Graduation Speeches

 

                Graduation speeches…although I have never really wanted to stand before thousands of people and address the graduating class, I have pondered what I might tell them, given the chance.  This might have been the hardest year of all. Even the principal, known for nailing his speech every year, struggled. How do we bring a note of hope in this difficult time?

                When I first started teaching, I thought a great deal about the choices we make in adolescence that ripple through our lives.  Maybe it was because I had just come off years of working with ELL students and people working on their GEDs. One night, one of my best GED students mused on the years he lost to drugs, sleeping outside, and what a wonder it was that he still had his brain when he returned to the working world. We both knew what could have happened.  I had friends who had children early and were moving into a freer time as those children grew up and graduated. So, I thought, choosing wisely was important.  This is not wrong, but outside forces loom larger to me now. We can choose “correctly” and still struggle because of actions beyond our control.

                And so, I thought about shifting to the idea of recycling. Recycling alone will not save the planet; we know that there are warehouses full of “recycling” waiting for a market and, for many years, we shipped trash to China. But, I do believe that the practice of recycling can shift our thinking in profound ways. When you have to stop and consider where every item you throw away goes, it slows you down. Can I get a couple more months out of those shoes? Probably (then suddenly, no, they are leaking…) What do I do with this?  Can I repurpose it? Repair it? Where did all of these binders come from?!   Do I really NEED that item, or do I just want it? When we get to the needs vs. wants question, we have hit the crux of a life well lived. What do we need to be well? What do we think we want to be well? Are they the same? How do we get to a place where everyone has what they need before we work on what we all want?  

                I have always believed that we should do work that we love. Work that feels meaningful and, in a quiet way, world changing. That can be just about anything, really. There is as much worth in being a deli clerk, handing over the 2/3 of a pound of thin sliced roast beast to a person with a smile as solving for world hunger. It’s just smaller. I have always been blessed with work I love—or, if I needed to do something less positive to me, the knowledge that I am working towards a change in occupation. I want to encourage everyone to love their work, but I wonder if that is possible. It’s hard to put a positive spin on  work life these days.

                I have been teaching people to read for thirty five years. It took me some years to come to this occupation but I knew, in second grade, that this is what I wanted to do. Because, as Tim O’Brien and The Things They Carried, his best novel about war, and friendship, courage, and the nature of story says,  In the end, stories can save us. They allow us to keep the dead—and missing-- alive through our memories: hear each other’s pain and joy through a true telling of past actions (Norman Bowker commits suicide, remember, because no one listens to his stories): help us make sense of our world. Your life, in a story, is both unique and universal. Maybe I need to circle back to the seven year old in the basement, beside her chalk easel, teaching her dolls to read on a winter afternoon, and, as all teachers do point you to the information  and allow you encounter  it yourself. Because that is how we learn. Four words, people. Shortest graduation speech on record.

“Stories can save us.”