June 4, 2006

Welcome: Peter Branch, Head of School
Class of 2006 Speaker: Kate Kennedy
From the Principal: Kevin Barr, High School Principal
Faculty Speaker: Topher Dunne, High School History Teacher

Speeches from the Classes of 2002 - 2005...

View Photos from the Class of 2006 Graduation

Welcome by Peter Branch, Head of School

It is my honor and pleasure to welcome you to the conclusion of the 60th year of Georgetown Day School, to our 35th Commencement and to the graduation of the Class of 2006. As you can see, we've got seniors! I am delighted to see you all here today. After many years as a school head, I am well aware, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, that the Class of 2006, will little note nor long remember what I say here. Nevertheless, at this ceremony, it falls to me, first, to revisit the accomplishments of these talented and energetic young men and young women for the benefit of their families and friends and, second, to challenge our near graduates as to what they will do in the years ahead with all their talents and acquired skills and knowledge. As they will soon learn, there is no rest for the able.

The GDS Faculty and Staff well know and appreciate the Class of 2006. We have seen your positive impact on the School and each other since the first of you entered in the fall of 1992 as pre-kindergarteners. Indeed, 25 of you are lifers who entered in pre-k or k. Your ranks have swelled to a total of 113, with a class ethos of both strong individuality and of mutual support. Your character and gifts are diverse.

Your intellectual abilities are undoubted. Despite the implementation of the new SAT I, your combined verbal and math SAT I average was 312 points above the most recent national average. Indeed, one of you received the top possible SAT I combined score of 1600. You have been willing to challenge yourselves academically. Your advisors have tried, often unsuccessfully, to get you to limit the number of your honors and Advanced Placement courses. Nevertheless, this year your class took a total of 250 AP tests. 90 percent of the exams you took as juniors received college credit grades. 50 of you received recognition as Finalists or Commended Scholars in the National Merit, National Achievement, or National Hispanic Scholarship Programs. Two of you had the unique honor of winning awards as Presidential Scholars, one from Maryland and the other from the District of Columbia.

In looking toward your paths beyond GDS, you had the wisdom and sense of yourselves to look broadly for colleges and universities which best fit you as individuals. As a result, this class sent applications to 159 different colleges and universities. Defying the national hysteria about multiple applications, you applied to an average of 6 schools, just what your college counselors recommended. You will be attending a total of 59 different institutions.

The life of the School has benefited from your leadership. You were remarkably good peer leaders to the freshmen, providing support and good cheer, as well as a second lunch out, much to the delight of the freshmen and the local restaurants. The positive spirit of SSC was generated through your personal approach to the school community. On multicultural and sexual orientation issues, you facilitated school, regional and national dialogues, obtaining recognition for GDS's efforts at the DC Metro Diversity Leadership Conference and the national People of Color Conference. On Diversity Retreats and during Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, you gave voice to the need to celebrate all of the students in the School.

In the Arts, you will be missed Your individual talents were remarkable as shows, one acts, musicals, and vocal and instrumental performances over your four high school years demonstrated. Particularly notable during productions was your basic decency to each other, to the faculty and to younger students. Your studio art work enhanced the halls of GDS.

Although community service is often begun as a requirement, many of you came to understand it as a personal and social responsibility. Together, you have contributed a documented 12, 734 hours to helping others. You have worked on ranches in the West and revitalized urban parks in the District; you've worked to rebuild the Louisiana coastline and constructed low-income housing in D.C.; you've saved endangered animals; coached children in a variety of sports, prepared meals for the hungry and homeless; saved lives in emergency rooms and ambulances; provided help to the elderly and ill, and tutored and mentored children in schools, recreation departments, through music, the Special Olympics and our own art department. You have worked all over the world. A number of students have spent hundred of hours creating a sister school in Ethiopia. Altogether, this has been a remarkably caring class.

In athletics you have given great support to GDS teams for four years, helping win 2 MAC Cross Country banners, 2 MAC Track and Field banners, and 2 MAC men's soccer banners. Many of you have been named to the all-league teams in MAC and ISL for your respective sports. 3 of you ran on the 4 by 800 meter relay team at the Nike Indoor nationals which placed 18th in the nation and set a new GDS record. All of the teams which would have used our field bore with good grace, and even with success, the absence of home games as a result of the construction.

