That’s why I skipped my college graduation. I wasn’t there at the time it happened, or maybe it was my first semester, but I was told that Senator Rick Santorum was asked to speak one year. He was told he had ten minutes, tops to speak to the grads. Instead, he chose to give a forty-five minute speech on his views on abortion. Several grads and one faculty member. Despite this being a Catholic college founded by an order of nuns, despite having a monseignor as our dean, and being on the same grounds as the mother house of the Sisters of Divine Providence-Sen. Santorum was informed he would NOT be welcome back again.
Of course, if I had stayed a semester longer, the Queen of Jordan would have spoken at my graduation.
As a high school teacher, I have sat through many long and boring graduation speeches. In 1998, I remember the Senior counselor standing up on stage attempting to share a witty anecdote about every frigging graduate (which numbered close to 300). I ended up leaving after 2.5 hours, and they had yet to award a single diploma.
We have a nice set-up. Because the microphone on the stage feeds through the announcer’s box in the stadium, we can silence any speaker that goes well beyond their allotted time. We have yet to do it, but the switch is manned during graduation. The speakers know of this, and generally behave.
[aside]The line this year is 5-3 Parents/God. About 15 years ago, the head of the Math department noted that all speakers thank either their parents or the Almighty, or both. We’ve started making book on it. We keep a running count from the VIP section. Closest to the right numbers gets the pot.[/aside]
I was at my girlfriends brothers HS graduation yesterday, and they apparently haven’t gotten any better in the 10 years since I had one. There were a few odd points, such as having 15 valedictorians in a class of 300 people. Anyone who maintained a 4.0 GPA all through HS got to be one.
The whole 2.5 hours seemed to be themed “Let’s blow sunshine and marshmallows up the Valedictorians arses because the rest of you will end up working at McDonalds”. It was almost embarrasing.
Then a student who had a band got up to sing with some people from choir a song that he wrote with his band. I think the song was called “Please Let The World End Right Fucking Now”, or else that’s all I was able to make out over my brain screaming.
Truly it was horrible. Each of the Vals got to give a speech. Apparently the don’t teach public speaking at the high school level.
I have to say the major ceremonies I’ve attended- High School Graduation, and the Australian Citizenship Ceremonies for myself, my fiancee, and the rest of my immediate family- have all been excellently done. Speeches to a minimum, relevant, sometimes witty, and there’s tea/coffee and scones/sandwiches afterwards.
I’ve also warned everyone that, should I ever win a major award of some kind (be it a Nobel Prize, an Oscar, or the C. Montgomery Burns Award For Outstanding Achievement In The Field Of Excellence), my acceptance speech with begin with either “I’d like to thank the losers, for without their losing I could not win…”, or (in my best Elvis impersonator voice) “I’d like to thank my Momma, and Elvis. Thankyou, Thankyouverramuch…”.
My high school was like this, and grades were unweighted. Meaning that I took eight AP classes (compared with a maximum of four for anyone else in the entire school) but got a ‘B’ in freshman English*, so I wasn’t one of the 20 ( :eek: ) valedictorians.
As to the OP: you know what a bad topic for a commencement address is: the HOLOCAUST. My sister graduated in May, and the speaker was the director of Holocaust and Genocide studies at some college. Surprisingly, the speech fell flat.
[RANT] The ‘B’ was bogus, too: >= 92 was an ‘A’, and all grades were rounded to the nearest integer. I had gotten a 108% on my final exam, which was supposed to count as 10% of the total grade in the class. But, for reasons unknown, the school changed the scoring system so that the final accounted for ~5% of the total grade, which gave me a 91.38% for the year, hence the ‘B’ and no shot at valedictorian. And what really sticks in my craw is that if they had told me about the damned change, I still had an opportunity to do extra credit and get the ‘A’. I imagine I’ll get over it someday. :sigh: [/RANT]
Reading this makes me very glad that there aren’t any graduation ceremonies in the UK, or at least there weren’t when I was 18. Finishing school consisted of “you got your A-levels, now bugger off”, there was an awards presentation for each subject but none of the students spoke at it.
My memories from graduate and post-graduate degree congregations are mostly just sitting in a very large hall with a very long list of names being read out. Standing in a queue at the side of the stage waiting for your name to be read out, then repeating to myself “don’t trip as you walk down the steps!” as I went to shake the Chancellor’s hand. I only remember two speeches each time, one from the Chancellor and one from the guest, thankfully both were short.
I’m graduating from university next Friday. AFAIK it will take about an hour for 120 of us, and will be done mostly in Latin. There’s free drink afterwards though, so it could be worse.
I got my school’s (an all-girls grammar) award for “caring and sharing” whatever the hell that means- since it was £100, while all the other awards were stupid plastic trophies, I was quite happy.
The other thing I wanted to add last night but didn’t because I was locking up while posting is that I don’t see what the big deal is about a HS graduation anymore. Don’t most folks go to college these days, at least at the community college level? I can see where it was a big deal when lots of people didn’t graduate from HS. Now I don’t see the point over everyone dragging out grandma and all of your cousins to sit and suffer through all this nonsense. College graduations are a different story, but I think enough is enough with the HS.
Well, I think HS graduations are like that because they are the first real graduation ceremony (not counting that silly kindegarten stuff) that people go through. It marks a rite of passage from childhood and adulthood, and having 12 years of school under your belt isn’t a small achievement. Also, as a kid your parents can actually guilt you into attending your HS graduation. But in college you’re a semi grown-up. Your parents can plead all they want, but if you don’t want to go to your college graduation, you’re not going to go.
