Tag Archives: High School

Education

Commencement: Words on Friendship

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Over the weekend, I had the very great honour of being one of two teachers to give a speech at our class of 2025 graduation.

These were my words to these young people, and to young people everywhere:

Thank you for the honour of speaking to you today. A former colleague once told me that for a teacher, this is as good as it gets. I’d have to agree.

But the thing about giving a speech is that one must know what one wants to say. And, feeling rather like a student presented with a long-term writing task, I didn’t. So I did what many of the young people sitting before us have done in this situation, and, despite what I have told you all, either as your I&S teacher, psychology teacher, or EE Coordinator, I procrastinated. For months. Naturally, I collected ideas along the way, but the writing itself happened in a relatively short amount of time in a sort of self-imposed IA jail. Like I’ve been saying, we’re all in this together.

When I first met this group of young people in August 2021, it did not take long to realize that something very significant was afoot here. After a short time getting to know you in the classroom, we spent four nights together in the Thuringian Forest and by the time we came back I was convinced: This was a group of friends who bickered like siblings, deliberately pushed each other’s buttons, and loved each other in ways that demonstrate what love is – a verb.

Fast-forward to your trip to Munich in February of this year. Once again, I watched as you looked out for each other and spoke up for one another. Even in the moments when you split off into small groups, you kept track of everyone’s whereabouts and plans. You knew who had internalized a city map and who could find the best restaurants. You knew who had extra cash for transport tickets and who was running a few minutes late. In short, you cared about each other.

Care is a verb. Love is a verb. It’s not enough to call oneself a friend. One must act like a friend in order to be a friend. Many of you know my thoughts on social media, and it will probably not surprise you to hear that I believe “friend” is a word we throw around too often without thinking about what it really means. I like the description by poet Mary Ann Evans, better known by the pen name George Eliot: “A friend is one to whom one may pour out the contents of one’s heart . . . knowing that gentle hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.”

Friends look at our best qualities and forgive us the rest. They care about us enough to be honest, which helps us become better than we are. We need those people sometimes. And we need to be those people for others. Imagine what type of world we could live in if we acted with kindness, if we looked for the best in individuals, seeking to build one another up rather than tear each other down. In the family that is this class, you have experienced just that. My hope for you is that you continue to create that community wherever it is that you go next.

Friendship is, writes poet David Whyte, “the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.”

It is having and being a friend that allows us to navigate this complex world, one in which negativity frequently demands our attention and feeds off exactly that. The counter to this is the very real positivity and joy that we find in one another. These are our opportunities to love others, to care for them, and give our attention to those who deserve it. It is with one another that you have learned true friendship, an art that has shaped you and will stay with you. Some of the people beside you today will walk with you for years into the future. A beautiful thing about real friends is that they give us the courage to be ourselves. Be there for them and let them be there for you. For those who will let each other go after today, be gentle when you meet again, for these people, too, have shaped you as an individual.

Today marks a metamorphosis, the beginning of a new chapter in the journey of your individual life. It is as individuals that we are able to motivate, nurture, and challenge one another to be the best people that we can be. I’d like to take a moment to celebrate the very individual people that you are.

[Here followed a few words to each of my psychology students. My colleague spoke to the other half of the students, who had taken the business management course.]

Dear graduates, it has been a joy to observe your true friendships with each other, and the way you have embraced the individual that is each one of you. The world needs more people who are friends like you are.

Congratulations, Class of 2025. I can’t wait to see who you become.

Jena, Germany – April 2025
Education

Commencement: A Beginning

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This year, I had the greatest honour I have ever had.

Our class of 2021 voted for me as their graduation speaker which, as one of my colleagues put it, is about as good as it gets for a teacher. Students were on campus for graduation and families attended from home via livestream.

These were my words to our students, and to students everywhere:

It is a true honour to speak to you today, and I thank you from all of my heart. The best way to describe my feelings upon hearing about this is the Yiddish word verklempt, which roughly means full of emotion and speechless. I felt this way because I was deeply touched and I had no idea what to say. Just because I think a lot of things doesn’t mean I know a lot things. But I have lived a lot and this has led me to some understandings. In the next few minutes, I will do my best to share them with you.

Over the past two years, I have watched this class grow in many ways, the most significant of which, the one that I think best defines this class, is how you have grown in your resilience. To be resilient means to bounce back, to respond to adversity, to rise up stronger and wiser than you were before. You did this, and continue to do this, in rather complicated circumstances while managing your studies, maintaining hobbies and activities, and making plans for the future. You rose to this challenge. And now, you are here. This is resilience.

The ability to be resilient, to see challenges as opportunities to grow, is something to carry with you always, regardless of what happens next week, next month, or five years from now. And as we all continue to learn, we cannot rely on well-laid plans, but plans are required if we hope to move forward. Resilience is the story of the class of 2021; what will be the story of your individual life?

