commencement
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Regalia
You are viewing stuff tagged with commencement.
Four of us were busily chatting in the kitchen the other day, and Ess came in to tell us all something. We were very engaged talking to one another, and Ess could tell and she started to get this little hitch-stutter-filler in her speech, uncertainly stretching out words, aware that nobody was listening, wondering whether to continue. Essie’s experience lasted a brief moment, but the profound pain I felt in response, my daughter here, talking, no one listening, startled me. Here’s the flip side of that:
Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes gave a commencement speech at Kenyon College in 1990. The number of topics Watterson addresses is striking. A few that caught my attention:
Adrian Tan delivered an amazing combination of wisdom and wit to a graduating class in Singapore:
Do not waste the vast majority of your life doing something you hate so that you can spend the small remainder sliver of your life in modest comfort. You may never reach that end anyway.
Resist the temptation to get a job. Instead, play. Find something you enjoy doing. Do it. Over and over again. You will become good at it for two reasons: you like it, and you do it often. Soon, that will have value in itself.
I’ve saved a bunch of articles from the beginning of the summer, and now I am making my way through them. The first: Advice for High School Graduates from The Conversation Blog at the New York Times. The blog is like sitting around a dinner table with two knowledgeable, witty, opinionated folks: David Brooks and Gail Collins, both columnists at the Times. In this piece, Brooks requests help from Collins, as he will soon make a commencement speech at a high school. He laments some sizable gaps in the education options available:
David Foster Wallace - Commencement Speech at Kenyon College
So let’s talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about quote teaching you how to think. If you’re like me as a student, you’ve never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I’m going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.
I’m not sure I agree with all the points in Charlton Heston’s speech to Harvard Law School’s class of ‘99 entitled “Winning the Cultural War,” but I do think he makes some good observations:
Conan O’Brien’s commencement address at Harvard makes a pretty quick read and an excellent examination of fantastic comedy writing. In addition to functioning on the levels of entertainment and humor, the speech goes a step further: it actually inspires. This line between laughter and inspiration is particularly difficult to walk in public speaking, but Conan did so quite successfully here. I’d highly recommend reading the entire speech, but here’s my favorite part, in which Conan speaks about starting up [Late Night with Conan O’Brien] in 1993.
Whoa. As I write, graduation with a B.S. in biochemistry and life-changing changes all crash down at once. I should brainstorm for some sort of longer form writing about these events. I could call my writing a “post” … and then, as they accumulate, arrange these “posts” in reverse chronological order on a sort of faux-forum online. I’ll call that a world wide web log of my life. Perhaps I could shorten that to “web log.” Or even “blog.”
Jon Stewart’s Commecement Address - He was funny then, he’s funny now.
Permission to recount yesterday in its entirety? Permission denied? Hmm. Sorry, I guess I will have to risk court marshal on this one.
My sister’s commencement exercises, my birthday, and the Dashboard Confessional concert all happened to fall on the same day. In the morning, I dragged my sorry carcass out of bed and ran off to the gym to squeeze in a quick workout. Running down the stairs back to the car, I noticed I had shaved five (5!) minutes off of my usual hour and forty-five regimen. I sarcastically congratulated myself with an “Oh yay me” as I put some rubber down on the road.
Valedictory Address
Alex Micek
June 8th, 2003
Friends, relatives, distinguished guests, and the class of 2003:
We are gathered here today to honor the passing on of a time in our lives called “high school.” This ceremony marks its final passing from our lives. Now, we all have had vastly different experiences in high school, but one thing we have all been exposed to is CliffsNotes. Yeeup, CliffsNotes, those handy reader guides that summarize the characters, plot, symbolism, and important details of a book or play. I would like to take this opportunity to introduce you to a guide that you haven’t heard of: the CliffsNotes guide to high school. Please remember, that all CliffsNotes take time to say “Opinions expressed in these Notes aren’t rigid dogma meant to discourage intellectual exploration” and the same is true here; take what you want. This is a summary of high school on its own terms.