June 7, 2009

Welcome: Peter Branch, Head of School (text not yet available)
From the Principal: Kevin Barr, High School Principal
Faculty Speaker: Topher Dunne, High School History Teacher
Class of 2009 Speaker: Noah Robbins
Class of 2009 Speaker: Jannah Tate (text not yet available)
Parent Speaker: Ron Klain

Speeches from the Classes of 2002 - 2008...

Welcome by Peter Branch, Head of School

(Text not yet available)

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From the Principal: Kevin Barr, High School Principal

There is a moment in James Joyce’s Ulysses when Stephen Dedalus, helping one of his students work math problems, is touched by the boy’s vulnerability. In watching the boy puzzle out the problem, Stephen thinks, “Like him was I, these sloping shoulders, this gracelessness. My childhood bends beside me. Too far for me to lay a hand there once or lightly. Mine is far and his secret as our eyes.”

For much of the novel Stephen is estranged from himself and others and yet like all of us he possesses a capacity for empathy, an ability to not only see ourselves in others but to recognize that in some deep way we are the other. The best teachers and the best parents carry their own childhoods with them and remember what it was like for the world to be new and for them to be graceless in it.

We have tried to teach you many lessons in your years with us. Sometimes it may have felt as if we were force feeding you; at other times we might have been accused of spoon feeding, but in our best moments we sat down together at the table and helped each other to the choicest of what was being served.

When Shakespeare and Tony Morrison, your history studies and your calculus, your grasp of photons and quarks, and your ability to just about dunk that basketball are starting to fade, I hope you will remember the most important lessons we strove to teach you: that you are lucky to be alive at such a moment in history, that the blessings you have received are to be shared, that joy runs deeper than grief, that there are multiple paths to the truth, that a flower is now and always an extraordinary miracle, that it isn’t easy being green, and that a grasshopper may just be an insect but when provoked can lay waste an entire field.

You have been a great, great class. Now run on. Life is calling you.

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Faculty Speaker: Topher Dunne, High School History Teacher

Bright Moments and Congratulations to the Class of 2009 and thank you for this opportunity. Today is a celebration, where friends, family and the GDS community gather to witness your graduation. You move on today from a familiar place into a wide variety of new challenges and vistas. It is my hope that your experience while you were here was meaningful even while it may not have always been the easiest thing.

It is also important to realize that All of this has happened before, and will happen again. You may have attended this ritual or many like it in the past, to watch friends or relatives graduate. Today it is your turn to participate and join the great cycle. You walk across and after getting your diploma the world is oddly the same, yet profoundly changed. There is a Zen saying: before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water; after enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. But what exactly is enlightening about the upcoming trip across the stage and likely accompanying photo op, whether or not it gets tagged on Facebook? In many ways the enlightenment, if it occurred at all, rests in the JOURNEY which led you to the stage to become graduates.

For some, GDS is the only school you’ve known, for others it is on a relatively short list. Haltingly or not, some sense of loyalty has likely developed, even if it is not very public. What is loyalty at GDS? There might be some crested blazer, Beach Boys, cornball, be-true-to-your-school connotation, but, lest you haven’t already said it to yourself, “That’s so UN-GDS.” We were never like that. An article written by Michael Schaffer (an alum from last century) for the New Republic this past fall demonstrated that loyalty to the institution of GDS exists albeit enigmatically. Schaffer writes of entering what some call “the bubble” in order to learn about being more open. This traditionally has been such an antithetical place full of anti-hero types that it is not so surprising that a loyalty to GDS plays out in arcane ways, as if every day is opposite day.

That loyalty may have been as much to each other as anything. Did you band together during your time here? Were you products of infighting? Did it take some periodic shamanic rituals involving paper, sage, cinnamon and a secondhand Crockpot from the ’70s to keep you together? Did you need zip-ties to keep from separating too soon? Or was it deeper than that? Your relationship to GDS may have started as contractual - with an application and enrollment ... but it was always deeper than that, being much more than following, or trying to bend your way around sets of rules. It was more like living up to (and interacting with) norms in some larger way as a community, where you could engage with the culture and interact with it.

The relationships that form around peers or colleagues involve trust. Did you come to trust easily? Did that trust grow into loyalty? Were you tested? Perhaps 6th period senior year? By being 10 points down at half-time in the tournament finals against some Quaker school down the street? Being asked to show up to support a friend, or classmate, in an activity, show, at a taping? To contribute to some group project? Or was it internal? Promising yourself? When you said you’d meet someone at Conie’s, or pretended you would?

