Friends (Part 3 of 12)

This is part 3 of 12 in my attempt to catalog friends and people in my life that I am thankful for and why I am thankful for them.  Stay tuned each day for a new friend and a new story.

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Only one person has ever said I would make an effective TV evangelist.  He said it when I was 15 and very impressionable.  My impression, after said accolade, was to assume this guy had no clue who I was, what I stood for, or who I wanted to be.  He would end up being my future supervisor.

When I met Rob Quel, he sported a business-man's mustache and a weird, weird sense of humor.  The moustache is different now (read: grayer) but the humor is the same.  Over time, I've come to understand it and even appreciate it.

When I first arrived in Lynchburg as a 15 year old city boy from a state that knew no winter I tunneled head-long into the E.C. Glass High School sophomore curriculum and landed in Mr. Quel's Writing Lab class first semester.  He was quirky; I liked that.  His jokes sometimes fell flat in class; I liked that too.  I already had my eye on probably being a teacher and I was sensitive to not just lessons that went off without a hitch but the ones that seemed to sputter as well.  I was intensely interested in how that happened to teachers.  (I was later to learn, as teachers all know, that there are many MANY things that can make an effective lesson go awry.)  The class was also unlike English classes I had taken in the past.

We didn't read literature really; we didn't act out plays.  We talked about essays and argument.  We also performed.  Not poems and plays but other stuff.  We created commercials.

It was one of these performances where the aforementioned comment was made.  We were tasked with selling an item; something mundane, everyday and run-of-the-mill.  I remember putting it off. I don't remember why.  But when it was my turn I grabbed the pen off my desk and went at it.  What did I say?  That is had extra qualities, James Bond stuff.  Need to vaporize the talkative kid in front of you?  Boom, laser beam.  Needed to call home?  Boom, a phone.  Needed something to eat?  Boom, a replicator.  These imaginary qualities probably say more about me as an adolescent than anything else.  Repressed anger?

Anyway, when I finished several peers conveyed how impressed they were, how much fun the bit was.  I was grateful.  Then Quel said, "You ever think about a career as a TV evangelist?"  I laughed, a few laughed with me.  But I thought: what the hell, dude?

It wouldn't be for almost 20 more years before I understood the compliment.  When I returned to my alma mater to teach, I found myself after a few years there reporting to him as my supervisor.  I was glad: he challenged me without making ridiculous demands.  It was after one particular class he observed when he stopped by to review my lesson that he said, "Well, one thing is certain: you could sell anyone anything."  I was brought back to my sophomore year.  And it made sense.  It wasn't the religion thing; it wasn't the capitalist thing; it was the persuasive thing - it was the ability to communicate and end up with people listening and liking what they listened to.

Quel isn't my supervisor anymore (I wear everyone out eventually) but here's what I love about him, what I wouldn't trade for the world.  On a random day in any given period of school, if he is in the building and passing by in the hall, he unceremoniously throws my door open and without excusing himself demands to know what I am subjecting my poor students to today.  Whatever my answer, he finds several reasons to lambast my choices and encourages my class to revolt, like French Revolution revolt.

He's Kramer to my Seinfeld.  And I'm not close to the genius of Seinfeld.  He throws that door open and slides into my room.  I put on my part of the show: impatience, frustration, are-you-done-yet?  But I know (and I think he knows) I love it.  I love every moment of it.  I love it when he looks at my new Forensics trophy cabinet and asks if it is The Shrine to Aaron.  When he goes through my end of the year student feedback looking just for the negative ones and getting frustrated when he can't find many.  I miss sitting in his office in the late afternoon talking about Forensics or English or whatever.

I'm not sure if I am as funny as he often was, or impact my students the way he impacted me.  But I know he continually provides me with a role model for where I am headed.  He might not ever join me Marlin fishing in the Caribbean but I know that he would listen to the stories I tell about it when I returned.

