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xaaraI received a phone call last night from my counselor--apparently, the Washington Post wants a picture and a copy of my speech. The Post. The DC newspaper.
Could this get any worse?
Now I'm obsessing over every word of my speech, inserting and deleting commas, looking for better verbs and nouns--in general, dying. But whatever. Graduation's tomorrow, I'm sending the class off then, and after that it's over. Thank God.
Parents, teachers, administrators, guests, and graduating class of 2005.
As a school, we are an island. We float amid a sea of GW students, exchange our space for theirs, barter for classrooms and auditoriums. We take the Metro or drive to school, to borrowed sports fields, to labs and museums. Walls does not have a neighborhood; we cannot play pickup games on a nearby field or host an afterschool block party. As a result, we have formed here in downtown Washington a community based on self-sufficiency.
Over the past seventeen years, I have learned the following about myself: when I’m happy, I whistle; when I’m alone, I sing; when I’m bored, I chew on pens; and when I’m in an strange or uncomfortable place, I find the nearest public restroom and hide.
On my first day at School Without Walls, I did not see the interior of the bathroom. Despite my lowly status as a new junior, I never had an opportunity to become nervous and retreat—no one gave me time to decide that perhaps I would rather take shelter and wait for the storm to pass. People I met within minutes of arriving introduced themselves, warned me to avoid falling structural elements, directed me to class, and invited me to lunch. People I met within minutes of arriving had already afforded me a support network that I would value for the next two years.
We have united as might the survivors of a shipwreck. The ancient buildings that house DC Public Schools crumble on the evening news. Students flee the system. Superintendents have a repetitive tendency to come and go. Somehow, we have managed not only to survive but to glean from these circumstances an education that defies content standards and curricula.
In a conversation I had a few weeks ago, one of my teachers said that no matter how small the colleges we attend, their size will dwarf Walls. Their freshman classes will probably dwarf Walls. Despite the fact that many of us have grown up in cities, the number of students at any other school must by its very mass intimidate us. We will be lost. We will be lonely. I will write home about the restroom décor.
But then our ability to fend for ourselves will sustain a return to our oldest tradition: taking what we have and making the best of it.
I think often that we do not value what we take from this school and from the schools that preceded it. We, to a young man or woman, know how to read. We write with clarity and focus. We understand and apply higher mathematics. We found amid the chaos of mass education an avenue to learning unavailable to many of our fellow students.
The public elementary and middle schools here in Washington should form the core of vibrant communities; their philosophies could concentrate upon ideas about learning as an exploration. We live in one of the most diverse cities in the world—our schools should offer every student an intensive holistic education.
However, a disconcerting number of the students just a few years younger than us are barely literate. Word problems frustrate them. By the time they enter ninth grade, their teachers will not have exposed them to the standard body of literature; they will begin a slide that may lead them to consider dropping out.
Adults tell an eighth-grade boy I know that he can be whatever he wants to be despite their failure to provide him a rudimentary education. You can be a doctor, they tell him, you can be a rap artist or a politician. They bring him to career fairs and set him loose with a dozen of his eighth-grade classmates. The world dazzles him, and his dreams overflow with the glitter of fame and fortune, fast women and faster cars.
When he tries to describe this future to me, he stumbles. He lacks the vocabulary to convey the image of his ideal house or his ideal partner; he falls back upon the sullen reticence that has served him so well in the past. "Big," he tells me. "My house will be big." Yes, his house will be big, his car fast, his life fun. Bland adjectives, bland to match his vague ideas. And so he abandons those ideas in frustration at his inability to express them.
When I ask soon-to-be graduates of Walls about their ideas for the future, many of them answer with an honest I don't know. Some have a good concept of what lies ahead for them, and can describe in detail not only the end goal but the path there. More impressive still is the ability of the undecided among us to envision a plethora of possibilities. One minute, we plan for a degree in biology and pre-med; the next, we've decided that political science fascinates us. We try sports because they exist, join clubs because they offer pizza and debate, register for GW classes based on sentence-long summaries that sound intriguing.
Within the haven that is Walls, we have been given the gift of imagination.
As students who graduate from this school, we have a responsibility to pass our education, that capacity for dreaming, on to those who come after us.
This is not to say that we should all become teachers. We can show our dedication to encouraging a generation of intelligent, well-educated, visionary students in myriad ways. If you speak another language, tutor it in college. Organize a calculus fair or a weekly open mic. Ask the questions everyone else shies from. Find your niche and build from there.
Above all, always demand the why.
I can offer little in the way of advice. What I've learned in under two decades consists largely of "Look both ways before you cross the street," and "Value your friends—you never know when one of them might be able to explain the homework." I suspect that the parents and teachers watching us right now posess a much greater wisdom—after all, they've supported us this far. We can only hope to continue to justify their faith in us. And so in closing I turn to a poem by James Wright, entitled "A Blessing."
Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more, they begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.
Thank you.
Could this get any worse?