In this talented class, there were many individual achievements. A listing of a few of your honors captures the breadth of your interests. One young woman collected 2,800 prom dresses for very grateful Katrina victims and got more media attention than many a celebrity or politician. Another individual was the national winner last year of the Lincoln Essay contest in which she described how "sitting in the hall between classes, my friends and I discuss the faults of our school's administration, the right to same sex marriage, and the justification for the Iraq war." As a junior, another student helped save his father's life thanks to the application of CPR learned in a GDS P.E. class. In the National Latin exam, a member of the Latin Cult earned a perfect score. One of you received a Scholastic Art and Writing Gold Key this year for her Photography Portfolio. You contributed to the most successful Debate team in GDS history, in one weekend taking the top prize in tournaments on both coasts. Two of you were named the Top Debate Squad at the High School level, an award given this year for the first time.

In the Auger Bit and the Yearbook, in Its Academic, Model Congress, Model UN, the National Science Bowl, the National Math Exam, and in all the ways GDS students challenge yourselves and bring life to our school, the Class of 2006 has been distinguished.

After the Awards Assembly, it was my pleasure to receive a copy of the 2006 Menagerie, the GDS yearbook, which adopted as its theme, "Under Construction," with a wonderful grasshopper holding plans and wearing a yellow hardhat. With the spirit of generosity which this class has shown throughout its career, the editor writes, in the Foreword, that "What we hoped to highlight ... was not the minor inconveniences of the building process, but, rather, this dynamic time of new beginnings and positive change." She then comments that "the entire GDS school community shares the feeling of excitement about the physical changes which will enhance the GDS experience."

From the rapt attention to the construction site of students in the library to the cooperation of parents with the new carpool procedures to the successful and speedy packing efforts of the faculty and staff, the GDS high school threw itself into supporting the construction professionals in their efforts on our behalf. Dislocated from their former perches around GDS, seniors found new haunts and even friends and laid claim on their own square of carpeting in the halls.

The yearbook theme of "Under Construction" also reflects, in the minds of the editors and staff, "the essence of senior year in a more symbolic sense." "After all," they wisely note, "senior year is a time of figuring out who we are and where we are going, at least for the next four years. Our lives are under construction, and we have all benefited from the firm and deep foundations that GDS has provided us with in the academic fundamentals, but they have also instilled in us the power of intellectual curiosity, excitement and risk-taking. As we embark on the next phase of our lives, we have been enriched by the school's values of respect, trust and caring."

As Head of GDS, I could not be prouder of that succinct summary of the goals of this school. The Class of 2006 gets it. And you know that you are still a work in progress, or under construction. The faculty from your earliest days at GDS has valued and challenged your undoubted intellect. On the other hand, you and they have known when your curiosity and developmental inclinations got it wrong. One of the great things about being head of a prek to grade 12 school is the opportunity to watch such developing understanding. Since you entered third grade, I have that pleasure, as well as a few challenges. In Middle School, when you took too seriously a teacher's expressed desire for one of the white rocks lining Landon's driveway, we had to extend our apologies, and, of course, the rock, to that fellow school. That same year, your sense of justice and respect for community were demonstrated at your post 9/11 assembly when you read from the Koran and the Old and New Testaments and listened to a classmate play Jimmy Hendrix's version of the Star Spangled Banner on her electric guitar.

Your yearbook celebrates the school's values of trust, caring and respect. Those values have become part of your lives because of the belief in them by your family, as well as by your teachers. When the adults in your lives trust you, care for you and respect you, then you learn by that example to extend such support to each other. Mentoring, whether of second graders by fifth graders, or of freshman and sophomores girls by junior and senior girls in SIS, or in Monday tutoring or Tuesday art classes, or of freshmen by seniors, or of children in an Ethiopian village - mentoring has been an essential training for you as the transformative leaders I know you will be.

GDS would not be the school for social justice founded 60 years ago if it did not value your character development as much, if not more, than your academic growth. As a result, your teachers value your spirit of care and concern. One of your high school teachers writes, "They helped each other learn more than any group of students I've ever taught." Another commented, "I've never worked with a better class! The camaraderie from the very beginning was remarkable. Any group of '06 students was wonderful to be with."

