If you're an educator then you know every year you'll hear students, principals, and other speakers trying to find their own way to wish the graduating class best of luck. It's always a joyous time for me to see the whole group together cheering each other on, but it is also a sobering moment. As I watch them cross the stage I think about how they were as sophomores in my class and realize just how little we know each other.
I teach many academically gifted students and they are not what you might think. Many bright students have done the calculus and know when a class or a teacher is not really worth their time. They usually crave stimulation and if they are not getting it academically watch out - that's when the truly creative become an incredible handful. I enjoy these students for the most part because they challenge me too. A few of them even submit themselves to additional classes with me as juniors or seniors. I really like seeing where they are headed next, but I know they could have made it into Chapel Hill without me. My hope for them is that I showed them a way to look at the world just a bit differently.
The group of students that always get me fired up at graduation are those hard luck cases. I am really drawn to the misfits - both the gifted and the challenged. The gifted ones are smart, but have already closed the door on education in some way. Perhaps they've been bored so long they've just given up - or they are too socially awkward to develop into a class clown and withdraw. It gives me great joy to find that idea or activity that wakes them up a bit so I feel I've touched them both academically and emotionally. The biggest joy is seeing the kids who are challenged walk across the stage. I don't just mean intellectually - there are so many challenges out there. I realize I only have a glimpse of the hardships teenagers face in my rural area and they know nothing about my life.
Nothing has changed and yet so much is different for these teenagers. I can't even imagine cell phones with cameras and Facebook and all that "enhances" the social experience of these students. You can read about all the annoying behaviors somewhere else, my point is that I had a difficult time getting through high school so the pressures these kids face put me in awe - especially given the small town everybody knows you community where I teach. But I didn't grow up here and I don't even live in the same county as where I teach, so what they know of me is limited and every graduation ceremony touches me deeply. Best of everything class of 2013!
