Worthy of Honor

For those of you that don't mind reading a speech (note to self - just lost most of your audience), here's the text of my address to tonight's Watertown High School National Honor Society Inductees. I have high hopes for these students!

Watertown High School

National Honor Society Induction October 20, 2011

Good evening, and welcome to this wonderful evening on which we celebrate the very honorable success of these seniors before us. Great praise is due to those parents, siblings, relatives, teachers, coaches, mentors who have lavished love and help on these young men and women. Behind every successful young person are some other people who supported that success, and if you’re one of those people in the audience, we thank you.

And to tonight’s inductees, I speak for us all when I say we are so proud. Let me first honor you. You’ve managed to earn top grades in demanding courses, serve others with your free time, and earn the respect of your faculty, all while being a teenager, which is hard enough all by itself. Tonight we honor you for your success. You’ve faced challenges – some of you even more than others – but you’ve put together a beautiful high school career.

And I get the chance tonight to invite you to keep that going, but with a twist. Because I don’t want you to just lead successful lives; I want you to lead lives that are beautiful. The successful life earns the praise of others; but the beautiful one makes them stop and wonder. The successful person accomplishes good things for oneself, while the beautiful person also does something good for this world.

I’m obviously not talking about physical appearance here. I’m talking about a life well-lived, a life that has inner beauty because it is good and purposeful. More than a string of A’s on your report card or a big number on your paycheck, this kind of life is truly honorable.

But it’s hard to achieve because in the days and weeks and years to come, you’re going to be tempted to settle for the banal, or to slip toward the brutal. I have my killer alliterative B’s rolling tonight – you know that letter most of you don’t see very often your report cards.

The beautiful instead of the brutal and the banal. Let me define, illustrate, and then encourage.

Brutality is the worst that humans offer our world. It refers to everything that is savage, cruel, rude, even inhuman. If you’re hungry, to be brutal is to steal your neighbor’s food, or – as is true in a commercial I saw during a baseball game the other night – to eat your child’s fish. Brutality evokes that response of something just not being right.

Banality is different. It’s not brutal, it’s just commonplace. Banal means unoriginal, boring, something so ordinary, it’s not a pleasure, not something really worth our time and attention. A banal response to hunger is maybe just eating chicken nuggets, or white bread PB and Js, and doing that meal after meal, day after day. It’s not wrong, it’s just no way to live.

Now beauty can just be a pleasing appearance, but it also can refer to what’s glorious and good and meaningful. A hungry person with a taste for beauty creates a meal worth remembering. It’s calories, but it’s also art. Go to a brutal restaurant, and you hear them slaughtering the animals out back or you see roaches running across the floor. Go to a banal one, and you just leave feeling full. But a beautiful dining experience, and you remember it for days or even years.

This world, and actually each one of here tonight, needs beauty. We need experiences that move and inspire us, and we need you to be people who develop a knack for making beauty, and living beautifully.

One more illustration about how hard this is, but how important this is. And then I’ll bring it home for you, NHS seniors of Watertown High. As a parent, I must not become brutal. My three children depend on me to not hurt them, not abuse them, not neglect them. They count on me to not be sarcastic with them, insult them, swear at them. They expect a lack of brutality, and I try my best to give them that. All parents, myself included, have a moment or two where we lose our temper and can be a little brutal. But if it becomes a pattern, then watch out, there go the kids.

Banality, that’s easier. I can make sure my kids are clothed and fed, but just sit them in front of the TV all afternoon. I can give them the minimum, but never really take the time to see something good and talented in them and call that out, never really let them know I love them to death. It’s not brutal, but it’s all too common.

What my kids will really be changed by is if I can pull off beautiful parenting for them, firm in my limits, warm in my praise, going on adventures with them that teach them about the world and help them take risks, even while they’re cared for each step of the way.

You’re not, I hope, going to be parents for quite some time, so tuck that away, but let me bring this invitation home to you in two areas.