Friends (Part 2 of 12)

This is part 2 of 12 in my attempt to catalog friends and people in my life that I am thankful for and why I am thankful for them.  Stay tuned each day for a new friend and a new story.

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I met Derek Elmore about eight years ago.  Actually, I know exactly when I met him.  It was the fall of 2008.  I know it was before November 2008.  And the reason I know this so precisely is the same reason I thought after we first met that he would never talk to me again.

The last bell of the day for a high school teacher is not really an "end" in any traditional sense of the word.  We go off to our next thing: coaching, meetings, professional development, parent conferences, you name it.  Much of this we do willingly as it's important to our students and our school; some we do grudgingly.  In the early months of 2008, when I was still teaching on the second floor of my school, I was on my way to one of those grudging things.  How quickly might it end, I wondered.  How quickly could I get back to my team and the things I cared about more?

On my way I ran into Derek who was headed to the same meeting.  I didn't really know him; we had a mutual friend in Casey Wood and Casey spoke very highly of Derek.  The friend of my friend... So we chatted for the briefest of moments as we headed downstairs.  Somewhere in that stairwell on the center hallway, as we griped about the things in education that frustrate us, I made the passing comment, "Well, it'll all get better when we get a different President in office.  Preferably from the other party."  I practically tossed off a wink.

Derek threw a quick side glance at me and simply replied, "Yeah? Ya think?"  No sarcasm, no hostility, no judgement.  But in his words I realized.  Shit, I thought.  Shit, shit shit.  Aaron why do you blurt your politics out with complete strangers!?  I think I apologized while not losing face (in all likelihood I sounded like a moron - something I achieve on a fairly weekly basis).  And I remember as we walked into that meeting thinking clearly and definitely, well, someone else who won't like me.

I'm not sure when politics became a central part of who I am.  High school?  I remember giving speeches about liberalism.  College?  Did my readings reinforce what I was already thinking or did they open me to more reasons?  After?  When I started paying taxes and wondered why much of my money was going to weapons of war instead of feeding the poor?  (There I go again...)  Whatever the case, by the time I met Derek, I was definitely partisan although I tried to be good about listening to others and thinking before I spoke.  (Obviously something I failed at when I first met him.)

But the next day I ran into him again on hall duty, up on the glorious W hall, second floor.  He came and stood next to me and after the class change had settled, he commenced.  And it was simply a question related to the student our meeting had been about the day before.  I didn't know I was holding my breath until I released it.  So we talked.  About students and school and our experiences.  We compared notes on students we taught; we tried to keep the hallways clear (easier some days than others).  I learned from him.

I learned that not only could I get along with someone who saw the world in a pretty fundamentally different way but I could like him too.  Really like him.  Have his back if stuff went down, kind of way.  He doesn't need me to have his back, by the way.  He's taller, stronger, and would doubtlessly rescue me from any problems before I could ever help him.  Over the next year, two, and three as we talked more our conversations migrated from specific ("Have you been on the E hallway recently?") to generic ("Think Florida has education problems like we do?").  Gradually we even talked about our differences.

This is the real point I want to make: I got to a place where I wasn't uncomfortable when Derek talked about what he believes (free market, libertarianism kinds of things).  In fact, I welcomed it.  In time, I even needed it.  I reached a place where I needed his quid to my quo because I was worried I hadn't thought my ideas really through enough.  Or worse, I hadn't really had anyone push back against my ideas in a way that made me objectively check myself.  We talked about Ayn Rand and even as we came to different conclusions about her writing, we could still talk.  We could talk about taxes and guns and religious fervor and modern political crap... and it didn't end in anger or fisticuffs (can I use that word in 2015?).  Often, it ended in a bit more clarity.

I figured out, not really long ago, Derek and I don't talk about these things to try to change each others' minds.  I'm never going to get him to vote for Bernie Sanders and he's never going to convince me that Ron Paul has all the answers.  But we do it, I think, to make sure we haven't drifted too far off course.  At least, that's why I do it.  And I love talking to the man.  I love it when we agree on stuff; I love it more when he explains why something I think, with all due respect, is kind of batshit crazy.

