Messages from the Class of 2015, presented at two graduation ceremonies in the Chicago area, focus on ending a chapter filled with uncertainty and getting ready for the next one while still remembering to live and appreciate what life has to offer.
We zoom in on the exercises of commencement at two high schools in the Chicago area: Walter Payton College Preparatory High School in the city and Harvard High School in the nearly rural far-northwestern suburbs. Both schools graduated the Class of 2015 earlier this evening.
The graduation ceremony at Walter Payton College Preparatory High School was a mixed offering of multimedia and traditional speeches. One speaker, quoting Henry David Thoreau, had this to say:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. —Henry David Thoreau
Another set of words graduates heard came from the song “Home” by Phillip Phillips, shown at the end of a short video prepared by the senior class, to wit: “Hold onto me as we go, as we roll down this unfamiliar road …”
In a nutshell, that’s high school these days: an unfamiliar road full of new experiences, some of them good, some bad. But one thing acknowledged by many speakers Monday evening was the fact that the graduation ceremony would be the last time ever that all the friends sharing in the experience would ever be in the same room.
The salutatorian at Harvard High School began her speech by recalling a few memories from kindergarten, laughing at fellow kindergartners who used nap time for taking an actual nap. “And in high school, we learned that we really miss nap time,” she continued. “And that we weren’t as cool as we thought we were in junior high. We learned that five-paragraph essays in MLA format get really old (sorry). …
“Looking back, the time really flew,” she said. “This is the last time we’ll all be in a room together. This is the end of a chapter. … No more Hornet Pride Days, or proms, or homecomings. Those things are over. And while we can wallow in the fact that we can’t go back to those moments in time, we can celebrate that they’ll forever live in our memories, that they provide all of us with a common ground.
“High school isn’t meant to last forever, but its memories are. … Though Harvard may not be the fanciest town or the most entertaining, I’m proud to say this is where I graduated from. It isn’t about the classes or the intensity of the coursework; it’s about those moments in class when Chris would make a sarcastic comment to Ms Weaver, or when Marlee brought chili for breakfast to Ms Shingle’s class. …
“There will always be obstacles that we face in life. At the beginning of this year, I had my son, Colton, who is and will always be my greatest blessing. However, that doesn’t mean it didn’t make my goals harder to achieve. I had to push myself even more to study and do homework, along with all the other things that were added to my plate. …
“Being able to stand here today and address all of you gives me the honor and the pleasure of saying I achieved more than I thought I ever could. … One day, you’ll blink, and you’ll be 40 years old, wondering where the time went. … Before I close this speech, I would like to thank my mom. I owe her a bigger thanks than I could ever dream of giving. She’s been my rock, my biggest supporter, and my friend. She shaped me into the young lady I am today, and I can only hope I’ll be half as good of a mom as she is.”
The last student speech of the evening, given by the valedictorian from the Class of 2015, carried on the theme with great humility and humor. “Hi guys,” she opened, and then she cracked a laugh. But after she, quite successfully, led with a joke, it got solemn to fit the occasion—NOT.
“What I am going to do is tell you I’m really honored—and it’s not because I get to stand up in front of all of you and speak, because this is legitimately terrifying—I’m just honored that I got to meet you all. Like, 95 percent of you, anyway,” she said.
“I didn’t know all of you, and we all didn’t know each other either. But it’s not like we were all isolated from each other. And we weren’t cut off. I think it was more like being trees in a park: We didn’t choose to be planted here, and we weren’t always close to each other. But we grew together. We were the only ones who understood the fear that we might get cut down and what it was like to be so far from the rest of the forest. …
“I know there are some things here none of us are going to miss, and they don’t need to be said, because we get it. But, there it is, we all get it. The students here are the only ones that get this place. It seriously is like having an inside joke with 600 other people. And that’s not something to be taken for granted.
“The familiarity might not stay, because life is going to gently tug us apart to better things. But I’m sure the wonderful people that will fill your lives years from now still won’t have the same understanding we all have with each other. This is always going to be where we came from.”
Congratulations to the graduates of the Class of 2015! And good luck to you all! We extend our sincere thanks to the staff at Walter Payton Prep High School and at Harvard High School for allowing us to be a witness and documentarian of these exercises. Note that it is strictly against our policies to publish student names unless they have already been published in the story’s context in another source.
As to the graduations themselves, school reformers too often can’t see the forest for the trees, to extend Harvard’s valedictory a little. But it’s worse, because they can’t even see the trees. Today, kids are the trees, as she said. They’ve been telling us for years what means the most to them about school. We need to see them.
What’s important are too often those things quite far from reformers’ minds and other things that aren’t even a speck of an idea for them: friendship, struggle, often frightening unfamiliarity turned growth in every chapter of their lives. These are the words and opinions we need to listen to as we move our schools forward.