Now I'm obsessing over every word of my speech, inserting and deleting commas, looking for better verbs and nouns--in general, dying. But whatever. Graduation's tomorrow, I'm sending the class off then, and after that it's over. Thank God.
Parents, teachers, administrators, guests, and graduating class of 2005.
As a school, we are an island. We float amid a sea of GW students, exchange our space for theirs, barter for classrooms and auditoriums. We take the Metro or drive to school, to borrowed sports fields, to labs and museums. Walls does not have a neighborhood; we cannot play pickup games on a nearby field or host an afterschool block party. As a result, we have formed here in downtown Washington a community based on self-sufficiency.
Over the past seventeen years, I have learned the following about myself: when I’m happy, I whistle; when I’m alone, I sing; when I’m bored, I chew on pens; and when I’m in an strange or uncomfortable place, I find the nearest public restroom and hide.
On my first day at School Without Walls, I did not see the interior of the bathroom. Despite my lowly status as a new junior, I never had an opportunity to become nervous and retreat—no one gave me time to decide that perhaps I would rather take shelter and wait for the storm to pass. People I met within minutes of arriving introduced themselves, warned me to avoid falling structural elements, directed me to class, and invited me to lunch. People I met within minutes of arriving had already afforded me a support network that I would value for the next two years.
We have united as might the survivors of a shipwreck. The ancient buildings that house DC Public Schools crumble on the evening news. Students flee the system. Superintendents have a repetitive tendency to come and go. Somehow, we have managed not only to survive but to glean from these circumstances an education that defies content standards and curricula.
In a conversation I had a few weeks ago, one of my teachers said that no matter how small the colleges we attend, their size will dwarf Walls. Their freshman classes will probably dwarf Walls. Despite the fact that many of us have grown up in cities, the number of students at any other school must by its very mass intimidate us. We will be lost. We will be lonely. I will write home about the restroom décor.
But then our ability to fend for ourselves will sustain a return to our oldest tradition: taking what we have and making the best of it.
I think often that we do not value what we take from this school and from the schools that preceded it. We, to a young man or woman, know how to read. We write with clarity and focus. We understand and apply higher mathematics. We found amid the chaos of mass education an avenue to learning unavailable to many of our fellow students.
The public elementary and middle schools here in Washington should form the core of vibrant communities; their philosophies could concentrate upon ideas about learning as an exploration. We live in one of the most diverse cities in the world—our schools should offer every student an intensive holistic education.
However, a disconcerting number of the students just a few years younger than us are barely literate. Word problems frustrate them. By the time they enter ninth grade, their teachers will not have exposed them to the standard body of literature; they will begin a slide that may lead them to consider dropping out.
Adults tell an eighth-grade boy I know that he can be whatever he wants to be despite their failure to provide him a rudimentary education. You can be a doctor, they tell him, you can be a rap artist or a politician. They bring him to career fairs and set him loose with a dozen of his eighth-grade classmates. The world dazzles him, and his dreams overflow with the glitter of fame and fortune, fast women and faster cars.
When he tries to describe this future to me, he stumbles. He lacks the vocabulary to convey the image of his ideal house or his ideal partner; he falls back upon the sullen reticence that has served him so well in the past. "Big," he tells me. "My house will be big." Yes, his house will be big, his car fast, his life fun. Bland adjectives, bland to match his vague ideas. And so he abandons those ideas in frustration at his inability to express them.
When I ask soon-to-be graduates of Walls about their ideas for the future, many of them answer with an honest I don't know. Some have a good concept of what lies ahead for them, and can describe in detail not only the end goal but the path there. More impressive still is the ability of the undecided among us to envision a plethora of possibilities. One minute, we plan for a degree in biology and pre-med; the next, we've decided that political science fascinates us. We try sports because they exist, join clubs because they offer pizza and debate, register for GW classes based on sentence-long summaries that sound intriguing.
Within the haven that is Walls, we have been given the gift of imagination.
As students who graduate from this school, we have a responsibility to pass our education, that capacity for dreaming, on to those who come after us.
This is not to say that we should all become teachers. We can show our dedication to encouraging a generation of intelligent, well-educated, visionary students in myriad ways. If you speak another language, tutor it in college. Organize a calculus fair or a weekly open mic. Ask the questions everyone else shies from. Find your niche and build from there.
Above all, always demand the why.
I can offer little in the way of advice. What I've learned in under two decades consists largely of "Look both ways before you cross the street," and "Value your friends—you never know when one of them might be able to explain the homework." I suspect that the parents and teachers watching us right now posess a much greater wisdom—after all, they've supported us this far. We can only hope to continue to justify their faith in us. And so in closing I turn to a poem by James Wright, entitled "A Blessing."
Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more, they begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.
Thank you.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-09 06:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-09 07:53 am (UTC)O_______________O
Envyenvyenvyenvyenvy.
That said, the speech is simply lovely. You'll be fine. Though nervousness is totally excusable. ♥
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-09 10:32 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-09 02:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-11 08:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-11 08:37 am (UTC)Thank you. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-11 08:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-11 08:40 am (UTC)