Your academics. You’ve obviously been successful students, but I wonder how often you’ve done it while being bored, while assuming that school needs to be just banal. Well, it doesn’t. It happens once in a while, but I’ve rarely heard of a teacher who complains if you make a paper or project your own and do something surprising and creative with it, take an academic exercise and make it a thing of beauty. Do that this year, and you and your teachers will be happier. And next year, when you head off to college, find something you like doing, and do it extraordinarily well. You’ve done well enough in high school that you’re going to have great opportunities next year – all of you. Take that opportunity and make it worth your while. The world doesn’t need more people who are bored by their jobs or do them with mediocrity. So get used to doing something special, something beautiful with your work. Don’t settle for the ordinary, even if that can get you a good grade.

And in your social lives, you’d be surprised – or maybe then again you wouldn’t – by how much brutality is all around you. And that’s going to increase next year, no matter where you go to college. People who rip and insult others, take advantage of them, and in the end only look out for themselves – that’s brutal, but it’s also pretty typical.

Instead, be something beautiful in your social lives, next year at college, but here too as Watertown seniors. Befriend someone new, and make their year worthwhile. Expand your universe of obligation – what we were talking about this morning – and stick up for someone who’s being gossiped about or trashed on Facebook. Compliment people, even if you don’t know them well. Take advantage of your peer mentorship in advisory, and really help an underclassman. Do something each week, or each day, that someone will feel is beautiful. And the treasure you give them, and get for yourself, will be immeasurable.

This is the highest honor, my amazing, wonderful inductees who look so beautiful tonight, to be a person who pushes out the brutal and doesn’t settle for the banal, but who makes and rises to beauty each day of your lives. Do that this year, Watertown High School will have never known a prouder, a more memorable, a more honorable NHS.

Thank you.

Then and Now

Another Era at WHS

Recently, I was invited by Bob Kaprelian ’53 and Bob Norton ’61 to host a tour of the school for the class of 1961’s fiftieth reunion. So over coffee and doughnuts, along with a couple of student reporters from The Raider Times, I walked with a couple dozen members of Watertown High’s past and chatted about our present and future.

I couldn’t help but draw some contrasts between life at WHS then and now and thought I’d share them with you.

Then you turned right upon entering the building and walked into the gymnasium and basketball court. Now in that spot there’s a library.

Then computers were students in math class working on problems; now they’re spread throughout the building for use in student research, learning, and production.

Then they had a headmaster named John J. Kelly; now we have a John J. Kelly gymnasium.

Then the cafeteria opened up to a courtyard next to a track and open space in front of the cemetery. Now there’s still a courtyard, but that open space is covered by the athletics and physical education area and by art, photography, and design studios.

Then the academy award for best picture went to West Side Story. Now it’s one of the possible choices for a winter musical (Or at least it was a few years back; this year we’re running Seussical.)

Then the landmark novel To Kill a Mockingbird was written by Harper Lee. Now our ninth graders read it in English class.

Then the two genders had separate PE classes and only girls took home economics classes and only boys went to the wood shop. The Hoyt Thurber award for the best student athlete was given only to a graduating young man. We still have PE classes but they are mixed gender, and plenty of boys enroll in Foods and Nutrition, while plenty of girls work in the wood shop, often – Mr. Boudreau claims – with more patience and skill. And there are, and will be again this year, two Hoyt Thurber awards, for an outstanding male and female student athlete.

Then they held Armenian bake sales from time to time. We have one this week!

Then probably too many of the youth of Watertown smoked and/or drank, but not everyone thought it was a problem. Now too many of the youth of Watertown smoke or drink, and we see it as a problem for their health and safety.

Then kids picked on each other and did horrible things to someone from time to time but there wasn’t a specific word for it and it largely happened below the radar. Now we call it bullying and are trying to put a stop to it.

I’m suspicious of the belief in the inevitable progress of humankind and an ever-brighter future, and I have no time for the sentiment that today’s youth are somehow worse than those of the past or that society’s running itself into the toilet. Neither the past nor the present is a uniquely golden era. We’re neither better nor worse from one another, just different.

