This was a comparatively sober, mature graduation, and I remember sitting in parking lot traffic and group photos on the hill in front of the Station Building and Sam Gilliam, yet again my graduation speaker. I attended a low-residency program over four summers, so graduation occurred a year after I had completed my studies and felt like an afterthought. My last graduation ceremony was in 2005 for an MFA from MICA. I remember one beloved physics teacher making the entire senior class repeat two words of wisdom out loud as a group: “compound interest.” I wonder how that has resonated with this group, now in their mid-30s? This actually made the experience more interesting, and the keynote graduation speaker, typically a favorite teacher with decent oratory skills and good sense of humor, even more fantastic. I was in my twenties, barely older than my students, and I remembered one great lesson from my college graduation: I met up with several other teachers at a bar before the ceremony, and then we walked to graduation in a pleasant haze. It was a beautiful spring day and my dad’s smile is playful and proud.Īs a high school art teacher, I was required to attend graduation in academic robes and sit on the end of a row of students to keep them quiet. My greatest treasure from that experience is not my diploma, but a photo of me and my dad wearing funny hats and robes. I don’t remember much about this one, except it was a degree in education from my dad’s alma mater where he was a career professor. Learning opportunity: getting high before graduation might make the speeches more interesting, but wait until you have arrived safely at your destination.įast forward to graduate school.
#FREE ELEMENTARY GRADUATION SPEECH DRIVER#
So much for making an impression in those four years, huh? The main thing I remember is the nightmare-level terror of almost missing the ceremony-in a carpool with my fellow art majors, driving around cluelessly in circles in the neighborhood surrounding the college I had just attended for four years, completely lost before the driver admitted he was stoned. In college, I recall winning some sort of award at graduation and the art department chair pronouncing my name incorrectly as I crossed the stage.
That ceremony taught me that alphabetical order seldom produces close friendships and listening to names being read for three hours is boring as hell. I graduated in a high school class of 433 students. Or has it? Is a graduation speech (and ceremony) a mission-accomplished placeholder of a moment designed to make students and parents feel good about themselves in a generic and mass produced way, or can it actually teach us something valuable? (Strange coincidence: Sam Gilliam was the keynote speaker at both my undergraduate and MFA ceremonies.) When there is cheering, unsolicited clapping, knowing smiles, and tears, a graduation speech has done its job.
#FREE ELEMENTARY GRADUATION SPEECH FULL#
I have heard my share of rambling graduation speeches full of non-specific platitudes, but I also know when a speaker has nailed it. I am not an expert on the subject, but I have learned through personal experience that graduation ceremonies are designed to be tolerated and photographed, but rarely enjoyed. I have graduated at least four times myself that I can remember: high school, college, graduate school, and then graduate school again. I have taught college students, graduate students, art majors, non-art majors, and spent seven years teaching art to high school students in Maryland public schools. Whether you are a newly minted chemical engineer, MBA, lawyer, or English major, this advice is uniformly applicable: 2020’s non-graduation is a symbol of what you have lost, but it should be the least of your worries.Īfter decades in education and teaching, I have acquired a respectable amount of graduation experience. I am not writing this for any particular age group or grade level, a specific program or genre of study, although I am an academically trained artist and feel an affinity for art school and liberal arts graduates. This is (clearly) not an official graduation speech. If you are a 2020 graduate, you have a right to mourn this rite of passage, this pinnacle of excellence, this moment of triumph, taken from you by a viral pandemic and a country that didn’t make much effort to avert it, but you should also know that the collective graduation ceremony is a symbolic event as an actual experience it never quite lives up to the hype. We all know this, but when you’re experiencing a traumatic loss it’s difficult not to place it on a pedestal or polish it into a gleaming fantasy.
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