are in a different time now, and the usual seriousness is on hold. Halloween, in the North American school calendar, is exactly that kind of time—a day when the dress code loosens, when the ordinary hierarchy of who is allowed to be strange gets briefly renegotiated.

The wink and tongue are doing specific semiotic work. Roland Barthes, writing about the connotation of images, argued that a photograph or drawing carries not only a denoted message (what it shows) but a connoted one (what it suggests, what cultural code it invokes). Denotation here is simple: an orange pumpkin face. Connotation is where the design gets interesting. The wink connotes complicity—I know something you know. The tongue connotes defiance without threat—I am being rude but harmless. Together they produce a face that is legible to almost anyone who has been a child in a culture that celebrates Halloween, and legible in a different way to adults who remember being that child. It is a design that depends on a shared code, and it rewards recognition.

Why the goofy variant is the harder design

There is a version of this shirt that would be scarier, and a version that would be cuter. The goofy variant is neither. It sits in a narrow band between menace and sentimentality, and that band is where the most useful cultural objects often live. A scary pumpkin shirt asks the wearer to perform threat; a cute pumpkin shirt asks the wearer to perform innocence. The goofy pumpkin asks the wearer to perform mischief—a social role that is available to children and adults alike, and one that carries a specific license: you may be a little rude, but only in a way everyone recognizes as play.

In school terms, this is the difference between a mascot and a trickster. A mascot represents the institution; a trickster tests it. The goofy pumpkin is closer to the trickster. It does not claim to embody a school’s values. It claims the right to poke at them for an afternoon. That is a useful thing for a community to have, and it is a thing that is easy to overlook when we audit our symbols. We tend to inventory the serious ones and forget the playful ones, even though the playful ones are often the ones students actually remember.

If you wanted to read this shirt as an artifact in a staff meeting—and I think there is a case for it—the question I would put to colleagues is not what does this mean? but who is allowed to wear this, and on what day? The answer tells you something about the informal rules of your building. Is there a Halloween dress code? Is it enforced? Do staff participate, or is it a student-only occasion? The goofy pumpkin is a small probe for those questions, because it is legible enough to be safe and mischievous enough to be interesting.

The costume that is not quite a costume

The retail title calls it a costume, and that word is worth a moment. A costume is something you put on to become someone else. This shirt does not really do that. It puts a face on your torso, but it leaves your own face visible. The effect is less I am a pumpkin and more I am wearing a pumpkin’s opinion. That is a different kind of dressing-up, and it is the kind that fits the school context better than a full mask would. A full pumpkin head would be a disruption; a pumpkin shirt is a joke you can wear to work.

This is, I think, the design’s quiet intelligence. It borrows the iconography of a threshold guardian and scales it down to something a teacher can wear on a Friday in October without needing to explain herself. The wink does the explaining. It says: I know this is silly, and I am doing it on purpose, and you are welcome to join me. That is a social invitation, not a scare. And invitations are what build the kind of culture that survives the departure of any single leader.

I am not claiming the shirt builds community. I am claiming it is the kind of object that can be used to mark a communal moment, and that the design choices—the wink, the tongue, the flat orange—make it unusually well-suited to that use. The flatness matters: a shaded, three-dimensional pumpkin would read as a rendering, something to be admired. A flat orange face reads as a drawing, something to be recognized and shared. It is closer to a child’s Halloween decoration than to a horror film prop, and that is the right register for a school.

A small experiment for the culture audit

If you are in the middle of an artifact inventory—and if you are reading this publication, you may well be—here is a runnable experiment for the last week of October. Ask a small group of staff and students to bring in or describe one object they associate with a light school tradition: a dress-up day, a spirit week, a silly assembly, a staff skit. Do not ask them to explain the tradition’s history. Ask them to describe the object’s face—literally, if it has one. What expression does it wear? Is it solemn, cute, scary, or goofy? Then ask: who is allowed to wear or hold this object, and on what day?