I have a lot of conservative friends.  Some I get along with better than others but none are like Derek.  I value our friendship at a place that is individualistic and sincere.  I would probably take a bullet for the dude and, while I was dying, explain that this is why we need gun reform.

I'm just glad he talked to me again.

Friends (part 1 of 12)

This is part 1 of 12 in my attempt to catalog friends and people in my life that I am thankful for and why I am thankful for them.  Stay tuned each day for a new friend and a new story.

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I met Deborah Ketchum almost a decade ago.  I wouldn't be surprised if she didn't remember me from that moment because it wasn't for another that we became really good friends.

When I returned to teach at my alma mater in 2004, I immediately picked up the mantle of Forensics coach with gusto and enthusiasm.  And promptly realized I had no idea how to "manage" a team.  I could coach students; I could help them with interping skills and speech writing.  But the organizational aspect of coaching was completely new to me.

I took my newly formed team to one of the only invitational tournaments in the area I knew about.  It was east of us at a school I had been to only once before, a little single A school (old school VHSL designations) called Randolph Henry.  I had never met the coach; I knew my team was fairly green to compete.  We went anyway.

I brought enough judges with me that I wasn't needed most rounds.  During the start of the second one, I was walking one of the upper hallways, making sure my kids had made it to their correct rooms to compete, and I passed this woman in the hallway.  She was clearly in charge: she was checking on rooms, speaking quickly to a few judges here and there.  I greeted her and briefly considered asking if she needed any help with anything but I concluded quickly enough, and luckily enough for me, that whatever she might ask me to do tournament-wise I probably had no ability to do since I had no clue how to run a team, much less a tournament.

Needless to say, the experience was fantastic and none of my team broke into the final round.  This wasn't a surprise to me but as teenagers my kids were a bit chagrined.  And without realizing it some things were set in motion over the next decade.

Fast forward about three years.  E.C. Glass joined the local Forensics league, as a practice route to the harder VHSL circuit.  And I ran into Deborah again.  First, I simply knew her as one of the people who ran the tab room while I judged.  Tab people are funny: they are stressed about things that seem unimportant to others: four poetry kids in one room and six in the other, a missing kid who is not on the drop list, a room without a judge.  All I knew was that I had neither the nerves nor the resolve to be a tab room person.

But as I got to know more of the coaches in this wild and crazy world of Forensics, and I had more conversations with Deborah, I realized that it wasn't that she was so much different from me as she had just learned to "organize", to "manage".  So I learned from her.  I watched her interact with her team in brief spurts.  I especially watched her work with other Forensics coaches from other schools.  Pieces began to fall into place.

Years rolled and I found myself helping in that crazy, hair-pulling tab room.  And before I had gotten a sense of what was happening, I was suddenly in there with Deborah and Mark Ingerson and others helping RUN this crazy thing.  I was checking on rooms, fixing disasters, dealing with technical website stuff and people stuff.  I had learned in that most ordinary of ways: without realizing it.

About four years ago, I was brought back to that very first competition, way out at Deborah's school of Randolph Henry.  Back then, we had left that school and my team reassured themselves that they were going to be prepared for future competitions, they were going to play to WIN.  As I sat in the tab room with Deborah so many years after that and we talked about the competitive nature of high school, much less Forensics, she brought me up short with a very simple questions.

"Do you press your kids to win at these little tournaments in the fall?"  These local competitions were small, a single evening, two rounds, just some quick judge feedback.  Do you press them...  I knew the right answer was "no".  I knew that it was absurd, demonstrably silly to rally a team for VICTORY at a little practice tournament, which is essentially what this was.  And even as I said something like "not, really" I knew I was telling at best a partial truth, probably more like a face-saving lie.  For the truth was I had pushed in certain ways for my kids to WIN at these things.  I don't think I ever made winning the more important thing than learning.  In fact, often I tell my students that they'll know the kids in the room that are better, more polished.  Watch them, I say, learn from them.  They will teach you much.