Graduating from college isn’t guaranteed, not with tuition being so expensive and kids often flaking out. So some parents might feel need to the go overboard on the HS grauation so that at least they know they celebrated something in their kids’ life.
It seems to me that when I graduated from HS, the families of kids who weren’t the academic stars in the class were the ones who did most of the cheering and hooting in the audience.
I’m not sure, but I don’t think over 50% of graduates of my highschool even ENROLL in college, let alone graduate. I hope I’m wrong, though.
This is my experience as well. As some people from past graduations I’ve attended have put it…“There’s probably a reason this is a big deal for them [the families]: It might be the only one they get to go to…”
At my high school graduation, in a really, really liberal college town, they managed to find as the speaker the local arch-conservative representative to Congress. The only good thing that can be said about his speech is that it was mercifully brief. I have no idea of the content, as I literally plugged my ears for most of it. The man was a fool as well as so conservative he makes the current crop look like bleeding hearts.
For that HS graduation, however, we also had that no-longer-done thing of a baccalaureate service – basically a nondenominational church service where the faculty got to thank God we were leaving and the students got to thank God we never had to deal with those idiots again. It was held at the local college chapel, which was a large and imposing stone cathedral-style building with a big organ. And – I swear I am not making this up; I still have the local newspaper entry to prove it – as we were processing into the chapel and the organist was playing, “The Heavens Declare the Glory of God,” a thunderstorm knocked the power out.
Oh god. I am to go to my son’s 8th grade graduation tonight. We sit in the HS gym, on bleachers for 2 and 1/2 hours. It is excruciating. I just did this for my daughter, now a sophomore in HS.
It is a nice day for the 14 y/o’s, but come on, I’m with Barak Obama–you’re SUPPOSED to graduate from 8th grade. (hell, you’re supposed to graduate from HS, too). Give 'em a pat on the back and tell 'em to get their butts back in school.
I really hope that they cut the violin solo, and most of the speeches short. A letter goes out every year, asking that parents and family not cheer when their child’s name is called, so that it doesn’t spill over into the next name called. That’s a nice idea and all, but is makes the ceremony that much more difficult to get through. It’s 45 minutes of boring, shallow [del]platitudes[/del] speeches, followed by deathly silence.
On November 19th, 1963 Edward Everett, a former Senator and President of Harvard gave a generally well recieved speech dedicating the cemetary grounds at Gettysburg, PA. The speech lasted two hours.
After a brief musical interlude, President Lincoln got up and gave a short 2-3 minute speech starting with the words, “Four score and seven years ago…”
You don’t have to speak a long time to say something worthwhile and memorable.
Lo, these many years ago, right before my high school graduation, there was a big to-do about who was going to be our Valedictorian and who was going to have the less-coveted second place. There were two people in the running - myself and a guy I was buddies with. I held his hand through social studies courses and biology courses, he held my hand through physics and mathematics courses more advanced than Trig.
When they got to the point where they were comparing elementary school attendance records, he and I got together over a pizza to talk about it.
As it turned out, his scholarship award was contigent on being valedictorian - if he wasn’t, he got 25% less financial aid. On the other hand my financial aid was not at all dependant on being valedictorian - I would get the same cash either way, as my financial aid was being predicated on my grade point average, community service, activities participated in and test scores.
He was valedictorian.
When we went back to school the next morning and had a meeting with the principal and the guidance counselor to inform them of what we’d decided, it took us nearly two hours to convince them that this was a good idea. Well, to be accurate, it took two hours to convince the guidance counselor. The principal looked at us with a relieved expression and said “This what you want? You sure?” and was prepared to let it drop. (I think the guidance counselor was still steamed at me because I chose the “double-elimination coin toss tournament” method of choosing an institute of higher education from between schools I’d received both acceptance letters and comparable financial awards from.)
Oddly, his mother was also pissed off - for some reason she saw our agreement as me condescending to her baby. He and I did an extended :rolleyes: at that and went on about our business.
Our combined speeches were 4.5 minutes long. We wrote them over that self-same pizza.
Dammit, *my daughter * is the frackin’ valedictorian (true), and you WILL sit down and shut up for the 5 damn minutes that are all she’s gonna take. If you have something better to do, then just go do it, m’kay? Criminy. :rolleyes:
In HS, the valedictorian was the guy just in front of me, alphabetically. So when it was time for his speech, he went up to the stage, did his thing, and then came back to ask what we thought. But we’d been playing poker, see?
College was even worse – it was the school’s sesquicentennial. ALL the colleges were combined into one ginormous ceremony, in the middle of the football field, on the windiest day of the year. The giant plastic plants on the stage kept falling on top of the ten – 10! – honorary degree recipients. Who all had speeches. Plus the three invited speakers. Plus various chancellors, provosts, deans, and such. And the governor. And a senator.
Most of the speeches were relatively short. They started getting shorter once five or six beach balls were being tossed around in the crowd. By the time we’d gone through half of the speeches – and not one degree awarded yet – there was a Domino’s guy wandering up and down the aisles, trying to deliver a pizza to “Arts & Sciences, row 5”. (just next to Engineering, where I was and where he delivered to less-than-30-minutes later)
And now they’re having graduations for junior high school? grade school? pre-school? The Hell? I dread the dozens of graduations I foresee in the coming years with my nephews…
