Commencement

Life Lessons from Graduation Speeches

It’s graduation season, one of my favorite times of year. I love seeing the proud parents snapping photos of the new graduates (who play it cool but secretly revel in the hoopla). Graduations remind us of poignant goodbyes and new beginnings. They entertain us with bagpipe music and sips of champagne. And for graduates and observers alike, graduations offer the chance to imbibe life lessons from the speeches.

Photo by Jakob Rosen on Unsplash.

I have attended more than my share of graduations, because when I was in grad school I sang alto in our university’s official chorus, which performed hymns and the university’s hokey Alma Mater at eight graduation ceremonies a year.¹ In between songs, I had the opportunity to listen to the speeches. Some of the best advice I have ever heard, advice that I think about and try to live by every day, came from the graduation speech of a beloved English professor, Wayne Booth: “Whenever you are contemplating an action, ask yourself whether it will add to the good or to the evil in the world.”

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Being a graduation speaker apparently runs in our family, because my kids and I all had the honor of being chosen by teachers and students to give graduation speeches.² Noah and Casey have kindly given me permission to publish most of their speeches here, and I’m also including a couple of paragraphs from my own speech, which I rediscovered a few months ago in a pile of old papers.

We Learn to Become Adults

As I looked over my speech, I was struck by how consistent my thinking has been, going all the way back to age seventeen. Even back then, I talked about how to be happy and true to oneself. In fact, clued-in readers may notice the influence of Messers Lee, Lifeson, and Peart on my philosophy. Yes, I listened to a lot of Rush in high school.³ But I digress. Anyway, here’s a little bit of my speech:

When I was a kid, I didn’t know what “commencement” meant, but since graduation represents the end of school, I naturally assumed that “commencement” was a synonym for “end.” This made sentences like “The meeting will commence at 8am” rather confusing. From context clues, “commencement” had to mean “beginning,” but why would it be a beginning to finally be done with school? But in fact graduation is a beginning—the beginning of adulthood.

We’ve all been looking forward to adulthood and being able to eat, drink, and be merry without worrying about getting caught. Adulthood is being able to stay out all night or being able to walk into a drugstore without the clerks’ assuming we’re planning to shoplift. Right? Well, yes, but true adulthood also means being happy. Your first reaction to that statement might be “Great! I like being happy!” but true happiness can be the hardest work we do. True happiness is the result of an accomplishment, whether mental, physical, artistic, psychological, or social. Let me clarify something here: A person’s achievements don’t have to be material or public to bring happiness. A shy person who is finally able to socialize with skill has accomplished just as much for him- or herself as has a star athlete or a straight-A student.

Adults are also individuals. We might wonder why we should be an individual when being part of a group is so easy and suits us just fine. Why set ourselves up for arguments, harassment, and even ridicule because we are different? But the greatest crime we commit against ourselves is to deny our beliefs and values to keep our lives running smoothly. We have all lied about our opinions and ideas to be accepted and then experienced the repercussions—feeling shame, telling more lies, and being forced to go against personal beliefs again and again. Standing up for what you believe, even if it means going against the group, is hard at the time of dissent but brings many personal rewards. Nearly all of history’s leaders and heroes have been individuals who chose their beliefs over popular acceptance. One person can be more right than a hundred.

We Learn from Each Other

Casey graduated in 2021 and starts off by talking about the pandemic:

As if the IB⁴ wasn’t hard enough on its own, there was a pandemic too. I have to admit, distance learning was not as fun as I expected. Our parents weren’t kidding when they said staring at a screen for hours and hours was bad for our health. And the threat of school closing down again or one of our classmates or teachers getting sick was pretty stressful. But hey, at least our exams got cut a bit! Ten out of ten, would trade my HL Literature Paper Two for the outbreak of a dangerous disease again. Seriously, though, it was a rough couple of years, which makes it even more impressive that we’re here today, ready to graduate. And now, when eating in a restaurant is legal again and we all have hot dates, we can tell them how we got 7s in IB geography!