But I did put pressure on the winning thing.  Too much pressure.  A full Saturday VHSL tournament was different.  But at these things: be kind, be friendly.  More: find the kids in your room that seem really scared and out of their element and greet them.  Make them feel better.  Help them enjoy their time competing rather than trying to defeat them.  That adversarial mindset was silly.  Isn't the art of speaking well inherently the act of building a room up? Of connecting with the people all around you?  You can't do that when the room is a battlefield.

I suspect Deborah doesn't realize the impact she has had on me in relation to all this; she would probably dismiss it as not that big of a deal.  But to me it's huge.  She was and is still my professional reality check when my ego starts writing checks that I can't personally cash.  When I know she will be at a tournament, I feel a sense of relief inside.  I know that however far south the tournament might go from one of a hundred different mistakes, she will find a solution.  Might not be pretty but it will help the tournament go on and most likely the rest of the people there will never know there was a problem.  I've learned that from her too.

Deborah Ketchum is my great friend.  I have not had the chance to see her yet this school year but I know that where these local tournaments are progressing, she is there (with others) making the thing turn without flaw.

Serendipity

At the end of every school year I find myself thinking back over not just the events that transpired in the last seven or eight months but the events that make up the sum total of my teaching career.  Students, co-workers, successes, and failures.  And among these assorted ramblings I am reminded of the reasons I got to the place where I am and why I am so absurdly happy doing what I do.  For you see when I graduated from E.C. Glass in the spring of 1994 I wanted desperately to get back but I kind of fundamentally knew, as the Moody Blues son goes, "you can never go home again".  But wish I did.

So something serendipitous happened exactly ten years ago that set me on a return path home.

I had just finished my first and what would become my only year teaching middle school under the principalship of Jay Sales.  I joke rather frequently with people that no amount of prescription medication has thus far helped me in blocking that year from my memory but truth is it wasn't that bad.  The middle school creature is a... different sort.  A friend of mine was fond of saying, "middle schoolers should just be put in deep freeze for three years and then thawed as 14 year olds."  I worked with a lot of great people at Sandusky Middle - Kenya Fowler, Calvin Buck, David "Moose" Pierce - and had some fantastic students.  Coming from a rather exclusive high school background I found myself often backtracking in my lessons to cover skills and details that I didn't realize middle schoolers hadn't mastered yet ("What do you mean the definition of a noun confuses you?").  But I survived and more importantly I think that year helped make me a better 9th grade teacher.

Thus, toward the end of that year Jay Sales called me in his office for an end-of-year chat.  He rather honestly asked me how my year had gone.  I often wondered if he picked up on my happy-yet-not-that-happy sense of being a high school teacher in middle school.  He was perceptive in that way, I think.  Because I suspected he already knew what my honest answer would be I decided to be honest in an out-loud way.  I told him that I was fairly content, that I was teaching English and worked with some good people, but I felt a bit like "a round peg in a square hole."  (Sidenote: as someone who has come to ABHOR cliches, I sure used a crap ton of them in my younger days.)  I don't remember much more about that conversation except that my Principal had the look of a man who was pleased I had told him the truth.  I left his office without expectation but also a little sadder for having articulated my frustration out loud.  It was now a real thing, hovering about me like the rings of Saturn.

But that man, for whatever reason and against whatever sense he had of keeping me as a teacher in his school, called up the Principal of Glass all on his own and said (I learned later) something to the effect of, "I have someone over here that needs to be over there.  What kind of English teacher openings do you have?"  And the ball rolled.