Trust, caring and respect, of others and their beliefs, are required to a much greater extent in our world than ever before. In his book, High Noon: 20 Global Problems, 20 Years To Solve Them, J. F. Rischard offers an agenda that will require global trust and cooperation, environmental care, and a respect for all humanity. It will take the concerted efforts of many to address and reverse the problems which confront us at an accelerating rate. I am confident that from this school, from the members of this class of 2006, we are sending forth individuals of great ability, tremendous values, and much determination. You have so much to offer in sensitivity and vision. May you continue to demonstrate the power of intellectual curiosity, excitement and risk-taking which has made you such a wonderful addition to our school community. Your energy and values are essential to that larger world that you will greet as you leave this hall and GDS.

The Faculty and I have great expectations for the GDS Class of 2006. Go with our best wishes and our many hopes. You have our affection and I know you will continue to deserve our respect. Congratulations on your successful commencement.

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Class of 2006 Speaker, Kate Kennedy

As I sat down to prepare this talk, I considered the recent graduation ceremonies at Harvard and Columbia, where the class speakers abandoned their notes and denounced the distinguished commencement speakers, John McCain and Condolezza Rice. The students received great reviews from their fellow students for doing this, along with fantastic publicity in the national media.

So I thought, ‘Perhaps I should denounce the commencement speaker.’

(Pause, glance at Dad)

And then I remembered that I need a ride home after this.

So I decided instead to talk about values. What values have I been taught by my school? By my time so far on earth? By my parents?

Let’s start with school.

High School is the last chapter before entering the “real world.” It’s a stepping-stone on the path to a higher education, a good career, and a successful life. At GDS, things are slightly more complicated.

You see, we are a school of values. Here we value moral and ethical fiber above the kind of fiber they use to make dollar bills. At the same time, GDS is a highly regarded private school that sets high expectations for its students. We are expected to achieve. We are expected to succeed. And though few would admit it, we are expected to go forth and make a pile of dough. At the same time, we are expected to look as though we wanted nothing to do with it.

Eduardo, my Spanish teacher, is a man of GDS values. "I HATE money," he would tell our class. "I HATE it! Chicos, chicos. Let me tell you this. Never do I carry money in my pocket. I cannot even LOOK at it. When it’s the time to do the bills, I say MARIBEL! Take it away from ME!

Bravo, Eduardo. Bravo. I salute you in your fierce rebellion against that green poison about which so many non-GDS-ers obsess.

But I ask you this: What should be the measurement of our accomplishments? If our success does not come in dollars and cents, then what coinage does it come in?

Perhaps it is love—beautiful love—that we should value most.

No, unfortunately, it’s not love either. Another piece of Eduardian wisdom. Ahem. "Oh Chicos. You will never find love. You should only have one love in the world but probably he lives in China."

Success doesn't come from love. Success doesn't come from money. Perhaps success comes from service to others.

After the devastating Hurricane Katrina, our head of school, Peter Branch, inspired us to dedicate our lives to helping the outside world. “You know, kids. I’ve been thinking hard about all of these problems on the golf course—cough—I mean, Gulf Coast.”

School has taught us a lot of mixed messages. They pressure us to succeed, but never really told us what real success consists of. Even so, our teachers have always been pretty supportive of us no matter what path we take. We got a little nervous when we found out GDS stuck the secret service on one of our own. But for the most part, GDS has been a source of comradery.

Luckily, we have other sources of values to look to. Our American society provides SO many role models. Let’s examine the prevailing ones for my generation. Today, young women idolize Paris Hilton, whose acclaimed guidebook to life, entitled Confessions of an Heiress is today’s answer to the confessions of St. Augustine. This invaluable tome contains such invaluable advice as, “Always act like you’re wearing an invisible crown.”

How true.

Today, instead of Babe Ruth, we have Barry Bonds. We have corporate shills like Tom DeLay and Dick Cheney as political leaders, and Kenneth Lay and Donald Trump as the icons for our business values. They teach us that the whole point of life is to make yourself a big pile and whoever dies with the most stuff wins!

When society’s values seem empty and our school’s values confuse us, it is our parents, the ones who raised us, to whom we look.