But I do think it’s nice to stop and take perspective once in a while and notice where we are and where we came from before going back and making the best we can of these times we live in, while still enjoying that coffee and doughnut, of course.

Smile!

I've embarked on a year-long experiment I wanted to tell you about. Dr. Gortych, WPS's director of guidance and assessment, and I were discussing how to help juniors and seniors access our anti-bullying curriculum, since our advisory program is only running for ninth and tenth grade students. What we landed on were a series of class meetings I would lead. Roughly once a month, I meet the entire junior or senior class in the auditorium for half an hour, for a class meeting where we'll explore what it means to be a citizen at Watertown High School.

For our first meeting, I've chosen a TED Talk to show to students. Ron Gutman, an entrepreneur in the field of public health, explores the hidden power of smiles. Watch the video and see if you find it as fun and intriguing as I did.

We can't give students two thousand chocolate bars each day. (I can just picture Ms. Johnson, our food and nutrition teacher wincing!) We do want them to have long, satisfying, influential lives. Perhaps learning to smile a little more is a start.

9/11 at Watertown High School

Thanks to the imagination and commitment curriculum coordinator Kraig Gustafson and the social studies department, Watertown High had the opportunity to remember the tragic events of September 11, 2001 on Thursday and Friday.

On the morning of September 11th, I remember standing in a classroom in Boston's Chinatown. It was a free period in my day, and a colleague - I remember his name and tone of voice - told me to turn on the television because New York City was under attack. I couldn't believe him. I turned on the TV, stunned at what I was seeing, and started to think of family working in Manhattan and a close friend who had been due to fly out of Logan that morning. If you are an adult, you no doubt also remember where you were, who was with you, and how you felt when the shocking news hit you that late summer morning.

Most of our high school students have much fainter memories of that day, and soon WHS will be filled with students who can't remember it at all. Yet the events of that day are perhaps the centerpiece of 21st century history thus far; their impact still looms large in our world.

So at Watertown High, we remembered. I read an announcement on Thursday morning. We hung flags with the names of rescue workers who died. Social studies classes presented facts, perspectives, and background on the events of the day and the implications since. In my own English class, we read parts of Galway Kinnell's haunting poem, "When the Towers Fell," and wondered just what it means that "each light, each life, put out, lives within us."

Our history does indeed live within us. We hope we help our students make meaning of it, and find their place in our fractured world.

Command and Care

Yesterday we had a great first day of school, welcoming over 700 students to Watertown High, including about 200 first-year students. Charlie Breitrose, over at the Patch, did a nice piece on the opening experience for those freshmen. You can find it here:

One thing that I told all students is that our faculty and staff will have an ongoing theme this year on two of the twin pillars on classroom and school excellence: command and care.

Balance Rock, at Wachusett Mountain

These words come from Professor Ron Ferguson's work on closing the achievement gap, where he and his team of researchers have identified seven qualities that make for excellent classes and excellent schools. Two of these are command - first labeled control by them - and care.

Schools where students experience command provide safe, predictable, orderly learning environments. We're making strides here by the addition of a part-time Dean of Students to our administration, clear and systematic practices designed to reduce cuts and other unexcused absences from class, offering training to staff who want it on classroom management, and the rolling out of a school-wide anti-bullying program, based on the internationally acclaimed Olweus anti-bullying program.

Alongside these efforts, we're working hard to make sure all students at WHS experience nurture and care. We've placed all ninth and tenth grade students in advisories, which meet in small groups every seven days to focus on aspects of high school community building and success beyond the classroom. Through a federal grant, we've been able to boost our partnership with the Watertown Youth Coalition, bringing additional resources into the school. And we're making subtle changes in administration, guidance, hallway expectations, and a wide array of other areas to make sure that the interaction between students and adults at the high school is as positive as possible.

Command and care: we hope to keep these twin pillars strong and balanced. Let us know how we're doing.