A few years ago I discovered rock climbing, and it has become a significant part of my world. My favourite of the climbing gym’s motivational posters says: Ask yourself if what you are doing today is getting you closer to where you want to be tomorrow. Only you have the power to live your life. All actions have consequences, and your decisions will set you on different roads that allow for different possibilities. I have learned that these decisions affirm who we are, and also lay the foundation for who we will become. And even though you might wish otherwise, you will never know where the other road might have taken you, and you will never know who you might have been had you taken it.

So this is a critical question: What kind of person do you want to be as you begin your next chapter? Educator John Holt wrote, “The true test of character is not how much we know how to do, but how we behave when we don’t know what to do.” Your character guides how you respond to your environment and those around you, and it is your character that exemplifies the values that are central to how you understand yourself and others. When we are confident and comfortable, surrounded by family and friends, we know who we are. Here, at Southeast Asian International School*, you know who you are. You know who is there for you, what is expected of you, and how to behave.

But things are about to change. Graduation marks the end of this chapter and the beginning of a new journey. You will have beautiful, remarkable, memorable moments. But there will also be times when you stumble. When you fail. When you are caught unawares, uncertain, or having made a terrible mistake. But you have proven yourself to be resilient, and this means that you will stand up and you will begin again. And if you are courageous enough, you will find yourself with choices.

Ask yourself if what you are doing today is getting you closer to where you want to be tomorrow. Sometimes, the way forward is obvious and you clearly know what is the right thing to do. But sometimes, actually doing the right thing is very hard. This is when you need to ask yourself about the person you are becoming and what matters to you. You can decide how to act, who to be around, and how to build the community you want to live in. And you can change your mind when the road you are on is not right.

To send you on your journey, I would like to offer my deepest hope for you: That you find a path with a heart. This idea comes from The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda, which is somewhere between anthropology and memoir. Don Juan explains that a path with a heart can go anywhere or nowhere – how it goes is what matters. As I understand it, when a path has a heart, it is right. It is the deep conviction that we experience without the need for words. This is the path that gives us joy, strength, and a sense of peace.

And finding this path takes work, perhaps trying multiple paths before reaching the right one. You will know that you are on your path when it speaks to who you are, how you understand the world and your place in it. Sometimes, you can keep going with what you have already begun. But sometimes, the scariest and most important thing to do is stop and start again. The choices that we make, and the character that reflects our values and guides our behaviour, allow us to walk a path with a heart. Doing this takes resilience, it takes courage, and it can take us to places we’ve never dared to imagine.

As poet Mary Ann Evans, better known by the pen name George Eliot, wrote, “It is never too late to be what you might have been.”

Travel the path with a heart. The path is a journey. The journey is life.

Congratulations, Class of 2021. I can’t wait to see who you become.

The road to Devín Castle – Bratislava, Slovakia – January 2019

*Name changed to protect the innocent, as a friend and former colleague would say

Education

Words for Students About College

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My grade 12 students are applying to college and for the most part, they’re miserable about it. They’re worried about grades and transcripts, letters of recommendation and application essays. They’re worried about class assessment tasks, standardized tests, final exams.

And no matter how often I try to tell them that it doesn’t matter, I understand that to them, it does. When I was 17, applying to college was the most stressful and seemingly important thing I’d ever done, too. I do empathize with my students. Applying to college is the most stressful thing most of them have ever done, but it doesn’t have to be this way. 

I’ve been telling my students to consider the following pieces of advice based on what I know now, looking back over 11 years:

  1. Put yourself in a place you’d like to live. Think about what you want around you, the community you’d like to call home, and the access that place provides for whatever matters to you.
  2. Study something that provides you with options. You can always go back to school, continue your education, and switch tracks entirely. The more options you have, the easier it is to change your mind and do something else.
  3. Consider your passions and the best ways to find fulfillment – and then consider what you need to be able to do that. Financial security? Free time? A level of autonomy? We encourage students to follow their passions, but I’d argue that it’s more important to set yourself up to be able to do that in the long run.
  4. Remember that formal education is an option, not a requirement. It’s a choice. Take a gap year. Get a job. Go somewhere new. And then decide whether formal education is the best way to set yourself up to live a good life. Higher education isn’t going away.
  5. Figure out how you learn best. Figure out what you need to sustain yourself in an environment that drives you. Do you need a 9-5 job to afford to spend your weekends surfing? Do you need to live in a specific country? Do you need to be part of a think tank to have meaningful discussions?

I’m not saying these are the right questions for everyone, but I do believe they merit some thought. Higher education is the default option for the students that I teach, as well as for many students worldwide. I don’t think this is always appropriate, if for no other reason than we don’t often consider alternatives. We also don’t often consider why higher education is the default.

Asking questions is a step in a different direction, and hopefully in the right one.

A friend described his life path to me as “a bowl of spaghetti” and he’s one of the most interesting people I know. I followed a very linear path until I got scared and jumped off it; I’m a better person and educator as a result. Linearity and predictability are safe, easy, and obvious but there’s a lot more to the world than that.