Like most GDS students, I love my parents. My father taught me many things: to skin dead animals, never to pass road kill without putting it in your car, to plunge yourself into any body of water before testing the temperature.

And my mother deserves quite a bit of credit for surviving my upbringing. However, I think it would help all of you if I give you a glimpse of the world from our perspective—yes, you—you baby boomers—baby boomers pretending to be adults, but still babies in so many ways. And yet you are our parents!

God help my generation.

You are so quick to point out when we make a mess and leave it for someone else to clean up. But look at the mess you guys have made of our world.

Indeed, as we graduate today, the consuming task of our lifetime is going to be dealing with the terrible fix you’ve gotten us into and paying off the astronomical debt you’ve run up on our account.

Your generation recently turned a $5.6 trillion surplus into a $10 trillion debt that our generation will have to pay. The kids from our generation are dying in a war that your generation created. Your generation has also trampled the constitution that was to have been our greatest inheritance. You’ve turned the land of the free into the land of the spied upon. Our government is torturing people, imprisoning Americans without rights, spying on our citizens, and listening to our phone calls. We are helping Iraq write a constitution. Why don’t we just give them ours? We don’t seem to need it anymore!

I know you think of your generation as idealistic, but when I think of yours, I think of the movie Animal House. You were funny and endearing when you were guzzling beer and smoking pot. There was something sympathetic about your long, dirty hair, and your love beads and peace signs, tie-dyed T-shirts and your wild antics at Woodstock. But now you have bank accounts and giant corporations and congressional committees and weapons systems and bunker busters and Bradley tanks and Humvees and, quite frankly, you’re dangerous.

It’s no wonder we’re nervous about you running the country. Even the idea of you driving heavy machinery makes us anxious.

But despite everything, we love you.

And you should take a step back and be proud of us for what we’ve accomplished.

Despite the fact that most of us are probably acid babies because you were taking LSD while we were in our neo-natal stages, the statistics show that we drink less alcohol, take fewer drugs and smoke fewer cigarettes than your generation.

Plus we have more sex.

So next time you tear your hair out—or what remains of it—and shake your head in exasperation when we get a tattoo, don’t get home on time, or if WE leave a beer can in the living room; next time you want to tell us that we’re acting irresponsibly, that our bad behavior will affect our future, put yourself in our shoes. We don’t always trust your judgment. We love you, but we don’t always feel we can rely on you to do the right thing.

Sometimes you remind us that you are the ones paying the bills, so you have the right to make the rules. But you baby boomers are going to enjoy your Social Security and pension plans and we are going to have to pay for them.

Plus, we’re virtually assured that there will be nothing left when our time comes to retire. So the reality is, we are the ones paying the bills.

Doesn’t that mean, by your own logic, that we should be making the rules?

Here are a couple to start off with.

First, we shouldn’t have to go to Montreal to get a beer. You didn’t. You only went there to avoid Vietnam.

Second, the people who start a war should fight it.

Third, the money you’re spending on our college educations is ours anyway, so stop using it to lord over us.

I know you think that you’re smarter than us. But be grateful for some of the things we’ve taught you—the practical things that I taught my parents. For instance, even a small tree can stop and destroy a large SUV when you drive it backwards across the lawn; king-size waterbeds hold enough water to fill a 2000-square-foot house 4 inches deep. If you spray hair spray on dust bunnies and run over them with roller blades, they catch fire. If you hook a dog leash over a ceiling fan, the motor can rotate a 30-pound baby brother wearing Batman underwear and a superman cape. Water-balloons are not glass-proof. Brake fluid mixed with Clorox makes smoke—lots of smoke. Super glue is forever. No matter how much Jell-O you put in a swimming pool, you still can’t walk on water. Pool filters don't do well with Jell-O. Garbage bags do not make good parachutes. Marbles in gas tanks make lots of noise when driving. You can make a cat dizzy by putting him on spin cycle. Cats throw up twice their weight when dizzy.

This is the collected wisdom of my generation.

Each generation learns from the ones that went before it.

Mine has had to learn from yours. You left us some good lessons, and some not-good lessons. But the lesson you most left us is that whatever your faults, you loved us.