The “all together-ness”, and many other things in the world, began to fracture as early as last fall. Who did you trust then? Who did you let down? Who let you down? Paulson? Your auto mechanic? Bernanke? Geithner? Jim Kramer? Jon Stewart? (Jon Stewart while he was interviewing Jim Kramer?) Or was it yourself again?

The list of people I remain loyal to and miss terribly because they are gone from GDS as students or colleagues, let alone those gone in any larger sense, grows annually. I don’t see how it can’t. Time moves on and despite how much you want to keep some things the same, it doesn’t always, or even usually happen.

So now you are here, at a ritual which in effect casts you out. Today you are ‘beyond’ GDS, which can be bittersweet. Is this ritual based on truth or meaning? The truth of completion, recognition of reaching the goals we the institution set for you, or the meaning that there’s a larger world out there which needs people like you to be IN it.

What do you do now? John Legend, of all people, recently said “I’m ready to go right now ...” and something about a green light, which may have a graduation tie-in, but he also delivered a commencement address at his alma mater. While he politicked it up a great deal, he also mentioned about not being blind followers. In my experience you do not tend to be blind followers, sycophantic “Yes Men” [sic] but rather are ones to stand up. BE the anti-heroes, or even HEROES, you can be. Your dissent can be loyal, even patriotic.

Sophia Lyon Fahs said “It matters what you believe.” I agree, but would add: it matters as much what you DO. How did you plan for time beyond today? Did you simply prove (or hope) you were better than other applicants? Interestingly worthy in some innate way? How many PICK ME PICK ME PICK ME moments are there in a life vs. proving your worth day-to-day by doing. Fortunately, life is not a series of college applications, or high-flying prom date requests (many of which didn’t seem to be so in question in the first place). Now it is time to DO things. You have choices, but it is an allocation problem: there are limits of time (the ultimate scarce resource), energy, effort. What’s “on your list”? Must-do things? Are there people you need to say things to?

I went ahead and said some of those things this spring, and became ... verklempt at a theater talk back It was during an attempt to explain some of why I do what I do and how I appreciate all I’ve gotten to see you do over the years. Like many of the faculty sitting beside you now, I believe in who you are and support you in your endeavors. That won’t change with today.

But we’re still at the ritual ... So you might get to the stairway and blanch. Arjuna, the heroic ksatriya from the Mahabharata, looks before him on the battle plain of Kuruksetra, sees what is about to occur and stops, unable to do anything. Yet Krishna, his charioteer, shows him that time will march forward and events occur whether he stops of not. The world will continue and he should fulfill destiny by going forth and DOING, not standing idly by. So, climb the stairs!

You may climb the stairs, descend again, leave the hall, ditch the diploma, hit beach week and never look back on us again, but I think most of you will choose otherwise; this place has likely meant too much you. CARING, worrying about the future of GDS and the world at large, or someday to wax nostalgic about some demi-godlike twilight when you went to GDS, Change came to Washington and THINGS SEEMED POSSIBLE; THAT is more likely part of your destiny.

To temper the previous allusions (a? or i?), memory is a tricky thing. Years hence today may be just a few flashes, if anything. In fact, most of your schooling may already be a few flashes, if anything. Respect that you don’t know everything, let alone remember it, keep learning and perhaps some of the things we went to great pains to teach you can stay alive in some form or fashion.

What will you carry away from GDS? Memories of the good may linger, but so might wrongs, wounds. Beware the grudges you carry—and how loyal you may become to them. Be mindful of spiritual materialism, claiming to own and clinging to beliefs, which can create holy warriors for causes, carry their regrets forward.

The mystery track at the variety show (if you remember), “Children Will Listen” from Into the Woods, stuck with me as I considered this address, even if you yourselves have already wandered in attention and are texting someone right now. Let me just say this, and it’s for everyone here: someday, despite what you may think or pledge, you’ll say something and realize that you’ve just repeated your parents, elders, teachers, someone unexpected. Perhaps you’ll be shocked, perhaps proud. In this sense I also wish you the opportunity to let family be an inclusive and welcoming construct. I got a birthday card years ago: brother, another year older, another year closer to dressing like dad ... she never understood that my secret was to START by dressing like my grandfather. You may not understand or be understood, but be welcoming and accepting.