Perhaps that is just his nature: I've got someone here who needs something different, something else.  He's a good worker (now I'm just putting words in his mouth) but he's better suited for you than for me.  Perhaps he would have done it for anyone else; I'd believe that.  But the fact he did it for me and allowed me to in so many ways return home is an act for which I will ever be behold to him.

It is right and good to acknowledge the people in our lives that we owe something to and I have many.  From family to colleagues to even students.  A boat can't sail, after all, until the main lines to shore have been cast off.

My son, the swordsman

Almost every afternoon after I come home my son grabs his shoes and sword and heads out the door.

Sometimes we pass each other on the driveway and he gives me that 10-year-old head bob that reminds me even though he is not a teenager yet he knows that using too many words in an acknowledgement isn't cool.  Sometimes he stops at the door and tells me about his day a bit before he heads out.  But eventually, once his afternoon work is attended to, he heads up to the cul-de-sac in front of our house, usually running, to face the monsters that inhabit Pokeys Creek.

I write that with a dual tinge of nostalgia and envy.  In fact, I often watch him a little from our front windows.  And there he is in the center of the road, holding his sword at a slight angle behind his head while sizing up the enemies before him.  He'll hold that position for a few moments and then dissolve into a flurry slices, thrusts, and jabs in the air before him.  He'll utter battle-like noises complete with the clanging of steel, cries of the men and creatures felled before his blade, and cheers from whatever crowd might be watching his heroic efforts.  He is unabashed about it.  Cars will sometimes cruise slowly around the cul-de-sac and he will dutifully step aside, into the grass, for safety but even there he is defending himself from opportunistic enemy forces that mistakenly think he is off-balance having moved from the concrete to the grass.  They soon learn better as my boy parries and dodges the advancing hordes.  People - real people - in the passing cars sometimes watch, sometimes smile.  A few give him odd glances that seem to say "glad he's not my kid."

And I think: "Damn right he's not your kid.  He's mine.  And he's amazing."

I have more than a few memories of being permitted to play-act around my yard in some of the more epic adventures I could construct.  Depending on my theme of the month it might be a science fiction adventure that was culminating in the last few moments of a galactic space conflict or a fairy tale quest to rid the world of the last evil creature known to man.  Whatever the case, I was never taught to be self-conscious about my make-believe world.  Swords, lightsabers, pirate hooks for hands... it was all fair game in my world.  I remember friends coming to visit me and they enjoyed the physicality of fighting or battling but never seems really engaged in the story of what we were living out.  Leave it to the future English teacher to care more about the story arch of what we played outside than the actual physical conflict.  But what's my motivation here?  Galactic domination?

So it is with my boy.  He tells me often about his friends who have one kind of sports practice Monday, a different one Tuesday, conditioning Wednesday.  And while I don't begrudge these children or their parents (both my children do gymnastics one day a week currently) I am proud of my son for not getting pressured into that world of constant go-go-go.  Do more.  Be involved in everything.  No time to rest now.  I love the fact that he spends thirty minutes to an hour spinning and jumping around the street out there engaging not just his muscles but also his imagination.

I hope, silently, that he never feels the need to suppress or conceal this creative and wonderful sense of fun and expression.  Some of the neatest teenagers I teach are ones who takes risks when they write in my class and allow their sense of fun and inspiration affect their sentences and paragraphs on paper.  Grow up that way, your way, I think.

Right now outside he's leaping over a horizontal tree branch in a rather heroic way.  I want to ask him what the story is.  Goblin stole his kingdom's treasure?  His princess?  His magical cloak?

Whatever the answer: I know I'll love it.

India Introduces America to Faith

In the high school English class that I teach, I frequently enjoy challenging my students' preconceived notions about literature, stories, and writing in general.  Often they come to me with clear likes and dislikes.  Alexander Dumas: like.  Ernest Hemingway: dislike.  Yann Martel: like.  John Steinbeck: dislike.  So I make them prove their "likes".  Why does Dumas, in Count of Monte Cristo, effectively convey revenge for you when Hemingway, in Old Man and the Sea, through the character of the beaten and battered Santiago who has finally caught the fish of his life and then is robbed of it, does not?  Why?  Some of them articulate what they see well; others struggle.