So we forgive you. Let the healing begin.

Thank you.

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From the Principal: Kevin Barr, High School Principal

Good afternoon. If you look at your program, it says that I am to offer comments. I believe that this is a change from past programs. The implication seems to be that I am not to give a speech or read entire chapters from my favorite books. To make sure of that fact, Peter Branch, operating under the ruse of the construction project, even ordered all the books in the library packed and stored.

As Moby-Dick would be packed in a box somewhere out of reach, I decided that for my part of the ceremonies, I would just rap the lyrics to an Eminem song, but sadly Jodie Foster beat me to it in her speech last week at U. Penn. So, I am stuck. I could be completely original, but remarks at graduation are supposed to channel the wisdom of the ages. Leave it to our seniors, though, to give me a way out. Unlike Jodie Foster, our seniors understand the one great cardinal rule of life: rock and roll is a young person's game and no one should ever quote songs by anyone younger than oneself. So it was that Hannah the Cruel, fronted by Laura Zax, closed out the recent senior banquet with a medley of Beatle songs. Since then, I have been humming those songs, thankful that the current crop of rock and rollers still honor their musical forbears. But it has made me wonder. Does life really go on, if we sing obladi, oblada? Why would anyone keep all his money in a big brown bag inside a zoo? Why was Lucy in the Sky with diamonds? It's a nice thought, but when folks are in their twenties, should the height of their ambition be just to hold somebody's hand? And no matter what we might wish, we do not all live in yellow submarines. But what about John Lennon's final little bit of wisdom, that all you need is love, that there's nowhere you can be that isn't where you were meant to be, and that it's easy?

Almost all of you know by now that it isn't easy. Some of you have lost parents; some of you have lost homes. Friendships have come and gone. Yet here you are, beautiful kids, all of you, ready to go off and make your way in the world. I would like you to remember that if love isn't all you need, it will carry you pretty far in this world and it is a better anodyne than power, money, or momentary physical gratification. John's claim notwithstanding, there may be somewhere in this world that isn't where you were meant to be, although, as Melville says, it is well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in.

Take the gifts that you have been given by nature and schooling out into the world, be open to all you encounter, and when times seem particularly tough, remember love may not be all you need, but acting as if it is might just make this world a little less broken.

Take care of each other and yourselves. We love you.

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Faculty Speaker: Topher Dunne, High School History Teacher

Welcome to all and sincere thanks to the class of 2006 for the honor of being your faculty representative at their graduation. I only hope that some of you haven't already complained to your neighbor that you hoped I'd bring Steve Cutts along with me this time too.

Here's a piece of practical advice as you depart. While cultural mores abound, please remember that manners in the outside world don't usually equate with manners at GDS.

Today you don't need a replacement. You are here at an inclusive ritual, where all of you will play a part. The staff walked in with you, as we have gone with you, sometimes leading and sometimes accompanying, on various explorations and adventures together these past 2 to 13 years. We didn't sit quietly and watch you enter then offer a quick goodbye. We didn't don various regalia and lead a march in as a means of proving status just as we don't want you to do the same. You will leave this ritual space on your own. Our trip ends here (the staff being condemned, like Sisyphus, to begin rolling the rock up the hill once more, only by now it is likely graffiti-ed with 2007). You have a ticket out waiting up here. I'm not sure where else this ticket will take you beyond 'across the stage.' You won't even have to show it to get into the reception. Nevertheless it is why we are here today.

Beyond the armchair anthropology in approaching this ceremony, I was sitting in front of my iBook and pondered, What does graduation and a GDS diploma mean? You have reached a level of ability and understanding...or at least minimum academic performance according to our standards both as individual faculty members and together as an institution. More importantly, you have gone through the process that is GDS. For me I find it more important to see how you think about and approach issues and problems rather than what information you garnered from your FReP, your knowledge of phyla, irregular verbs or the like. It is also highly likely that some of your most memorable lessons happened outside a classroom. In many of these cases you have educated one another, which really distills the GDS process to an elegant core.

Soon, however, this process, and your journey together, will end. Your part in this ritual is to cross this stage, and don't worry, I'll be among the group holding out a hand if you aren't sure where (or whether?) to cross. It may feel like a perfunctory walk, only to hit you with significance later. It is, however, liberation, a movement toward the light. It marks passage between one phase of life and the next.

