Delivered on Thursday, June 14, 2012,
on the occasion of the Class of 2016’s Moving Up

 

What does the Friday Night Lights story of a small town in Texas and its high school football team have to do with you and your moving up? You might say, “Not much.” But look beneath the surface and you might be surprised at just how interconnected these worlds really are.

Director Peter Berg commented that these words “[related] to a theme that we explored . . . where [Coach Gaines] talked to the team about getting love in their hearts and playing with love in their hearts and winning not being the fundamental indication of success. And that sort of theme I think is important for the show."

And important for us as we use this Moving Up ceremony as a moment to reflect on work accomplished and work still to be done. So on a day like today, surrounded by classmates, teachers, family and friends, what are these “fundamental indicators of success?”

For me, how we might answer that question is grounded in another set of questions that humans have been asking themselves and each other for thousands of years. These are questions that our own fifth graders pondered this year and then posted their thinking about them in our stairwells for all of us to ponder:

Why is the world the way it is?
Who are we?
Where are we going?
What is the purpose of it all?
How should we act?
How can we be happy?

 
We’ve asked you to work hard over these past four years. Whether in the classroom, on the field, court or stage and even on Houston Street, we’ve asked you to do much of this hard work on yourself. We’ve asked you to confront challenges and to capitalize on strengths.

One of your flags, which draws its inspiration from the Soul Eater manga and anime series touches on this idea:

Why have we asked to engage in this “experimentation and observation?” The answer is expressed by Oscar Wilde in the flag that counsels:

And, as the writer E.B. White encourages,

We have encouraged each of you to cultivate that which makes you unique or to use White’s term “obscure,” but we’ve also asked you to do this in a way that connects you to others “clearly.”

As one flag in suggests in Seusssianesque tones:

A side note that this quote misattributed to Dr. Suess belongs to Bernard Baruch who was an American financier, stock market speculator, statesman, and presidential advisor. The quote comes from a response he gave to the question of how he handled the seating arrangements at his dinner parties. I think it works well in both contexts.

And to bring us back to things legitimately Seussical:

 

In many ways, the journey you’ve all undertaken together has really been grounded in a question of faith. Or, as Kanye West says,

This moving up and growing up is serious stuff. There is a lot at stake. That said, we should remember to not take ourselves too seriously. To be open to the very humor of our own existence is something not to be underestimated. As one of you recognizes in the words of Roald Dahl’s Willy Wonka:

That thought provides a path that if we travel down a short distance leads us to comedian George Carlin’s quite useful admonition:

One thing that has never been petty is the friendships that you have made with each other; they will last a lifetime. One of your flags quotes Muhammad Ali who said,

 

While I agree wholeheartedly with the second half of his premise, I have to question the first part. I do think that one of our responsibilities has been to create a space for friendships to grow and flourish, to be challenged, contested and ultimately set right again. Yes, LREI is a school, but our mission calls on us to go beyond the merely academic and to engage the whole person.

You have worked hard to learn to look beyond yourselves and to understand the value of sacrifice and to say, “What can I do for you?” As a result, you will carry something of these others with you as your middle school years recede into the past.

As one of your flags, quoting from the anime series Gurren Lagann, says,

 

Embracing the other and making every attempt to understand the experience of another person or group of people has been an essential part of your middle school experience. In the context of learning, the ability to see diversity as an asset is hugely important.

As Jonah Lehrer observes in his book Imagine: How Creativity Works:

Group creativity is becoming more necessary because we live in a world of very hard problems: all the low hanging fruit is already gone. Sometimes a creative problem is so difficult that it requires peoples to connect their imaginations together.

We are therefore bound to each other in this work. Finding our common humanity, while respecting and learning from the ways that we are different is crucial. One flag, quoting J.K. Rowling’s Albus Dumbledore, suggests that

I want to agree with this in full and while it does seem like Albus has the same message for his magical charges that coach Gaines has for his football players,

As you well know from your studies in core and your social justice projects, ours is a world plagued by a sad history of intolerance, inequity and discrimination. Getting our “hearts” open to the other is hard work and fighting against injustice is even harder. It is, however, work that we must do. It is even more important work for those of us who daily enjoy privileges that obscure how our own “greenness” informs everything that we do.

