Baccalaureate speech May 2013
So, what am I doing here? I suppose being teacher of the year simply means that I’ve put 15 years into this job and haven’t been threatened by a lawsuit from a parent or student yet, but what I mean is what am I, a TOK teacher with Hindu or agnostic tendencies doing in a church trying to deliver an inspirational speech to a bunch of seniors that I had a, let’s say, complicated relationship with this year AND why in the name of God would Dr. Sparger let me speak when he knows, if I won, I would have shot my mouth off and gotten fired for my Teacher of the Year acceptance speech.
Well, as is my way, instead of oversimplifying, let’s qualify and nuance what this moment may mean for you. Doing that, I can only say this month must be filled with lots of paradoxes. It is both invigorating and frightening. For some, tossing off your cap after graduation will be the happiest moment of your life as you get to begin to turn the page and leave behind high school or this blandly middle class Port Orange or the state of Florida, but for others the moment will be bittersweet as your peers in this room are and may always be the best friends you’ll ever have, and yet some of them will begin to fall out of your life as your futures take you in different directions. Your parents know these paradoxes too for science may tell us that they actually get more depressed after they have children (what with the pooping and loss of disposable income you children represent) and yet you are also their greatest creation and the source of their greatest happiness, especially on days like this. Your teachers feel paradoxical emotions this month as well for it is simultaneously true that you are (due to FCAT, AP, IB, PERT, EOC testing) quantifiably a single snowflake or data point in a snowstorm of over 4000 other data points in a 30 year career and yet you are also a unique colorful strand in the tapestry of our life who, like say the Ryan Myers types, make this whole teaching thing worthwhile because we teachers actually feel like we may have positively altered the trajectory of a single valuable life.
The point is the world is a complex place. What advice do I have for you as you head into it? Well, in 2007, I posted to our class website a few life tips like 1) don’t move back into your parents house after college; 2) never pay for bottled water since tap water doesn’t kill people; 3) pay you credit card balances and start an IRA in the next 5 years; and 4) embrace it when, in 5 years, you have, as I did, an odd impulse to call up your parents and apologize to them for being such an annoying jerk as a teenager and that everything they told you about life turned out to pretty much be right. This year, I think I would add things like: 1) don’t be a fanatic and yet (paradoxically) you need commit to SOMETHING; 2) when in chairs, don’t slouch; 3) don’t sleep on your stomach; 3b) stay out of the hospital; 3c) stay out of the courtroom; 4) don’t eat once it is dark out; 5) process matters more than end results; 6) embrace the grind, or be willing to tinker and toil in a life dedicated to sacrifice and service. The quote about that goes “we can be richer than industry as long as we know that there’s things that we don’t really need” … and that ties into how your life probably won’t be lived in irresponsible excess like the Baby Boomers or Ronald Reagan era adults, but your life may be more about reigning things in and living a life of appropriate restraint. You may not make your life decisions based on how much you get paid or social prestige but instead by asking, “is this thing going to give me the experiences I need to be wrestling with” as you keep stretching your hands out towards your green lights of self-actualization or contentment.
The fad this year in education is to tell everyone to be a “life-long learner”, but it is so true. I knew all my childhood that by most measures I was the dumbest sibling in my family (since my older sister was a high school valedictorian and my twin sister is a Harvard Law grad), but SO WHAT as I’ve happily grown from a high school Mu Alpha Theta president to an English major to a Theory of Knowledge teacher who gets every single day to play with abstract ideas and new concepts in all fields of knowledge. I’m much more satisfied with who I am at 35 than who I was at 18 and this will probably become true for you too, but…
Please don’t become willfully ignorant now that your required schooling is over and PLEASE “be present in your own life.” As a teacher, we are basically 1 year visitors boarding onto the ship of your life before we exit that ship this month and, well, as visitors we would walk around and discover the size, speed and life direction of your ship, but the main criticism I had of a certain percentage of the seniors here is that when we walked into the captain’s deck we found no one at the helm. Our job is to try to find you or wake you up or tell you to stop looking at your smartphone and, please, for the love of God, take the wheel and don’t crash your ship. So I say one last time, TAKE THE WHEEL and try to own and be happy 40 years from now with the places you steered your ship.
