Tuesday, June 3, 2014

My Graduation Speech

Below is the text of the commencement speech I'm going to give tonight.  A little over 8 minutes.  Thoughts are welcome!


Welcome graduates, parents, community members, and other esteemed guests.  I’d like to thank you for attending our graduation tonight; an event I hope you agree is different than most graduations, in a good way.

Most graduation speeches are filled with advice to the graduates about a wide variety of things, from taking risks to wearing sunscreen.  There are a few graduation speeches that are policy speeches like the one President Barack Obama gave to West Point last week, and this speech will be one of those.

Human culture is filled with rites of passages.  From graduation to bar mitzvahs, quinceaneras to Lion hunting, passages from childhood to adulthood are common throughout the world.  Today’s event marks an academic passage from one location of learning to another and by no means is an event marking a coming of age.  In fact, I believe that there is no such single event that marks that passage but instead it is the slow development of character over time that takes a person from an adolescent to an adult.

It is the development of character over time that I wish to take a few minutes and expound upon today.  Character education is the process of intentionally creating opportunities to talk about and reflect upon outcomes from moral or ethical situations.  The primary way that we create these opportunities is through a class we have called Crew.  Crew is a class like other schools have called advisory or homeroom, but instead of a class whose primary purpose is announcements or administrative tasks, we take the time intentionally build a school culture where people build empathy and discuss our lives to grow together.  In Crew we’ve talked about racism, our weekends, sexism, “no means no”, we’ve taken care of fake babies, reading to them and bathing them, played kickball, created baskets for PTO fund raisers, planned dances, studied inspiring lives like Nelson Mandela, done Anti-bullying lessons, learned about time management, fed starving children, and the list goes on.

The term Crew is an Expeditionary Learning term that comes from being on a ship together.  The father of Expeditionary Learning, Kurt Hahn, believed very strongly in the role that challenges could play in building culture, character, and leadership and often times his challenges took the form of sailing on the open ocean.  He is credited with the quotation “nobody is allowed to be a passenger, everyone belongs to the ship’s crew” which places on the students a burden of being involved in the development of themselves and each other.  It also places upon all of us the onus of assisting in the development of their character, not allowing any of us to be passengers in the lives of those in front of us or around us.

Think about the consequences of this for a moment.  Everyone here is a part of these graduates’ lives in some way or another, making you Crew on their ship.  Until now, they have all been Crew on the same ship.  By transitivity we have been bound together to help each other develop a positive school culture and the character of these graduates.  How you have done that, only you know.  The degree to which you have been an asset to OWL only you know and only you are going to judge. 

Another way we at OWL work to build character is by taking the time to discuss issues that arise in our classes that some feel may take away from academic learning time.  At OWL we use words like Integrity, Perseverance, Responsibility, Collaboration and Stewardship but others use words like Grit, Optimism, Compassion, Respect, and so on.  By intentionally building these into our curriculum, and even putting a grade to them, we are saying that we value these character traits and their development are just as important as academic development.  And I want to emphasize that when I say development I mean that these are things that people can, and do, get better at.  Just as students get better at mathematics in my classroom as the result of time, effort, and reflection, students can get better at stewardship by not littering, telling their friends to not litter, and by taking time to give back of their talents or treasures to the community.  People can, and do, get better all the time.

That brings us back to my original point about passage from adolescence into adulthood.  A moment ago I mentioned responsibility, and one of the primary ways that people are judged as adults is how they manage their responsibilities.  Those responsibilities are many and include things like voting, taking care of dependants, following through on commitments, et cetera.  Many of the graduates on this stage have been, by this definition, adults for a while.  Some of the graduates on this stage will not be adults for some time yet to come.  How they develop from this moment forward is in part the responsibility of those of us here to support them as members as their Crews.

My challenge to the graduates on stage is to think about what role you would OWL to serve for you moving forward.  I see three potential possibilities.  The first is that you see yourself well on your way as a balanced individual and adult and want to give back to OWL in ways that are specific to your abilities.  The second is where you still need help from us and we are here to assist you in any way that we can.  Admitting to this second by the way is not an admission of weakness, but of strength.  It is a statement that you are nearly there and just need a little bit more and we are here to help.  The third is that you are ready to leave us and never look back.  As teachers I can tell you that while sometimes sad, this is okay too.  You see, teachers don’t make widgets, we help make people.  As you leave us each of us is force to reflect on the type of people we have helped you become and hopefully that reflection enables us to help create even better people to follow.


So celebrate today, understand this event in its context, continue to grow as a person we can all be proud of so that if you were to have a bumper sticker or a shirt in the community we could see you acting like a person we are happy to have advertising for us.