NOW FOR SOME PRACTICAL POINTS: Never underestimate the power of the Aesthetic experience, of the arts to turn back or stop time; to trigger feeling and spark memory and creativity. Experience art.

Another thing, which you may have already figured out: the insights of sleep deprivation can be both real and illusory; knowing the difference between the two is a challenge you will likely continue to face in your life.

Steve Jobs said, “if you live each day like it could be your last, someday you’ll be right.” With that in mind, be bold, have dreams, make plans, then pursue them.

How has GDS as an institution benefited you? I hope we have provided you with experiences and opportunities for insight, either in class or outside it ... How has it not? Have we sheltered you from various things too much or for too long? We’ve made choices of what you did, just as you’ve had some choices—to apply and attend GDS, some courses, and now WHERE to go. What’s next? Congratulations to the Class of 2009! So say we all!

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Class of 2009 Speaker, Noah Robbins

Before I begin, I’d like us all to take a moment to acknowledge something very beautiful that is here with us today. I’m talking about my Popsicle tie, which I’ve worn for every special occasion since sixth grade. With that said, I’d like to dive into my speech.

So I’ve been trying to figure out why you guys chose me to make this speech. There were several ways I could’ve gone about finding out. I suppose I could’ve gone up to each of you and asked why you wanted me to speak, but I was afraid I might learn that some of my close friends voted for one of the other candidates. So I decided to simply imagine why I’m here, and what people wanted me to talk about.

My best guess is that you thought I could give you a little piece of wisdom, something I’ve come to know about the world we’re about to enter. Let’s see how much I actually know about that subject. Here are two quick stories that, I think, only two people in this room know.

The first one goes like this: I once walked into a Burger King, went to the counter at the front, asked for a cheeseburger and small strawberry shake, and then immediately sat down at one of the tables, because I expected them to bring my meal to me. That’s story number one.

The second and even more embarrassing story is this: I once got lost walking from the Tenleytown Metro stop to Georgetown Day School. Now for those of you who don’t know where the Tenleytown Metro stop is in relation to GDS, let me just say that it is almost impossible to get lost walking between these two places. In fact, you can pretty much see one from the other. Anyway, I’m fairly certain it was one of the first times I had taken the Metro to this particular location by myself. To this day, I don’t know how I got it wrong, but I do know that I ended up asking a mailman for directions to school, and I had made so many wrong turns by that point that he didn’t know where it was. Either that, or it was his first day on the job. In either case, after wandering around for a while and beginning to panic, I ran into a fellow student who kindly walked with me the rest of the way, pointing out my tremendous stupidity as he did so in true GDS fashion. That’s story number two.

Now, you might be asking yourself why I decided to tell these stories, since they don’t seem to be relevant to graduation in any way, shape, or form. The reason is that I wanted all of you to know, right off the bat, that I know absolutely nothing about living in the real world. And this is somewhat problematic, seeing as how it’s the job of a graduation speaker to talk about how high school has prepared us to go out into the real world with confidence and, more important, competence. How am I supposed to talk about this momentous event, when the only knowledge about the real world that I have at my disposal is 400 episodes worth of MTV’s The Real World, a show that, I’m told, is a better depiction of college life than the real world?

Now as I understand it, there are a few differences between GDS and the world out there. One, in the real world, there are more than just three or four, open, non-closeted…Republicans. Two, in the real world, if someone is offended by a show like, say, The Producers, they simply don’t see it. Three, unfortunately, the next time we royally fail a written exam, we won’t feel compelled to stick it on a wall and flaunt it proudly. And last, and I know this because my father is a lawyer, the only time you will ever have to do involuntary community service in the real world is if you get convicted of a felony or misdemeanor.

But, in all seriousness, we would be kidding ourselves if we were to say that we have any idea what we’re getting ourselves into. We’ve all been raised on reality television, and sure, shows like Flavor of Love will indeed come in handy when we find ourselves inevitably chasing after a former rapper’s heart (it clearly came in handy for one GDS alum), but the truth is, we don’t really know what reality is. And so we’re left with one question. Has high school truly prepared us for what’s out there? The answer is definitely… no, absolutely not. But that’s okay. Precisely because we have hardly any direct experience with the real world, we can change it.