The answers will give you a map of the informal permissions in your building—the places where seriousness is deliberately suspended. That map is often more useful than the official one, because it shows you where the community actually feels safe enough to be silly. And the goofy pumpkin, with its wink and its tongue, is a reminder that those places are not frivolous. They are where the threshold gets marked, and where people learn, briefly, that they are allowed to cross it together.

Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner. This is not an independent review.

The shirt is available at the Quirky Cotton Collective listing.

The graphic is orange, and it is a jack-o’-lantern: a carved pumpkin face, the kind that has been printed on children’s costumes and porch banners for generations. But look at the mouth. Two white fangs hang down from the upper lip, pointed and deliberate, the unmistakable signature of a vampire. The face is not merely a pumpkin. It is a pumpkin that has been bitten, or a pumpkin that does the biting. The design does not explain which. That ambiguity is the whole object.

This is the jack o lantern shirt sold by Quirky Cotton Collective, a standard t-shirt with a single printed graphic: an orange carved face with vampire fangs in its mouth. No text, no scene, no caption. Just the collision of two visual vocabularies that normally keep their distance.

I want to read that collision the way I would read any artifact in a school corridor: not as a joke to be explained, but as a small piece of design that proposes a role to whoever wears it. What kind of symbol is this, and what does it ask of the person under it?

Two borrowed symbols, one face

The jack-o’-lantern is a seasonal marker. In the North American context where this shirt is sold, it belongs to late October: porch steps, classroom windows, the week before Halloween. Its carved face is meant to be legible from a distance, a grin or a grimace that reads across a lawn. The vampire is a different kind of figure entirely. It is a costume staple, yes, but it carries a longer narrative tail: the undead, the seductive outsider, the creature who wears a human face and is not quite human underneath.

Put them together and you get a visual pun, but a pun with a specific structure. The pumpkin is the host. The fangs are the parasite. The design does not show a vampire dressed as a pumpkin, nor a pumpkin dressed as a vampire. It shows a pumpkin that has acquired a vampire’s most recognizable feature, as if the two had merged at the mouth.

That is a different move from the usual Halloween graphic, which tends to pick one register and stay inside it: cute pumpkin, scary pumpkin, funny pumpkin. This one stacks registers. It asks the viewer to hold two seasonal codes at once and notice that they do not quite fit.

What the shirt asks the wearer to be

Every printed shirt proposes a role. A school tie says member. A team jersey says player. A shirt with a single graphic says something looser: this is the kind of thing I find funny, or this is the season I am in. The role is not a job description. It is a stance.

The fanged pumpkin stance is ironic but not hostile. The face is orange and round; the fangs are small and white. Nothing about the design is genuinely threatening. It reads as a costume of a costume, a joke about the fact that Halloween is already a night of borrowed identities. The wearer is not claiming to be a vampire. The wearer is claiming to be someone who noticed that a pumpkin with fangs is a funny thing to put on a shirt.

That is a modest claim, and I mean that as a description, not a criticism. Not every artifact needs to carry a thesis. Some artifacts are useful precisely because they are light: they give a room a shared reference point without demanding agreement about anything important.

The design’s real work: testing recognition

Here is the argument I want to make about this specific object. Its most interesting feature is not the joke. It is the test.

The shirt works only if the viewer recognizes both symbols and notices that they have been combined. A viewer who sees only a pumpkin sees a generic Halloween shirt. A viewer who sees only fangs sees a generic vampire shirt. The design rewards the viewer who sees the seam between them. That is a small act of visual literacy, and it is the kind of thing school culture work trains people to do all the time: notice when two familiar codes have been stitched together, and ask what the stitching is doing.

I am not claiming the shirt teaches anything. It does not cure, improve, or instruct. But it does model a habit that leaders in schools need: the habit of looking at a familiar object and asking which parts of it are doing the work. A plaque, a gate, a school song, a mascot costume: each is a composite of borrowed symbols, and each becomes readable only when you can see the seams.

A small experiment for a staff room

If you want to run this habit on your own campus, try a five-minute artifact reading at the next staff meeting. Bring one object from the school’s visual life: a house badge, a trophy, a sign at the gate, a shirt from a school event. Ask three questions, in this order. What are the two or three visual codes combined here? Which one is doing the host work, and which is doing the parasite work? Who is the intended viewer, and what do they need to already know to read it?