School didn’t have to depressing; and life shouldn’t be depressing if you know the sort of balance you want to strike between work, and your personal spheres of love, family, faith and fun and you know how to maneuver through the game of life while not getting lost in the game or owned by the game. Take me for example…
It is with real clarity that I came to realize in this year that I’m finally old. And, surprisingly, I’m pretty much fine with that. When you were born I was graduating high school; I’m now twice your age; and this year I fell out of the coveted 18-34 demographic just as you enter it. This year you all are experiencing a bunch of firsts, but all these things were firsts for me. My mother now brings bags of prunes for me when she comes to visit (and I don’t even think she is half-joking about it) and my mental thought bubbles at Publix now include, “Yes, perhaps I am the sort of person who needs to buy low acid Orange Juice” or I grudgingly accept I should be buying La Croix seltzer water instead of Coke. Old age is good at creeping up on you … and one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned as a newly minted old person is that you have an ever increasing list of things to be grateful for: I mean, I haven’t had a horrible first marriage or lost my foot to diabetes or been audited by the IRS. I mean I’m even grateful it only takes one not two Alleve for me to play tennis… poorly. My tip for you is to become grateful for a long list of things now. Be grateful you have loving parents and friends or be grateful you went to the best high school in the county or be grateful when you have dinner tonight that you won’t be going to bed hungry, because plenty of other humans on Earth are.
To transition from touching to lowbrow, I was watching Family Guy a few weeks ago and the Griffins came home to discover they’d been robbed. As they listed off all the material items they took, Peter added, “They stole my sense of wonder.” The joke is serious in that whether it is gratitude or humility or compassion or a sense of wonder, it is the unquantifiable things of life that actually matter the most. There’s a well-known graduation speech (by David Foster Wallace) about how fish have no conception of what water is because they live in it, and the point for you is it is revealing to step outside yourself and your environment and then reflect upon all the actual or unquantifiable blessings that you had here-to-for considered to be the normal ways of the world for everyone.
In most moments and most years, I’m quite grateful to be at Creek teaching students I like and who are mostly smarter than me. And I mean that. I also like that I chose a totally unprofitable major in college because I knew that as much as life is hard and the world is complex that the opposite of that is also paradoxically true. I knew I could live comfortably or with appropriate restraint on the lower edge of the American middle class…..
Now I had a friend look over the first draft of what I would say now and thought it was a lot of “jerking off”, which she meant as excessive self-congratulation, because in America it seems we don’t have frank public conversations about personal finances so let me be abstract and just say a nice goal my parents once threw out there and it took me about a decade to understand is to reach the point in life where your annual returns on your invested assets exceeds your annual life expenses. I can explain the specifics to you after this event, but once you get to that point you really don’t have to work anymore because you can live off your investments. Talking about firsts, this year may be the first time I’ve gotten close to that goal… which means I have the freedom to make this a newsworthy speech because I COULD tell Dr. Sparger that I am going to retire to either just relax or pursue new life challenges.
And yet, paradoxically, because of the life choices I CONSCIOUSLY made (my parents likely would have preferred that I got a major in Business Administration and not just a minor) I am doing pretty much exactly what I’d like to keep doing for the rest of my life whether Volusia county pays me or not – and these days it’s getting harder to tell the difference. So, if some dumb slob like me can be essentially unstressed by most of life’s challenges (I’m still working out how to fall in love), you all can certainly make it out there. And so, again, 1) take charge of your life and; 2) be comfortable with who you are and not what others wished you to be and 3) don’t forget to be grateful and thank your parents for the lessons they’ve instilled in you. My favorite tip is to “Always be arriving” and evolving and, also, never forget that, today, as every day, it’s a great day to be a Hawk.