For instance, when I had no idea how to get to GDS from the Metro, I kept thinking, “If only these street signs weren’t so confusing. How can it be a river and a road!?” When I made the mistake of waiting for the Burger King staff to serve me my meal, I thought, “Well, they should’ve made the process a bit clearer. Perhaps some instructions on meal-ordering etiquette taped to the wall would’ve done the trick.” I wanted to change the real world, because I had no idea what was going on. And for us, though I’m sure none of you would make the same mistakes as me, we’ll all want to change the world as it is, because we will be so confused. As we’ve seen in this last Presidential election, it only takes eight years of nonsense and confusion to motivate people to change things for the better, and putting aside for a moment the fact that the Obama girls ended up going to Sidwell, things have changed for the better.

So the next time someone says they’re prepared for the real world, laugh at them, sneer at them, and if there’s time, punch them in the face. If they try to put today’s celebration into concrete terms and quote Bob Dylan with “How does it feel to be on your own?,” retort with one of his incomprehensible lyrics, like “The sun’s not yellow, it’s chicken.” If they quote the Beatles and say “All you need is love,” shout back “I am the eggman, I am the eggman, I am the walrus. Coo-coo-ca-choo.”

In short, the only modest wisdom I can offer is this: the best way to prepare for the real world is to be completely unprepared, to accept that it, much like these lyrics, will be difficult to figure out. For if enough of us are baffled, lost, and waiting for our cheeseburgers and small strawberry shakes, then eventually, we’ll be able to change the real world into what we want it to be. But I could be wrong. After all, those stories about me are true. Thank you so much. Enjoy Jannah Tate.

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Class of 2009 Speaker, Jannah Tate

(Text not yet available)

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Ron Klain, Parent Speaker

Thank you Peter for this invitation to speak.

Before I begin, I want to offer some “thank you’s” on behalf of the parents of the Class of 2009. To Kevin and Tom for their incredible leadership of the High School; to the college counseling team of Chris and Bobby and Barbara, who helped this class achieve record-setting results in a year of record-setting competition in college admissions; and most of all, to the best high school faculty in America, who have given our children a mind-opening, perspective-changing, thought-provoking, worldview-bending, paradigm-shifting, Morris Dancing, education … all on a first-name basis.

Today begins a happy but a hard summer for most of us parents. For as fall approaches, it is not only our own children to whom we must say goodbye, but also, so many more of you whom we have gotten to know. Like many parents, we will miss our daughter’s friends because, unlike our own children, they are polite to us, and they tend not to leave their things strewn about our home. And so, to Hannah’s friends—Sari and Sarah; Lauren and Lindsay; Ashley, Rachel, and Chelsea—girls, you will be missed by Monica and myself, but most of all, by Hannah’s younger brothers, who ask that as you go off to college, be sure to send back pictures.

The job of a great graudation speaker is to dispense life-changing advice, and do it in under 10 minutes. Today, I’m ony going to hit one of those two goals. For I’m afraid that—after much thought—the best advice I can offer the Class of 2009 is this: No matter what comes next for you, however far you go with your schooling, however many more graduation days you enjoy, follow this one simple rule: Never, ever take the advice given to you by a Commencement Speaker over the age of 40.

Fortunately, there is little risk that you will violate this rule, since 99% of graduates forget what their commencement speaker has said less than an hour after graduation is over. My high school commencement address was given by a local official who, a few years later, was arrested for conducting an illegal gambling operation. I don’t remember exactly what his speech said, but we probably should have been more suspicious when, after telling us that we should “take chances” in life, he added “and if you do, the odds are 5-to-1 that you will succeed.”

But as I see it, there are three principal reasons why you should never listen to a Commencement Speaker’s advice, above and beyond the risk that the speaker might turn out to be a felon.

First, the unpleasant truth is that adult Commencement Speakers have lived their lives in “the past;” while you are about to go live your lives in “the future.” Everything we know, everything we have learned, everything we have experienced is from a world that is no more; everything that you will experience is in a world that is yet to be. We see world events colored through the prisms of the U.S.–Soviet conflict and Watergate; but your understanding of the world will always start with 9/11 and the election of Barack Obama. Our understanding of friendship and romance comes from a time when we wrote letters that took days to arrive, and stared nervously at a box we called a “telephone” in the hope that it would ring; but your understanding of connection comes from a reality where you can text, video chat, instant message, facebook chat, and blackberry message anyone, anytime, anywhere on planet Earth.