You do not need to reach a conclusion. The point is to practice seeing the seam. A pumpkin with fangs is a low-stakes place to start. A school crest is a higher-stakes one. The habit is the same.

Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.

At a graduation ceremony, the band strikes up the alma mater. The audience stands. A few people sing. Most mouth along, eyes on the program, waiting for the part where they can sit down. This is not a failure of school spirit. It is a data point about the gap between what an institution displays and what its members actually carry in their heads.

The school song is one of the most reliable artifacts in institutional life and one of the least examined. It appears on programs, in handbooks, sometimes on a plaque near the main office. It is played at assemblies, athletic events, and commencements. And yet, in many schools, the number of people who can sing it from memory is small, and the number who can sing it accurately is smaller still.

This article treats that gap as diagnostic. It offers a practical method for auditing a school song before a rebrand, merger, relocation, or ceremony redesign. It also argues that the question leaders should ask is not “do people know the words?” but “what ritual work is this song doing, and is that work still needed?”

Three layers of any institutional ritual

Every ritual has at least three versions. The official version is the one printed in the handbook, engraved on a plaque, or filed in the archives. It is fixed, authorized, and often the only version leaders consult. The performed version is what actually happens at events: which verses are sung, whether the band plays it in a different key, whether anyone stands, whether it is shortened, whether it is preceded by a fight song or a moment of silence. The folk version is what people hum in the hallway, parody at camp, or misremember decades later. It may include invented verses, altered lyrics, or a completely different melody that has attached itself to the same name.

These three layers rarely match. The official version may have four verses; the performed version uses one. The performed version may be in a key that no one can sing; the folk version has migrated to a lower register. The folk version may include a line that was never official but has become the one everyone knows.

The gap between layers is not necessarily a problem. It can indicate that a song is alive, that it has been adapted to local use, that it is doing work the official version cannot do. But the gap can also indicate disuse, replacement, or simple non-transmission across cohorts. The audit is how you tell the difference.

What rituals do

Anthropologists have long treated rituals as enactments of institutional ideals. In a study of rushing activities at the Danish Technical University, My Madsen argues that these activities can be understood as “extreme enactments” of institutional ideals, and conceptualizes them as rituals of “hyper-ideal sociality” — social scenarios where institutional ideals become grotesquely clear enactments that legitimize and teach students the social order of institutional life. Madsen’s fieldwork shows how activities such as partying, fancy dressing, games, and competitions reflect the professional ideal of the institution and serve as ways to teach and rehearse specific preferable behavior.

Madsen’s study is about rushing rituals at a Danish technical university, not about school songs, and its findings should not be transplanted directly to K-12 settings or to musical traditions. But the analytical frame is useful: rituals are not decorative. They teach. They rehearse. They legitimize. They make the social order visible and, in some cases, grotesquely clear.

The school song is a different kind of ritual. It is usually less extreme, less embodied, less socially demanding. But it may be doing similar work: teaching students what the institution values, rehearsing a collective identity, legitimizing a particular version of the school’s history. Or it may be doing none of that, and simply occupying a slot in the ceremony because no one has thought to remove it.

The audit is how you find out which.

A practical song audit

This method parallels the artifact inventories and plaque walks that culture workers already use. It is designed to be completed in a few weeks by a small team, and it produces a record that can inform decisions about rebrands, mergers, relocations, and ceremony design.

Step 1: Collect the official text

Find every version of the song in the institution’s records. This may include the handbook, the website, sheet music in the music department, a plaque in the lobby, a recording from a past ceremony, and any archival materials in the library or district office. Note the date of each version and any discrepancies between them. If there are multiple versions, do not assume the most recent is the authoritative one. The most recent may be a revision that was never adopted, or a version that was created for a specific event and then forgotten.

Step 2: Observe actual performances

Attend at least three events where the song is scheduled to be played or sung. These might include an assembly, a graduation, an athletic event, and a staff meeting. Record what actually happens: which verses are used, whether the audience sings, whether the band plays a different arrangement, whether the song is shortened or skipped. Note the time of day, the setting, and the composition of the audience. A song that is sung at graduation may be ignored at a football game, and the difference matters.