So, what am I doing here? I suppose being teacher of the year simply means that I’ve put 15 years into this job and haven’t been threatened by a lawsuit from a parent or student yet, but what I mean is what am I, a TOK teacher with Hindu or agnostic tendencies doing in a church trying to deliver an inspirational speech to a bunch of seniors that I had a, let’s say, complicated relationship with this year AND why in the name of God would Dr. Sparger let me speak when he knows, if I won, I would have shot my mouth off and gotten fired for my Teacher of the Year acceptance speech.
Well, as is my way, instead of oversimplifying, let’s qualify and nuance what this moment may mean for you. Doing that, I can only say this month must be filled with lots of paradoxes. It is both invigorating and frightening. For some, tossing off your cap after graduation will be the happiest moment of your life as you get to begin to turn the page and leave behind high school or this blandly middle class Port Orange or the state of Florida, but for others the moment will be bittersweet as your peers in this room are and may always be the best friends you’ll ever have, and yet some of them will begin to fall out of your life as your futures take you in different directions. Your parents know these paradoxes too for science may tell us that they actually get more depressed after they have children (what with the pooping and loss of disposable income you children represent) and yet you are also their greatest creation and the source of their greatest happiness, especially on days like this. Your teachers feel paradoxical emotions this month as well for it is simultaneously true that you are (due to FCAT, AP, IB, PERT, EOC testing) quantifiably a single snowflake or data point in a snowstorm of over 4000 other data points in a 30 year career and yet you are also a unique colorful strand in the tapestry of our life who, like say the Ryan Myers types, make this whole teaching thing worthwhile because we teachers actually feel like we may have positively altered the trajectory of a single valuable life.
The point is the world is a complex place. What advice do I have for you as you head into it? Well, in 2007, I posted to our class website a few life tips like 1) don’t move back into your parents house after college; 2) never pay for bottled water since tap water doesn’t kill people; 3) pay you credit card balances and start an IRA in the next 5 years; and 4) embrace it when, in 5 years, you have, as I did, an odd impulse to call up your parents and apologize to them for being such an annoying jerk as a teenager and that everything they told you about life turned out to pretty much be right. This year, I think I would add things like: 1) don’t be a fanatic and yet (paradoxically) you need commit to SOMETHING; 2) when in chairs, don’t slouch; 3) don’t sleep on your stomach; 3b) stay out of the hospital; 3c) stay out of the courtroom; 4) don’t eat once it is dark out; 5) process matters more than end results; 6) embrace the grind, or be willing to tinker and toil in a life dedicated to sacrifice and service. The quote about that goes “we can be richer than industry as long as we know that there’s things that we don’t really need” … and that ties into how your life probably won’t be lived in irresponsible excess like the Baby Boomers or Ronald Reagan era adults, but your life may be more about reigning things in and living a life of appropriate restraint. You may not make your life decisions based on how much you get paid or social prestige but instead by asking, “is this thing going to give me the experiences I need to be wrestling with” as you keep stretching your hands out towards your green lights of self-actualization or contentment.
The fad this year in education is to tell everyone to be a “life-long learner”, but it is so true. I knew all my childhood that by most measures I was the dumbest sibling in my family (since my older sister was a high school valedictorian and my twin sister is a Harvard Law grad), but SO WHAT as I’ve happily grown from a high school Mu Alpha Theta president to an English major to a Theory of Knowledge teacher who gets every single day to play with abstract ideas and new concepts in all fields of knowledge. I’m much more satisfied with who I am at 35 than who I was at 18 and this will probably become true for you too, but…
Please don’t become willfully ignorant now that your required schooling is over and PLEASE “be present in your own life.” As a teacher, we are basically 1 year visitors boarding onto the ship of your life before we exit that ship this month and, well, as visitors we would walk around and discover the size, speed and life direction of your ship, but the main criticism I had of a certain percentage of the seniors here is that when we walked into the captain’s deck we found no one at the helm. Our job is to try to find you or wake you up or tell you to stop looking at your smartphone and, please, for the love of God, take the wheel and don’t crash your ship. So I say one last time, TAKE THE WHEEL and try to own and be happy 40 years from now with the places you steered your ship.