For the Class of 2009, today’s technology will change everything about your lives—except, probably, how often you phone home from college. But it is not just technology that has changed. If someone had stood up at my high school graduation and said that, in my lifetime, we would see a black President, a Hispanic woman nominated to the Supreme Court, and same sex couples being married in Iowa, they probably could have gotten very good odds from our bookmaking commencement speaker. Yet the Class of 2009 has seen all these things happen—not just in your lifetimes, but before you finished high school. What’s more, many of you— through social action, through volunteering in the last election, through your community service— have helped bring these changes about. What could we possibly tell you about your future in a world that so many of you are already doing so much to change

The second reason why you should ignore advice from over-the-hill Commencement Speakers is that—in addition to our having lived in the past—we have an odd attachment to the past, and a horribly misguided sense that somehow “the good old days” were a time when “everything” was better. A small example serves to illustrate. One day, my wife was bemoaning to our children how much “better” music was when we were teenagers—less coarse, fewer references to drugs and sex. But our kids, having heard this speech before, fired back. “But Mom,” they answered, “isn’t it true that when you were our age, your favorite group was The DOOBIE Brothers?” And then, adding insult to injury, they said, “And back when you and Dad were first dating, wasn’t your favorite song ‘Afternoon Delight’—and that wasn’t a song about having milk and cookies after school, was it?” So much for the purity of the past.

More seriously, the point I want to make about every generation’s attachment to its own youth is this: notwithstanding all the challenges the Class of 2009 faces as it enters the world today—economic problems; the risk of terrorism; a global environmental crisis; and more—notwithstading every other obstacle that you will have to overcome, the arc of human progress teaches us that the world that you, the Class of 2009, will build for yourselves and your children will be more prosperous, more fair, more humane, more peaceful, and more just than the one in which your parents have lived. The famous saying—those who do not know history are doomed to flunk Richard’s class (I mean, the saying: "those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it")— is not a call to learn from the past so you can replicate what we have done, but rather, a suggestion that you learn history so you can do things differently. So for goodness sakes, don’t listen to us—except to learn what we did, and then do the opposite!

Which brings me to the third reason you should never take advice from Commencement Speakers: because any lessons that we have learned are not the product of our successes but, rather, came from the things that went wrong and the things we never saw coming, from our mistakes and our failures. When I was a high school senior, I wanted to go to Harvard for college. I got rejected, and set off, disappointed, for Georgetown. And yet it was at Georgetown where I got my start in politics—working on Capitol Hill part time during school—and where, most important, I met my best friend, who now, 30 years later, is still the love of my life.

 I have seen this pattern time and again. I found my first job working on a Presidential campaign because I was forced into a job search when the Senator I was working for was defeated. Decades later, it was the lessons that myself and others learned from electoral defeats—not victories—that shaped our contributions to Barack Obama’s successful campaign in 2008. As my old boss, Vice President Al Gore, said on the night he conceded the Florida Recount, “defeat can serve as well as victory to shape the soul and let the glory out.” The lessons that should guide you in life are not the tales of success that a commencement speaker shares, but rather, the failures and disappointments that you yourselves will suffer along the way.

So I’ve come to the close of this speech with no real advice for the Class of 2009, other than the advice that you should ignore any advice that you might get in a speech like this one. I do, however, have a simple plea for the graduates. Your parents have given you a gift of an education at GDS that far surpasses the start in life that 95% of us had when we were kids. We ask only one thing in return. When you leave for school, email us, text us, im us, bbim us, fbim us, tweet us—but as my own mother had to recently remind me, none of those electronic communications substitutes for the need, at least once a week, for us to hear your voices on the phone. Because as much as we enjoy your text messages and your online photos (at least the ones you let us see), you should never forget that from the time you first screamed your first cry after birth to the day you first said, “look at me, Mom and Dad,” at a dance recital or a soccer game to the time, freshman year, that we were first able to pick out your voice out above the din of the GDS forum to that moment last week when we heard you say your final farewells to your friends in the gym on senior night, it is the sound of your voices that has been the joy of our lives, and that we will miss the most this fall.

Congratulations, Class of 2009.

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Read last year's graduation speeches, from the Class of 2008.

Read graduation speeches from the Class of 2007.

Read graduation speeches from the Class of 2006.

Read graduation speeches from the Class of 2005.

Read graduation speeches from the Class of 2004.

Read graduation speeches from the Class of 2003.

Read graduation speeches from the Class of 2002.

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