To the class of 2018: Ignore the grad speaker
It’s that time of year when many media stories begin with “It’s that time of year,” and when all across the land thousands of young people will be inspired, confused or amused by graduation speeches.
Enduring the grad speech and the rest of the monotonous ceremony while sitting still for hours in a stifling gym wrapped in a polyester gown and wearing a silly hat (where does that tassel go?) is an obligatory right of educational passage. It’s as much an essential ordeal for the relieved parents as it is for the graduate.
As much it is an unpleasant, squirmy experience, it does offer the graduate the reward of the assembly line grip and grin of the diploma hand-off. Pity, though, the poor soul tapped to deliver a grad speech. While each graduate is ushered off on a fresh start in life, the grad speech-maker faces the daunting task of coming up with something fresh and original to say, without using the words “daunting task.”
Your scribe has been there, and in the first of two such occasions, opted to bedazzle the cuticle-examining audience with a settling of accounts with an old math teacher nemesis, who, concluding that I did not possess a beautiful mind for math or other intellectual pursuits, suggested “You should switch to shop.” I sometimes wish I had, knowing now what skilled tradespeople make (not that we’re in this thing for the money, right? Right?)
The other time, in a vain attempt to “relate” and “connect” with the younger generation, I turned the lyrics from teen pop sensation Rebecca Black’s inane but addictive ditty Friday into a parable about facing scholastic challenges. I opined: “‘Partying,’ in her clever symbolism, surely means studying and learning, and ‘fun, fun, fun,’ by consequence, means ‘marks, marks, marks!’ ”
I even quoted Quinn Fabray, a character on the then-hit TV show Glee: “You can be married many times, but you only graduate from high school once.” I think the context here was the choice of a dress for the prom.
It’s not known whether any of these efforts at hipness helped or hampered the attempt to deliver the main message, which was to beseech the digital generation to read, read, read.
Graduation speakers must tread that highwire of offering sage advice about forging one’s path in life, but not appearing to be too smug and self-satisfied. “I did it, so you can too!”
It helps to remember how, despite all the pomp and circumstances, graduating from high school, cegep or university is actually a very big deal. How many of us, as wee folks looking ahead to years and years of classes, studying, essays and exams, thought it would never end.
Sometimes, it helps that grad speakers be counter-intuitive, cut against the grain, tread the path less taken, shun the usual clichés. One example that comes to mind of recent note is Xavier Dolan, the precocious Quebec filmmaker extraordinaire.
Dolan is also, as he admitted at the Bishop’s University convocation ceremony two years ago where he received an honourary degree, a cegep drop-out, possibly one of the rare such people to have received such a distinction.
Because I am a drop-out,” he began, “I must admitted the chances of me standing here one day on stage in one of these robes was rather thin. Lucky me. Life found a way to make me wear it.”
Quoting a Celine Dion song, Dolan said, “such is my fate, I go my own way.” Though confessing his lack of formal post-secondary education often left him feeling intimidated and vulnerable in certain circles, he said he “followed his instincts” in pursuing his dream of making movies. At the time, Dolan’s video of Adele’s mega-hit Hello, filmed in the Townships, had received more than two billion hits.
When trying to pitch his first script, I Killed My Mother, Dolan said “producers would mock me and tell me to go back to school.”
Dolan’s path, of course, is exceptional; but with diploma firmly in hand, it is the challenge of all new graduates to take that piece of parchment and “go their own way.” Fare thee well, class of 2018, and if you ever have to give a grad speech, make it memorable.