It’s graduation time again in schools all over the western world and as tradition would dictate, as Principal, I was asked to enlighten our graduates with a few words of wisdom in the form of a commencement speech. This is not a first for me, so one would think that after all these times in which I had to address the graduates on their big day, I would simply recycle an already written, one size fits all speech. Not so. You see, kids nowadays seem to get wiser quicker. Some of us baby-booming old folkies may feel threatened by their seemingly precocious wisdom, and just brush it off as cynicism with a touch of arrogance on their part (my parents used to say the same about me), but let's face it, from year to year, kids change and consequently, my message to them also needs to change. So nowadays, gone are the plethora of graduation clichés that used to overrun my first attempts at commencement speech writing.
29 years ago, when I was young and naive, and therefore not very smart, my first commencement speech was riddled with a sea of these graduation clichés, from the predictable ‘your education is just beginning’ to my least favourite of clichéd graduation lines – 'these four years were the best days of your life'. To this bromidic line that inevitably finds its way in most commencement speeches, all I can say is... paaalease…shoot me now why don’t you! For me, school was not a good thing. As a matter of fact it fringed on the dreadful. Especially high school. If those four years were the best years of my life, well, game over, might as well just roll over and die.
Looking back, I guess it was not all bad. From the age of 6 when my mother first abandoned me at the door of that strange Grade 1 classroom with the glistening waxed wooden floor and the overabundance of lush oxygen sucking ferns (boy were there a lot of plants in that room!), I had a rather optimistic foresight of what lay ahead as I embarked on the 12 years of my schooling life. Even that creepy looking black robed grey ashen coloured faced lady greeting us at the door didn't intimidate me; my mother having told me that this was to be my teacher and this also happened to be a nun and that all nuns were married to Jesus. Hey, aside from the polygamistic overtones of that last detail, I figured that you couldn't get a better catch than Jesus, so my ashen coloured faced teacher must have been ok. In any case, that first year in the fern jungle was probably my best year of schooling. It was downhill from then on.
I really never did like school. Like, really really never did. I remember a few years back when I watched a retrospective special of The Ed Sullivan Show on TV. It was an agonizing experience. Throughout the 2 hours of the program, my stomach was tied in knots. Seeing those acts again fourty years later, from the Dave Clark Five to Topo Gigio strutting their stuff on the Ed Sullivan stage brought back that sinking gut feeling in the pit of my stomach that I had experienced as a child on every Sunday evening. Sunday evening represented the end of the weekend and the dawn of another week…at school. The usual and inevitable Sunday night nausea that I experienced as a child is still very vivid in my mind today.
The thought of going back to school would often drive me to tears and I would become physically ill. The weekend was about to come to an end, and with it, the two-day respite from school. Once again, I would need to face those books, those teachers and that silly regimented routine that my parents continually reiterated as being “the best days of my life” School was a completely and utterly useless waste of my time. Simply stated, school was stupid and boring and I was miserable.My aversion to school was somewhat stifled during the early years of my university years. Although the social component of those early college days represented a substantial part of my university lifestyle, some learning also made its way in my life and I did succeed after three years of partying, come out with a Bachelor of Arts degree. During those three years, I had no career aspirations or plans and therefore, there was no purpose to my going to university except to basically get a degree which would, eventually, help me get a job, and perhaps a job I liked at that. Like many of my friends, I was no shining light and setting goals or drawing up a personal mission statement were the furthest things on my mind. My major interest lay a few blocks away from college at the Marion Street neighborhood pub, more specifically with this skilled and talented young lady whose stage name, if I recall, was Irma Sperma. Irma was an accomplished dancer, very good at what she did, at least I thought so, and so did my pub brothers. What she could do with those tassels would make your head spin to a point where some of my pub buddies would come close to some sort of paroxysmal seizure. But enough said about Irma, let's get back to the topic of this entry, my dislike of school.
My summers were spent making money working at a variety of meaningless but good paying jobs. It is at one of those jobs where I met the man who would indirectly inspire me to my profession as an educator. His name was Joe Kowalski.
Next entry : Inspirational Joe
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