A Toast to The Grads

A post popped up on my social media feed recently: the original poster wrote: “Multiplies you by 1”; the response was: “Ach, I’m the exact same, but a process has occurred”.

The joke is about rationalizing the denominator, of course. You put a number through a process and it comes out with the same value, but altered somehow. In the language of mathematics, we would say it has been solved or simplified, but the way I see it, though the thing on the other end still resembles what it used to be, we should hope we somehow made it better.

Season 7, Episode 21 of the Simpsons, “22 Short Films About Springfield”, contains a short sketch so memetic among Millennials it may as well be common parlance: the sketch “Steamed Hams” opens with the Superintendent arriving at the Principal’s house for what soon becomes an unforgettable luncheon. The bell rings; the door opens, the Superintendent says: “I made it, despite your directions”.

Grads: You made it. Despite our directions.

Good Evening, Friends, Family, Colleagues, Graduates, we are gathered here today to celebrate the end of an era, a great shift in the natural order of things, like the change of a season or tide. I am, of course, referring to Thomas Paul’s graduation. Congratulations, Thomas: you survived Pre-Calc 11, a house ban from Privett, and getting your skateboard confiscated by Mr Snow. Though I will never forgive you for the state you left the furniture in Dorm 16, I’ll also never forget what you did to the Coke bottle, and maybe in a few years I’ll even be able to laugh about it.

One of the joys of teaching both 9s and 12s is I get to see the sum total of your growth. In Grade 9 you are confused and befuddled, and in Grade 12 you are still confused and befuddled, but some of you are maybe a bit taller. I learned, in your Grade 9 year, exactly how much bodily harm can accrue in the span of a five minute break, though if memory serves it was Sunny who came back to a lesson on linear relations battered and bruised after tripping up the stairs. Will Catlin, vegging out in the back row; the other MacDonald brother, filming Tik Tok dances; Sam Davis, making sure the class got back on track, even if Laila and Ella weren’t quite back from their inexplicable trip to the school store for “instant noodles”. 

And you were guinea pigs, of course; the Meta 9 pandemic simulation certainly made for an interesting end to the year. Although I’m glad we went with a little, itty-bitty respiratory illness and not the murder hornets.

So you came back, some of you even having learned something while online. It feels ludicrous in the wake of the 2019-2020 school year that we ever thought a school environment, particularly the Brentwood environment, could ever be replicated in a Zoom room. Teaching is so much more than me desperately trying to get E block Pre-Calc 12 to memorize logarithm laws and special triangles. 

Teaching is relational, and reciprocal; what we as teachers give to you is what you give to us. You are the reason I get out of bed each morning, and not just to open the dang door to hand out the dang cell phones. There is something that happens each day that can’t be replicated in a Zoom room, an office, or on a piece of paper. Isaac Asimov wrote that teachers have a certain magic, but so do classrooms. And so do students, or Privett boys, in a critical mass.

You may be told that you are about to enter the real world. This is a fauf – you have always been in the real world. Life is always happening to you, whether you want it to or not; it has been happening this whole time, for the last four years of your life, and it will continue happening long after you leave. 

You are a continuous person; you have not been reinvented, you have only graduated from one stage of life to another. Some of you crossed that line triumphantly; some needed a bit of a shove from time to time, and some of you, it felt like I hauled you by the scruff of your neck into a shopping cart and pushed you across, Ian.

There are, on reflection, a lot of things they never taught me in Teachers’ College - I learned how to make a half-decent rubric, but not how to counsel someone through heartbreak, how to get blue spray paint out of a carpet, or how to deal with a homemade slip and slide. I also never realized, until coming here, that teaching would mean always getting ready to say farewell, year after year. We intersect one another’s lives for very brief moments, and change is always bittersweet. It’s over, which is good; memory is made more salient when it’s bookended firmly, and ‘good’ is of course one half of ‘goodbye’.

To the parents - some of you whom I have met, and some of you whom I have never met – how absurd and wonderful that what binds us together is the joy of spending time with your children. Thank you for trusting us to occupy a place in your child’s life, to share their triumphs, help them through their fears, and torment them with a polynomial division quiz on a Monday morning. I don’t know how you do it, put so much faith in us to do right by your family, but I am grateful for it.

To the grads, as your teachers, we thank you for the gift of your attention and your time. We danced the silly little dance we call school together, as was handed down to us from Sir Isaac Newton, who dreamed up the modern education system while inventing Calculus during his own pandemic.

To my boys - the 9s who survived Krunker with Young Norm, the 10s who experienced masked Fun and Games, the 11s for whom the Interhouse trophy was always obviously ours – when I was your age, Adele had just released her first single, Hometown Glory. The line is: “‘Round my hometown the people I’ve met / are the wonders of my world”. 

Before she discovered heartbreak, Adele sang of the feeling of returning home to find that you are the thing that has changed. Dylan Thomas wrote, “Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me / Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand.” It is with love and appreciation but also a hint of trepidation when Lois Lowry wrote: “Thank you for your childhood”. We have all been where you are, have all felt what you are feeling – and maybe that is the magic of teaching.

My hope for you – for all of you – is that you wander away, and you change, and maybe you one day wander back. We have had the joy and misery of being part of your lives for a very brief and important time. It will hurt to lose you. Next year, the school will feel as though it is full of ghosts, when your presence is palpable but gone. It will not be the same.

So, I propose a toast to the class of 2023. Nobody wished for the way the last four years went, but we get what we get, and we seem to have made the best of it. The way you’re feeling right now – memorize this emotion, and may it carry you through the next stage of your life. In the words of Ursula Le Guin “What we wish for you is the thing you can’t earn, and can’t keep, and often don’t even recognize at the time; I mean joy. All we wish for you is the all ups and downs, may you have all of it.

Cheers :)

Ms Sarah Wolinsky, Privett Assistant Houseparent