I'm about to do that to you.

In the opening lines of Yann Martel's Life of Pi, the main character tells us that this story, his survival story on the ocean and subsequent adventures, is one that will make us believe in God.  Without going into too much detail, I finished that story with the exact opposite reaction.  It made me believe that faith and religion were just choices.  Choices that people make for very idiosyncratic reasons and sometimes reverse for inexplicable reasons.  It is, in the end, unpersuasive for me.

But last weekend I went to see The Hundred-Foot Journey, another movie-from-book, by Richard C. Morais and while I have not read the book yet, I think I have a good sense of why this story is a more powerful and persuasive argument for faith and spirituality than Martel's.  Interesting, by the way, that both are stories of boys raised in India who move somewhere else.  Pi is moving to Canada and ends up in the U.S.  Hassan and his family flee India after being attacked and end up in France.  I have to acknowledge my prejudices here: am I more moved by European sentiments of faith than American ones?

Early in the story, Hassan narrates his family's arrival in France: "When we arrived, the sun was setting, like a mango sorbet dripping over the horizon..."  Some of my students are not moved by similes but good ones, for me, are straight-up poetry.  Comparing the horizon to food doesn't hurt either.  But this was the first line that caught me as particularly spiritual.  There are plenty of moments in Life of Pi when Pi contemplates a sunset or sunrise or moonscape over the ocean from his makeshift life raft but all of those descriptions are detailed, by which I mean scientific.  They involve pointing out angles and shapes.  So it strikes me that in Journey we have a simple comparison to a particularly tasty dessert.

Is that it?  Food?  Is food essentially spiritual to us?  To me?  A month ago or so I went to see Chef and while I don't sense any underlying spirituality in that film it was an interesting and convincing riff on family.  In that movie, there is a scene where the main character takes his son aside after the son has suggested that feeding people okay food it just as good as feeding them great food.  The father tells the son that half-cooked food is unconscionable.  It's a crime.  It's obscene.

I had the same sense in Journey.  When Hassan arrives in France with his family he is the first one to sense the power of food in the area.  In this way he reminds me of the better moments of Pi who early in his story dabbles in different faiths.  (He tries Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity all at the same time.)  Somehow Hassan's desire to learn more recipes feels more spiritual, more authentic, than Pi's search for a religion that fits him.  They both involves conflict: Pi versus the tiger, Hassan versus those around him who hope for his demise.  That hope, by the way, is manifested both outwardly, as one of the chef's in a luxury French kitchen across the street attacks and burns part of Hassan's family's restaurant, and inwardly, as Marguerite (Hassan's love-interest) vies for the same position he receives under Madame Mallory in the kitchen.  I don't mean to diminish Pi's struggle, for it is important to the story, but just as that horrible ending admonishes us to choose "the one we like better" so Hassan's struggle is not one he can choose.  It was ordained the moment that his family put the down payment on the restaurant in France.

So here's the part that convinced me.  Late in the story Hassan has predictably risen above all the chef's in this little French village and gone to Paris to train with the best of the best in the culinary world.  His new boss at this Parisian restaurant repeated "innovation" in all his scenes as though he is the Steve Jobs of the French food world.  And it is there, amid the science and technicality of those kitchens, that he loses his love for food.  This isn't much of a revelation and I'm not saying it's impressive storytelling.  What I am saying is that it makes a stronger argument for a human's sense of faith: the food that he knows and remembers (from his deceased mother, from his distant father, from the woman he stomped on to get to this position) is a more persuasive argument for God.  The taste of food, the dripping mango sorbet itself.

Final Speech - Public Speaking 1st Period

June 2014

Superlatives bother me.