School didn’t have to depressing; and life shouldn’t be depressing if you know the sort of balance you want to strike between work, and your personal spheres of love, family, faith and fun and you know how to maneuver through the game of life while not getting lost in the game or owned by the game. Take me for example…
It is with real clarity that I came to realize in this year that I’m finally old. And, surprisingly, I’m pretty much fine with that. When you were born I was graduating high school; I’m now twice your age; and this year I fell out of the coveted 18-34 demographic just as you enter it. This year you all are experiencing a bunch of firsts, but all these things were firsts for me. My mother now brings bags of prunes for me when she comes to visit (and I don’t even think she is half-joking about it) and my mental thought bubbles at Publix now include, “Yes, perhaps I am the sort of person who needs to buy low acid Orange Juice” or I grudgingly accept I should be buying La Croix seltzer water instead of Coke. Old age is good at creeping up on you … and one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned as a newly minted old person is that you have an ever increasing list of things to be grateful for: I mean, I haven’t had a horrible first marriage or lost my foot to diabetes or been audited by the IRS. I mean I’m even grateful it only takes one not two Alleve for me to play tennis… poorly. My tip for you is to become grateful for a long list of things now. Be grateful you have loving parents and friends or be grateful you went to the best high school in the county or be grateful when you have dinner tonight that you won’t be going to bed hungry, because plenty of other humans on Earth are.
To transition from touching to lowbrow, I was watching Family Guy a few weeks ago and the Griffins came home to discover they’d been robbed. As they listed off all the material items they took, Peter added, “They stole my sense of wonder.” The joke is serious in that whether it is gratitude or humility or compassion or a sense of wonder, it is the unquantifiable things of life that actually matter the most. There’s a well-known graduation speech (by David Foster Wallace) about how fish have no conception of what water is because they live in it, and the point for you is it is revealing to step outside yourself and your environment and then reflect upon all the actual or unquantifiable blessings that you had here-to-for considered to be the normal ways of the world for everyone.
In most moments and most years, I’m quite grateful to be at Creek teaching students I like and who are mostly smarter than me. And I mean that. I also like that I chose a totally unprofitable major in college because I knew that as much as life is hard and the world is complex that the opposite of that is also paradoxically true. I knew I could live comfortably or with appropriate restraint on the lower edge of the American middle class…..
Now I had a friend look over the first draft of what I would say now and thought it was a lot of “jerking off”, which she meant as excessive self-congratulation, because in America it seems we don’t have frank public conversations about personal finances so let me be abstract and just say a nice goal my parents once threw out there and it took me about a decade to understand is to reach the point in life where your annual returns on your invested assets exceeds your annual life expenses. I can explain the specifics to you after this event, but once you get to that point you really don’t have to work anymore because you can live off your investments. Talking about firsts, this year may be the first time I’ve gotten close to that goal… which means I have the freedom to make this a newsworthy speech because I COULD tell Dr. Sparger that I am going to retire to either just relax or pursue new life challenges.
And yet, paradoxically, because of the life choices I CONSCIOUSLY made (my parents likely would have preferred that I got a major in Business Administration and not just a minor) I am doing pretty much exactly what I’d like to keep doing for the rest of my life whether Volusia county pays me or not – and these days it’s getting harder to tell the difference. So, if some dumb slob like me can be essentially unstressed by most of life’s challenges (I’m still working out how to fall in love), you all can certainly make it out there. And so, again, 1) take charge of your life and; 2) be comfortable with who you are and not what others wished you to be and 3) don’t forget to be grateful and thank your parents for the lessons they’ve instilled in you. My favorite tip is to “Always be arriving” and evolving and, also, never forget that, today, as every day, it’s a great day to be a Hawk.