. . . Yeah, doesn’t sound quite as impressive when you put it like that. The truth is, most of us are probably never going to be asked to calculate sine of pi over three in the real world—and if we are, we’ll have a calculator (and a dictionary, and a camera, and a music player) in our back pocket. Now at this point you may be wondering why we even go to school in the first place if we’ll never use a lot of the information we learn after graduation, and believe me, I pondered that question every day from the first day of eleventh grade until the end of my last exam. But I think I found the answer: The most important things we learn in school aren’t the facts we memorize or the books we read, but nearly everything else.

Take research, for example. Anyone can open a book or do a quick Google search and find an answer to their question, but not every book (and certainly not every website) has enough information to give you the full picture. Some sources will even intentionally try to mislead you and sway you to the author’s side by presenting information in a biased manner. But luckily, our teachers didn’t just give us a textbook and tell us to read it. They taught us to find our own sources and look for the intentions of the author, the context they wrote in, and if the work matches what we know from other sources and what we learned in class. This means that when we graduate, we don’t have to remember everything we learned perfectly. We have the skills to find information again.

Another thing that I think a lot of us learned the hard way in school is managing our expectations. Look, the IB is hard. We have to take at least six classes, plus TOK and CAS, just to pass. And some of you crazy people also do sports and other extracurriculars! Including me! Naturally, with such a busy schedule, some things are gonna fall by the wayside. Sometimes you have to turn in your maths homework late so you can finish your IA on time. Sometimes you have to quit your favorite club because it’s taking up the time you need to study. And that’s really disappointing. Scary, even, if you’re one of the “smart kids” or a “sporty kid” and feel like you’re letting everyone down by skipping that debate meeting or faking sick on Ski Friday to get some work done. But eventually, you start to realize that while you should always try your best, it really doesn’t matter if you’re late on your reading, or if your notes are ugly, or if you forgot to study before that test.

There’s one last thing we learned in high school, a lesson that’s even harder to learn in international schools, and one that we missed out on a little because of Covid. In high school, we spend all day with a bunch of our peers, constrained only by a few teachers and staff, and we have to learn how to handle our own relationships. We have to learn how to make new friends when we move schools, and say goodbye to our old friends. We have to learn which fights are worth forgetting, and when it’s time to end a friendship. We have to learn how to ask our crushes out, and how to hold onto a relationship. And I think having to switch to distance learning and not being able to see each other in person made it really clear how important school is for socializing. Our teachers may teach us the syllabus, but it’s our classmates who teach us how to function in the real world.

Photo credit: International School of Berne.

We Learn from History

Noah told three stories from history:

I’d like to thank everyone who voted for me to give a speech today. I can’t tell you how much it means to me that you thought I should be one of the four to represent our grade. I do mean, incidentally, today specifically; if I had given a speech yesterday I would have had to do it during the banquet, taking away time when I could have been eating.

I decided that for this speech, I should probably just stick to what I know. And I think we all realize that what I know best is . . . math. Yeah, just kidding. So, history. What’s the use of bringing it up in a graduation speech? Well, we can, as you were probably told in second grade, learn from history. So let’s talk about stories from history that can help us in our practical lives.

The first story is of the Roman Empire during the Crisis of the Third Century. Basically, in the third century AD the Roman empire was a mess. It had lost all of its provinces in the Middle East, and Britain, France, and Spain had broken off and formed their own separate empire. Meanwhile, a barbarian tribe called the Goths was raiding Roman territory in the Balkans. Now, the emperor at this time was a man named Gallienus. Everyone who was anyone in Rome was pushing for the emperor to march to reclaim the lost provinces at all costs. But Gallienus refused; instead, he decided to do nothing for a few decades. Ultimately, his successor Aurelian would be the one to reclaim Rome’s lost territory.