Most of the rest of life tends to have ambiguous endings rather than planned ones, so I urge you to see the comfort in rituals like these. Contrast this ceremony with when you leave for home, the beach, supper, whatever. How many people will you leave with a meaningful goodbye? How many get a "see you later" to avoid a meaningful conversation? For that matter, how many just get "see you at the beach?" We likely will not all be together in the same place again and in any event you certainly won't see each other or us as often as you have for the past 2 to 13 years, so contact and communication with each other and those of us still at GDS will become a much more active and deliberate choice as soon as you cross this stage.

Let's face facts, in all your actions and even with all of your academic excellence it is highly likely that you have committed a variety of errors in getting to this point. We, as a faculty, have been painfully aware of at least some of them. Although you probably don't want to broadcast your errors, they are a part of you. While some errors can be genius, like penicillin or jazz, most are slips of execution or judgement.

Whether you've unsent an email with errors in it (or even accidentally hit reply all and proceeded to type a personal message), backed out of a scheduling commitment since you couldn't manage your calendar properly, or not given another person a chance, the errors you commit are yours to own. Don't dim your light by being evasive. Acknowledge, accept and move on. Grow. Getting things wrong can teach us how to get things right.

But there is a gray area. Some actions may look and feel like errors but leave you uncertain. They may be the unpopular thing, or the relatively risky thing, even the thing you later realize to be a huge mistake. Here I refer you to the term dharma, which is not easily translated from Sanskrit. It can be enclosure, the great norm, moral imperative. It functionally comes down to what you realize to be the right thing to do in a situation, not just some litmus test of rules. I hope one of the major implicit lessons of our curriculum is to instill a sense of dharma in you. In the past I have been both praised and basically dismissed for the 'error' of doing what I believed and thought was right. There are norms of living that I hope GDS has helped to instill in you that can be more dynamic and vibrant than any set of rules.

I hope you have taken time these past weeks to take stock of what you have done in your time at GDS. If not perhaps you can ignore me for the next few sentences and do so. What shall you do now as graduates? You are young, generally unafraid to be at least somewhat foolish, and, I hope, still open to new ideas. Steve Jobs, someone who thinks different and is on my heroes list because of it, said "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life." Find your path, be the social change that you seek. GO DO SOMETHING!

The past 2 to 13 years have been as formative for you as the next several will likely be. Time may try to settle you in your ways and patterns, but consider this. You never know when enlightenment will hit, so at least try to be open to new perspectives and ideas. You may be on the stage thinking "why am I playing this?" I should have made a list; cake or death? Or it could be two weeks after the final Russian History paper that you realize how you should have answered it. (Yes, some lessons come too late because enlightenment doesn't necessarily follow a timetable.)

Our job as a progressive school is to provide structures and institutions with integrity so that our example (as people) as well as our lessons (as teachers) can let you develop into yourselves. Your job as progressively educated individuals is to demonstrate that integrity and set examples of your own. "Death is ignorance, vigilance is immortality".

When I describe GDS to others who may not be familiar with the institution it quickly takes on overtones of a magical place. It is more than the suspension of disbelief for two hours where some wicked big puppet becomes real and eats the meshuggenah plant store owner with the untraceable accent and then the entire world. GDS can be a place of magical realism, where the honors and accolades of students and the institution abound and depth and significance become commonplace. Are we, a school of 60 years, still hungry? Have we spent more time securing and protecting a reputation by shoring up our curriculum or seeking out truths and valuable lessons? Where is the balance? What is the tradeoff? For that matter, does it have to be one thing or the other? Consider that balance as you make your educational choices over the next 4 to 12 years (yes, another degree can keep you in school).

Lots of great stuff happened for you at GDS, providing relationships, opportunities, and memories beyond the mainstream. You have basked in the glow of its magic and I hope that some of that magic stays with you. I also hope that as the institution grows and ages it retains that power to enchant. Learn from your mistakes and do what you think is right. So say we all! and congratulations and bright moments to the class of 2006.

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Read graduation speeches from the Class of 2008.

Read graduation speeches from the Class of 2007.

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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