If you cannot attend in person, ask for recordings. Many schools record ceremonies for archival or broadcast purposes. These recordings are not a substitute for direct observation, but they can provide a baseline.

Step 3: Interview across cohorts

Interview a small sample of students, staff, and alumni. The goal is not a representative survey but a set of qualitative data points about what people remember, what they value, and what they have replaced the song with. Ask open-ended questions: What song do you associate with this school? When do you hear it? Can you sing any of it? What do you remember about learning it? Do you have a favorite version? Is there a version you would never sing?

Students are informants, not decoration. They may know a parody version, a chant, or a fight song that has replaced the official alma mater in practice. They may know the official version but choose not to sing it. They may not know it at all. All of these are findings.

Alumni are particularly useful for tracking transmission across decades. A song that was widely known in the 1970s may have fallen out of use in the 1990s and been revived in the 2010s. Or it may have been replaced by a different song that was never officially adopted. Alumni can also tell you what the song meant to them, which is not the same as what it was supposed to mean.

Step 4: Compare the layers

Lay the official text, the observed performances, and the interview data side by side. Look for patterns:

• Disuse: The song is scheduled but not sung. The band plays it, but the audience does not join. This may indicate that the song has lost its function, or that it was never taught.
• Replacement: A different song has taken over the ritual slot. This may be a fight song, a chant, a pop song, or a new composition. The official song may still appear on programs, but it is no longer the one people associate with the school.
• Parody: The folk version has diverged from the official version, often in ways that are critical or irreverent. Parody is not necessarily disrespectful; it can be a sign that the song is alive and being used.
• Non-transmission: Different cohorts know different versions, or no version at all. This may indicate that the song is not being taught, or that it is being taught inconsistently.

The pattern you find will suggest different responses. Disuse may call for repair or retirement. Replacement may call for acknowledging the new song and deciding whether to formalize it. Parody may call for listening to what the parody is saying. Non-transmission may call for a decision about whether the song is worth teaching again.

What the gap reveals

A song nobody knows the words to is not necessarily a failed tradition. It may be a ritual that has migrated to other forms. The official alma mater may be ignored while a fight song, a chant, or a student-composed parody does the work of collective identification. Leaders who only track the official version will miss this.

Conversely, a song that everyone knows may be doing work that leaders do not endorse. It may encode a version of the school’s history that excludes some groups, or celebrate a moment that is now contested. The audit can surface these issues before they become public controversies.

The gap between official and folk versions is also a measure of institutional memory. A song that is transmitted across cohorts is a song that is being taught, practiced, and valued. A song that is not transmitted is a song that is being displayed but not used. The distinction matters for decisions about rebrands, mergers, and relocations.

When to repair, replace, or retire

Not every song needs to be saved. Some songs are associated with a previous era, a previous campus, or a previous institutional identity. Some songs are contested. Some songs are simply not very good. The audit gives you the evidence to make a decision, but it does not make the decision for you.

Here are three common scenarios and some practical considerations for each.

Repair

If the song is still doing useful ritual work but is not being transmitted, repair may be the right response. Repair can include teaching the song in a specific class or at a specific event, updating the arrangement to a singable key, shortening it to a single verse, or providing the text in a visible format at ceremonies. Repair does not require changing the lyrics, though it may require acknowledging that the current version is not the only one.

Repair is most likely to succeed when the song is already familiar to some part of the community and when there is a clear ritual slot for it. It is least likely to succeed when the song is being introduced to a community that has no memory of it.

Replace

If the song is no longer doing useful ritual work, or if it is associated with a history the institution is trying to address, replacement may be the right response. Replacement can take several forms: adopting a new composition, formalizing a song that has already replaced the official version in practice, or creating a new ritual that does not require a song.

Replacement is most likely to succeed when the new song emerges from the community rather than being imposed from above. A song that students already sing, or that alumni already associate with the school, has a better chance of being adopted than a song commissioned from a professional composer. This is not a guarantee. It is a pattern worth considering.