Most people who know about Gallienus, including some historians, think of him as a terrible emperor, a coward. I disagree. It wasn’t just Rome’s territories that were a mess when Gallienus came to power; Rome’s army was devastated from the wars, and the economy was collapsing. By giving Rome a period of rest for its army and economy to recover, as well as actually reforming the Roman army so it could fight better, Gallienus was just as instrumental to the rebirth of the Roman Empire as those emperors who came after him. The lesson here is this: What is right isn’t always popular. Many times in life we’ll be in situations where we need to do what’s unpopular but needed. In these times you need to stick to your guns. People might mock you for studying instead of going out to vape, but hindsight will prove you right. Then again, Gallienus’s reign did end with him being assassinated by angry Senators, so maybe keep the sticking to your guns within reason.

The second story comes from the Napoleonic Wars. In 1805, Napoleon was about to capture Vienna and defeat Austria. To do that, though, he had to cross a river, and the Austrians planned to destroy the bridge that would allow them to do that. So the French generals Lannes and Murat rode up to the bridge and insisted that a truce had been signed; this was a lie, but the Austrian general fell for it. The French then began to advance their army across the bridge. An Austrian commander actually wanted to stop them, but the Austrian general rebuked him for trying to break the truce. Of course, when the French crossed the river they revealed the ruse and took the Austrians prisoner. What this shows is that, when in doubt, like when you have a paper due the next day on something you know nothing about . . . it never hurts to bluff.

The final story comes from WW2. Now, as my friends know, I love dogs, so you had to figure a dog was going to be in here at some point. This specific dog is a Newfoundland named Gander. After he accidentally scratched a child, he was given as a mascot to a regiment in the Canadian army just before WW2 began. The regiment was stationed in the city of Hong Kong, just as the Imperial Japanese Army was attacking. At one point, the unit was pinned down by Japanese gunfire, and the enemy threw a grenade at the Canadian troops. Gander picked up this grenade and ran into the midst of the Japanese army. Although he died in the explosion, he saved his unit from the Japanese. The moral of this story is really simple: Dogs make everything better.

Photo credit: International School of Prague.

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How about you, readers? Do you love graduations too? What life lessons have you learned from graduation speeches? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

The Tidbit

Ten years ago, one of my heroes, the fiction writer George Saunders, gave a graduation speech that was full of humor, love, and this important bit of wisdom:

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness—those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded sensibly, reservedly, mildly. . . .

Since your life is a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving, hurry up! Speed it along! Start right now. To the extent that you can, err in the direction of kindness.

The speech is only ten minutes long; please take the time to listen. You’ll be glad you did!

1. I can still sing the alto line of all three verses of the Alma Mater from memory. It really is a ridiculous song. The opening lines, for example, were apparently written by the Department of Redundancy Department: “Today, we gladly sing the praise of her, whose daughters and whose sons now loyal voices proudly raise to bless her with their benisons.” Or, in plain English, “Today we praise our university, whose alumni praise it, to bless it with blessings.”

2. Had my husband wanted to, I have no doubt that he could have given the funniest graduation speech ever, but he didn’t want to. He dislikes graduations and only went to his own under duress.

3. And still do. So there.

4. IB stands for International Baccalaureate; the IB organization loves abbreviations, so this note is a brief explainer of the program and of the terms Casey mentions.

In their junior and senior years of high school, IB students take six courses, three of which are higher-level (HL) and three of which are standard-level (SL), in the following categories: English, foreign language, math, science, social sciences, and the arts. The courses are graded on a scale of 1 to 7, with a 7 being reserved for the top 1 or 2 percent of students worldwide. (So, pace Casey, a 7 in geography is quite impressive!) Each course requires, in addition to regular assignments, an independent research paper of around ten pages, called an IA. Students also write a longer (at least twenty pages) research paper on a topic of their choice; take a philosophy course (TOK); amass and document their CAS hours—creativity, activity, and service—and complete an additional CAS project. The program culminates in exams (referred to as Papers One, Two, and Three) for each subject. The exams usually take four to six hours per subject, but in 2020 and 2021 they were cut back because of the pandemic, so the exams for Casey’s graduating class took “only” two to four hours per subject.

Casey is correct that the IB is an enormous amount of work, but its emphasis on independence, curiosity, and responsibility prepares students not only for college but also for adulthood. As Casey would say, ten out of ten, would recommend!