Kermit’s lament raises important questions about identity and individuality. In the end, Kermit is able to exclaim, “It’s beautiful! And it’s what I want to be.” Creating the space for ourselves and for others to be what each of us needs to be, requires us to be allies regularly willing to step outside of our comfort zone and to take the risk to make a difference, to “choose to participate.” You have explored the need for resistance as a response to challenges to freedom and can agree with General Douglass MacArthur’s claim that:

These are not struggles that are usefully taken on alone. They require the company of others; they require focused leadership that can create a sense of shared ownership for both the problem and for the solution. President Dwight D. Eisenhower reinforces this idea in the flag that says,

None of this is easy, but the choices that you make now really do matter. As Mark Twain suggests:

And from actor and activist Christopher Reeve:

Easy words to say, but moving beyond “safe harbors” and “shallow ends” requires dedicated and committed work. We have tried to help you in these efforts. We have asked you to complete tasks for which there was no immediately correct single answer. They were tasks like the social justice projects, a math investigation or the science Exploratorium where answers emerged over time and were the result of repeated efforts and failures. These failures were often the key to helping you see things in a new way. You did this work along side of each other and offered encouragement and support, picking each other up when a particular failure seemed removed from the possibility of success. These are the moments of learning that count for the most.

The reassurance of support and the desire to be your best selves has allowed you to, as the band Queen suggests:

And the flag that quotes Elbert Hubbard, the eccentric and visionary leader of the Arts and Crafts Movement, reminds us that:

Or, as the more contemporary entrepreneur Victor Kiam offers in another flag:

And a reminder from Norman Vincent Peale that:

And with the football team from Dillon, Texas still reaching out to these eighth graders in New York City, legendary football coach Vince Lombardi reminds us that:

The notion of quitting is one that is worth thinking a bit about; there is something to be said about knowing when to quit. Not simply quitting as giving up, but looking at one’s situation honestly and considering that a new course of action may be warranted in order to think differently about the problem that confronts you. As one of you recommends on your flag:

And where can this kind of thinking take you?

Well maybe not quite infinity, but certainly beyond. This spring, the author Steven Johnson can to speak to us as part of our LREI Speaker Series. Steven talked to us about the compelling idea of the “adjacent possible” and his own thinking about where good ideas some from. He says,

The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself. The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore them. Each new combination opens up the possibility of other new combinations. Think of it as a house that magically expands with each door you open. You begin in a room with four doors, each leading to a new room that you haven't visited yet. Once you open one of those doors and stroll into that room, three new doors appear, each leading to a brand-new room that you couldn't have reached from your original starting point. Keep opening new doors and eventually you'll have built a palace.

Two of your flags touch on this idea of the “adjacent possible.” As Cave Johnson, a character from the video game Portal 2 rants:

And the somewhat more restrained sentiment that appears on another flag:

If ever there was a time for reflection and sizing up the “adjacent possible,” Moving Up is one of them. That said, we hope that this spirit of innovation is one that you take with your for use in all of your future moments.

There is much talk these days in educational circles about how schools need to teach important innovation skills. A cursory list of these dispositions that appear in many writings include: Curiosity, creativity, collaboration, inquiry, resilience, and not just problem-solving, but problem-finding. Maybe the world is just catching up with us as these strike me as the outcomes of a good progressive education. So you have already discovered an adjacent possible that others are just beginning to see.

You have moved from thought to action and can affirm the words of singer Richard Sanderson who said:

And while familiar to us in the voice of Willy Wonka, we find affinity with the words of the poet Arthur O’Shaughessy who said in another flag:

Dreams exist to some degree outside of the constraints of time. So today is a good moment to cast off these constraints and really let yourself dream. Maybe easier said than done because today is also a day very much grounded in time and time is very much on your minds. A number of your flags touch on this:

 

So,

 

But heed the words of the time and dimensional traveling Dr. Who who advises,

Look to your right and to your left, You will not be together in this way again. So stop time and live in this moment and savor its meaning. Before you blink, you would do well to take to heart the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson who said,

And as another flag cautions,

So with a glance here and now, make amends for the hurts that you have caused and with a nod grant forgiveness to those who have wronged you. If you do, you will be able to say with a clear conscience,

and

If there is one constant that has gotten us to this moment and will move us forward from it, it is, as the science fiction writer Octavia Butler observes and one of your flag captures,

We are constantly in flux. In one moment, we are a beginning and in another an end. One of your flags memorializes the words of Steve Jobs, whose words take on a particularly poignant meaning this year. He said,

And as Mahatma Ghandi advises on another flag, the task that lies before you is to:

At last Friday’s Moving Up party, I received a card from your parents that had the following quote from Margery Williams that I offer as their dream flag to you:

And this resonates with the flag that quotes Nelson Mandela, someone who certainly took a long time to “become,” who said

And we are just about done. So best to circle back to the beginning and to see what Coach Gary Gaines has to say as your middle school time ends and you prepare to walk down the eighth grade steps and back on to the field of play. He says,

Being perfect is not about that scoreboard out there. It’s not about winning. It’s about you and your relationship with yourself, your family and your friends. Being perfect is about being able to look your friends in the eye and know that you didn’t let them down because you told them the truth. And that truth is you did everything you could. There wasn’t one more thing you could’ve done. Can you live in that moment as best you can, with clear eyes, and love in your heart, with joy in your heart? If you can do that [my friends] – you are perfect!

And we can say together,