Retire

If the song is contested, or if it is associated with a history that the institution has decided to repudiate, retirement may be the right response. Retirement is not the same as erasure. A retired song can be documented, archived, and made available for research. It can be discussed in a history class or included in a museum exhibit. It can be acknowledged in a ceremony without being performed.

Retirement is most likely to be accepted when it is accompanied by a clear explanation of why the song is being retired and what will replace it, if anything. A retirement that is announced without context may be experienced as a loss, even by people who did not know the words.

Introducing a new song

Introducing a new school song is not like introducing a new logo. A logo can be designed, approved, and applied. A song has to be learned, practiced, and transmitted. Leaders can create conditions for transmission, but they cannot mandate that a song become meaningful.

The conditions that support transmission include:

• Repetition: The song is sung at multiple events, not just once a year.
• Teaching: The song is taught explicitly, not just performed. This may happen in music classes, at assemblies, or in orientation sessions.
• Visibility: The text is available in a format that people can read and take home.
• Simplicity: The song is easy to sing. This usually means a limited range, a repeating chorus, and lyrics that are easy to remember.
• Ownership: The song is associated with a group that people want to belong to. This is the hardest condition to create, and it cannot be manufactured.

A new song that meets these conditions may still fail. A song that does not meet them is unlikely to succeed. The audit can help you assess whether the conditions are present, and whether the institution is willing to invest in them.

What to do with the audit

The audit produces a record. That record can be used in several ways. It can inform a decision about whether to repair, replace, or retire a song. It can be included in a rebrand or merger process, so that the song is treated as part of the institution’s cultural infrastructure rather than an afterthought. It can be repeated after a change to see whether the change had the intended effect.

The audit can also be used to identify other rituals that are doing similar work. A school may have a fight song, a chant, a cheer, a procession, a handshake, or a specific way of entering a building. These rituals may be more important than the official song, and they may be more vulnerable to change. The audit can help leaders see the full ritual landscape before making decisions that affect it.

Frequently asked questions

How many people do we need to interview?

There is no fixed number. The goal is to capture a range of perspectives across cohorts, roles, and levels of engagement. A sample of ten to twenty people, chosen to represent different groups, is usually enough to identify patterns. If the patterns are unclear, or if different groups report very different experiences, you may need to expand the sample.

What if we cannot find the official version?

If the official version is lost, the performed and folk versions become the primary evidence. This is not a failure of the audit; it is a finding. A song that has no official version may be a song that was never formally adopted, or a song whose documentation was lost. Either way, the audit can record what is known and what is not.

What if the song is in a language that some students do not speak?

This is a common situation in multilingual schools and in schools with a colonial or missionary history. The audit should record which languages are used, who understands them, and how the song is experienced by different groups. The decision about whether to translate, replace, or retain the song is a separate question, but the audit can provide the evidence for it.

Can we do this without a formal research team?

Yes. The audit is designed to be conducted by staff, students, or a combination of both. It does not require specialized training in research methods, though it does require care in recording and comparing the evidence. The most important thing is to be systematic and to document what you find.

What if the audit reveals that the song is contested?

A contested song is not necessarily a song that should be retired. It may be a song that is doing important work, or a song that is being used to exclude some groups. The audit can surface the contestation, but it cannot resolve it. The resolution will require a decision about what the institution wants the song to do, and who gets to decide.

The practical question

The school song is a small artifact. It occupies a few minutes of a ceremony, a few lines in a handbook, a few notes in a band arrangement. But it is also a site where institutional identity is displayed, performed, and remembered. The gap between what is displayed and what is known is not a trivial matter. It is a measure of how well the institution’s rituals are doing their work.

The practical question for leaders is not “do people know the words?” It is “what ritual work is this song doing, and is that work still needed?” The audit is how you answer that question with evidence rather than assumption. It is not a substitute for judgment, but it is a better basis for judgment than the official version alone.

If you are planning a rebrand, a merger, a relocation, or a ceremony redesign, conduct the audit first. It will not tell you what to do. It will tell you what you are working with.