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.

WHS Commencement Address, 2012

It's that time of year again. As the President of the Board of Education, it falls on me to give the commencement address at the graduation of Wauconda High School 2012. It was originally a cost - and time - cutting move to not seek out professional speakers for this role. I enjoy giving the address each year, but wonder as I get older if I am losing touch with what high school kids are like. I tend to think of them as constantly on the phone which means they are being antisocial to the people they are with, although they don't agree with this since the people they are with are on the phone as well. Hey! Let's all walk together but you aren't permitted to talk to anyone that is within 10 miles of you. Won't that be civilized. Any attempt by an adult to engage them in conversation will degenerate into a whatever moment. The odds of closing facebook and opening a real book are minimal. So am I pretty far off? Have I lost touch with the current version of high school senior? I thought so. They all having thoughtful discussions with their parents about how best to be of service to the community, aren't they? Meeting at Starbucks on Saturday morning to wrestle with the meaning of "Little lamb, who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee," and why is that reaction endothermic and not exothermic?  Oh, well. Here is this year's version of commencement addresses by Dummies. For my family, please note, The story I tell actually happened to a Barrington student of mine, but I thought it might be more pertinent to them if it involved Wauconda students. Sorry, Nate. You're not headed to California this winter for a wedding.  

Commencement Address

May 20,2012

Wauconda High School

John Armstrong

Parents, friends, faculty, and members of the graduating class of 2012:

On behalf of the District 118 School Board, I welcome you to the 96th annual commencement of Wauconda High School.

I would like to tell you a story I heard some years ago at the Illinois Storytelling Festival, which used to be held every summer just 15 miles up Route 12 in Spring Grove.  I can’t remember who told this story. I have heard dozens of storytellers over the many years I went to the festival and try as I might I can’t remember where this came from and I apologize to the teller for not giving him or her proper credit. I have since seen the story online in several different places, but also without any credit given. It is called “The Parable of the Taoist Farmer.”

Once upon a time there was an elderly Chinese farmer who farmed a small plot of land with his son and the help of a very old horse who did the plowing. One day, the horse ran away, and all the neighbors came around to commiserate that evening. "So sorry to hear your horse ran away. This is most unfortunate." The farmer said, "Maybe yes, maybe no." The next week the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it, and everybody came back in the evening and said, "What a great turn of events. You now have eight horses! Oh, isn't that lucky. " And he said "Maybe yes, maybe no." The next day his son tried to ride one of these horses but he was thrown, and broke his leg, and they all said, "Oh dear, that's too bad," and he said, "Maybe yes, maybe no." The following week an invading army came marching through the tiny village and shanghaied young men into the army. They rejected his son because he had a broken leg. Again all the people came around and said, "Isn't that great!" And he said, "Maybe yes, maybe no."

My son, who graduated from Wauconda High School in 2001, had a good friend in high school who finished college and was set on entering grad school with the idea of being a film-maker. His parents had moved from Wauconda to southern California while he was in college because of his dad’s job transfer. He decided that if he wanted to be a film-maker, the best place to go was the University of Southern California. USC – the film school in Los Angeles that gave us such graduates as George Lucas, the director - creator of Star Wars; Robert Zemeckis, who directed Back to the Future and Forrest Gump; and Ron Howard, who enrolled there after starring as Opie Taylor in the Andy Griffith Show and went on to direct  Apollo 13 and A Beautiful Mind after graduation.  It is the oldest film school in the world, established in 1929 and generally regarded as one of the most prestigious film schools anywhere. He sent an application, including a video he had shot in college for his film class. He didn’t get in. He was devastated. “Isn’t that terrible?” we said. He sent an e-mail to the admissions office asking for advice and they responded very kindly that his video was well-received but that his resume was a little short on experience. They suggested that it might be to his advantage if he volunteered at a small film studio to see what film-making was about up close and personal. So he did. He spent two years there doing all sorts of jobs, eventually getting paid as an intern, and realizing from the start that he really didn’t know much about the business of making movies. Two years later, he applied again to the USC School of Cinematic Arts and was accepted. He graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in Film and Television Production last winter. He returned to the Chicago area this spring for the wedding of one of his Island Lake friends and described to everyone how important his non-acceptance into USC was. “Because of the experience you gained at the film studio?” someone asked. “Well, somewhat,” he replied, “but mostly because I met Amy there and we’re going to be married next winter and you are all invited to come out to California in January for the wedding. “

“You didn’t get accepted to your dream school. Isn’t that terrible?”

“Maybe yes, maybe no.”

In spite of the fact that I am a Cubs fan, I enjoy the start of the baseball season every spring. It prompts me to bring out all the classic baseball movies to rewatch: The Natural, Major League, and my favorite, Field of Dreams. There is a point in that movie where Kevin Costner and James Earle Jones are tracking down a small-town Minnesota man who got called up to the big leagues from the minors for the last week of the season. He never gets to bat in the big leagues, and when the season ends, he quits baseball,  goes back to school and eventually becomes the town’s only doctor.

When Kevin Costner finds him, he asks him:

“Fifty years ago, for five minutes you came this close. It would KILL some men to get so close to their dream and not touch it.  They'd consider it a tragedy. “

And Moonlight Graham answers:  “Son, if I'd only gotten to be a doctor for five minutes... now that would have been a tragedy. “

“You didn’t make it as a baseball player? Isn’t that terrible?”

“Maybe yes, maybe no.”

It is a hypothesis of quantum physics (and a staple of science fiction writers) that every time you make a decision, the world splits into two worlds, one going on with the decision you made and the other going on as if you made a different decision. These parallel worlds continue with all the consequences of each decision. Which one is the right one? Who knows? You are going to have many decisions to make in your life, many experiences which at the time you and other people may label as good or bad. But how do you know?   My job as the commencement speaker is to give you advice on how to decide whether your experiences are good or bad. I’m telling you up front, “I don’t know, you don’t know, and your friends and family don’t know.” Each experience leads you down a different path and it may be years before we know whether the decision was a good one or a bad one.

When something happens in your life that sets you back you or causes you pain, remember the Chinese farmer.

Wasn’t that terrible?  Maybe yes, maybe no.

Thank you and congratulations on taking the next step in your life journey. 

 Feel free to comment below. Any thoughts you have will help to improve next year's speeches.