WMS/MMS Graduation Speech, 2012

The two Wauconda Middle Schools hold their promotion exercises at the same time, on a Tuesday night. It is a large group, but the principals move it along pretty quickly. Below is my address for the middle schools. The idea came from Ann. She thought there must be something in the fiftieth anniversary of The Phantom Tollbooth (which was actually last year) that would make a good topic, and she was right. Always nice to throw in some Chicago history as well. As an added bonus, after the ceremony, the board members and administration went out to Twigs in Lake Zurich to get pizza and unwind.  Twigs used to be Cozzi's pizza, putter golf, batting cages, and game room, where Nathan was gainfully employed one summer. As usual, some great stories about how, as in so many businesses, management is pretty clueless.   

Note:  You can find pictures of the Wauconda High School graduation here from the Daily Herald newspaper. Most years when they do this I don't get into the picture set; this year I made it in. It is a very colorful ceremony with the purple and gold school colors for the robes. The pictures won't stay up for long, so if you are reading this much later than summer of 2012, the link might not work.   


Wauconda Middle School
Matthews Middle School
Commencement Address
May 22, 2012

On behalf of the Board of Education of District 118, I would like to welcome family, friends, District 118 staff, and students to these promotion exercises.

Over the course of the past school year, the world has seen several milestone 50^th anniversaries. Fifty years ago, John Glenn, in the space capsule Friendship 7, became the first American astronaut to orbit the earth. The first Walmart store was opened in Bentonville, Arkansas and the first K-Mart store was opened in Garden City, Michigan. The Incredible Hulk Comic #1 written by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby debuted in 1962. Jamaicans celebrated independence from Great Britain and this fall, it will be the 50^th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis,

It is also the 50^th anniversary of the publication of a children’s book written by Norton Juster, who was an architect in Massachusetts. The book was titled The Phantom Tollbooth, and over the years I have been told by many kids that it is the favorite book they read in school. It tells the story of Milo, a boy bored by the world around him, for whom every activity seems a waste of time. One day he arrives home from school and finds a mysterious package that contains a miniature tollbooth and a map. Milo drives through the tollbooth in his miniature car and finds himself on a strange and wonderful road in The Lands Beyond. Milo meets many characters as he travels through the land and learns a lot about words and numbers and what it means to be educated.

Milo is told, “Whatever we learn has a purpose and whatever we do affects everything and everyone else, if even in the tiniest way. Why, when a housefly flaps his wings, a breeze goes round the world; when a speck of dust falls to the ground, the entire planet weighs a little more; and when you stamp your foot, the earth moves slightly off its course. Whenever you laugh, gladness spreads like the ripples in a pond; and whenever you're sad, no one anywhere can be really happy. And it's much the same thing with knowledge, for whenever you learn something new, the whole world becomes that much richer.

King Azaz and the Mathemagician give Milo a mission to rescue their daughters, the two Princesses, and also tell Milo that there is a serious problem with his quest, but they will only tell Milo about it when the quest is over. When Milo completes his quest, he asks King Azaz what the secret was. The secret, it turns out, was that the mission was impossible. “Impossible?” Milo asks. "Yes, indeed," the king answers; "but if we'd told you then, you might not have gone---and, as you've discovered, so many things are possible just as long as you don't know they're impossible."  

On the east side of O’Hare Airport, there is a short road that links the parking lots and shuttle areas with the airport. It is named Bessie Coleman Drive. Bessie Coleman was born in 1892 in Texas to parents that were of African American and Native American descent. One of 13 children, she spent most of her time looking after her brothers and sisters. She graduated from 8^th grade at the top of her class, but couldn’t afford to go any further. She worked at menial jobs until she was 23, when she moved to Chicago to live with her older brother. She worked as a manicurist in a barber shop, but what she really longed to do was learn to fly a plane. She had been fascinated as a young student by books she had read about the Wright Brothers and other aviation pioneers. Pilot schools in America would not accept women students, so through the money she saved working and the help of sponsors in the African American community in Chicago, she went to France to learn how to be a pilot. She made her first appearance at an air show in 1922 in New York City at an event honoring veterans of the all-black 369^th American Expeditionary Force of World War I. Six weeks later she gave her first air show in Chicago including figure eights, loops, and flight paths that nearly struck the ground. Everybody knew that it was impossible for a black woman to become a pilot. All that meant to Bessie Coleman was that she would be one of the first. In 1977, some fifty years after her death, her dream of starting an aviation school for women finally came true when a group of women pilots from Chicago founded the Bessie Coleman Aviators Club. In 1992, she received national recognition when the US Postal Service issued a stamp in her honor.

As Milo learned, so many things are possible just as long as you don't know they're impossible. 

Four years from now, you will be going through a similar ceremony on a Sunday afternoon celebrating your graduation from high school and your passage into the life of a young adult. Starting now, you will decide how those next four years will proceed. Your decisions will determine how the next four years will shape the rest of your life.

As Milo discovers in The Phantom Tollbooth, “The most important reason for going from one place to another is to see what's in between.” Enjoy your next four years in between graduations turning the impossible into the possible. Thank you.