When someone labels a thing or a person “better” or “best”, I often find myself asking what their point of reference is.  What is the scale?  What is the standard deviation?  In the end, I look for a way to disagree with the designation.  At the very least, I tell people, “It’s only the best so far.”  My pessimistic attitude reigns supreme.

But sometimes fate has a funny way of making hypocrites of folks like me.  So it is with a healthy dose of irony and humility that I dub this The Best Public Speaking class I have ever had.

I don’t wish to leave such a comment unproven so I offer the following examples in support of my argument:

1. If I asked Peter to come up here right now and perform an impromptu storytelling, everyone in this room would get pretty excited.
2. If I asked George and JD to reconstruct their semi-inappropriate performance of “The Graduate”, everyone in this room would sit up just a bit straighter in expectation.
3. If I asked Meredith the simple question: “how are you today?” we would doubtlessly get a 15-20 minute diatribe about her driving adventures in Lynchburg prior to school.
4. If I asked Sam McCorkle to come up here and run his prose one more time, complete with that awful Yoda voice - dude, it really is bad - you would all enjoy the nostalgia one final time.
5. If I asked Mckayla to come up here and deliver the most devastating dramatic interpretation she was capable of, we would easily be in puddles of inconsolable tears by the end.

I could go on; the list is long.  But maybe this reason is stronger than the rest for proving this is the best Public Speaking class I have ever taught: when I add my own thoughts, a quick comment, on something and I look out over the faces and intellects of this room, I see every face and every eye and every mind paying attention.  And I am humbled.

I didn’t always know this was what I wanted to do.  I had intimations early on, though, that being the center of attention was something special.  In third grade, I contracted the chicken pox and was homebound for three weeks.  I was bored out of my mind so I purchased and listened to the new hit release album, Michael Jackson’s Thriller, and, without seeing his music video, I constructed a dance routine complete with backup dancers.  When I returned to school, I entered the yearly talent show, found some backup dancers, bought a white sequin glove ($2.99 at Sears) and won second place.  In eighth grade, I read a biography of Walt Disney for a class assignment and instead of giving an oral book report in class, I rearranged the desks in the room to create a Space Mountain-like roller coaster, complete with pop-up cue cards detailing important events in Mr. Disney’s life.  At the end of my senior year, two things happened in short order.  I won the VHSL State Forensics Championship in Extemporaneous Speaking and I was selected as one of three graduation speakers.  Each of those were amazing moments in my life and, in their own way, prepared me to do this today.  Teaching, for me, is half content-related (I have to know what I am talking about or why should anyone listen to me?) and half presentation (I have to say things in an interesting and worthwhile way or I’m just an automated delivery system).

I truly don’t know what kind of teacher I am.  I look out at your faces, at your eyes, and I find myself crushed between two thoughts.  One, my words might be the only interesting ones you hear today or all week; this moment might be the one that I can say something that years from now affects someone in this room to change their life for the better or decide in their own way to give back to a community and a people to which they feel indebted.  Second, my words the scant minutes on the clock are all keeping you from being able to go home or least leave here and if I could hurry both of those up, that would be great.  So I’ll settle for somewhere in the middle.

I do this thing, this teaching, which really is just trying to present the truth to teenagers, trying to help them not be so miserable, downtrodden, misbegotten, deflated human beings because I refuse to think of the future in those terms.  For every day you came to school and didn’t want to, for every subject that you took a test that you felt uncertain about, for every class that you finished in June and thought “it can’t really get harder”, I want you to realize: you’ve beaten them all.  You’re still standing.  You’re still breathing.  You’re the sum total of your successes not your failures.  And as you bask - rightfully so - in your individual and idiosyncratic power, know that somewhere behind you sits a teacher of public speaking that can’t help but be incurably and sensationally proud of you.

As a wise hobbit once said, “I am glad that you are with me - here - at the end of all things.”  I wish you the very best ending and bright, happy new beginning.