My nephew just graduated from Boston College where Sec. of State Condi Rice was the speaker. Whatever her other faults, she is very intelligent and my nephew reports that she adhered to the proposed Graduation Speaker Should Shut the F*** Up Rule. What dragged the ceremony out was that all of the graduates had to pass through the metal detectors on their way into the stadium.
Settle down, Francis. No one’s bitching about the kids. Just long-winded guest speakers.
And congrats to your daughter.
These horror stories are precisely the reason I didn’t bother to go back to attend my graduation ceremony after graduating the prior January. In my opinion, it’s a complete waste of an otherwise useful evening.
-
High school graduation isn’t that big a deal for most kids. If a kid is up against some really horrible odds (like living in a car for the last year) I might make an exception. But other than that, it’s an exercise in agony.
-
BOOOOORING!
It depends. Is her speech full of obvious platitudes about what HS means to her and the Fresh New Future that awaits her class? Trust me, we’ve heard it before.
I hope it’s short, succinct and timely–some wit would be nice, but I won’t ask for that much from an 18 y/o. As long as it’s not pompous and weighty, it should be good. Sticking to 5 minutes is excellent.
And tell her not to swallow the mike, while you’re at it!
oh, and congrats to her on her achievement. Off to iron damned disposable gown…
Thanks. It was actually yesterday. Yes, she used the platitudes about “The future is coming up”, but then she recited Dr. Seuss’ “Oh, the Places You’ll Go”, which actually was right on target. The key point for me to be proud of was her clear, confident, smooth delivery, not the text.
Look, what are the options available to a kid faced with making such a speech, anyway?
Did he live four more days afterwards? If so, he outlasted JFK, which I wasn’t aware of. And his speech was quite good, especially considering that he was apparently 154 years old at the time. 
I wanted to get out of my graduation ceremony (I was 18 at that point), but my parents threatened to kick me out of the house entirely if I didn’t go. See, I had no plans to attend college (still really don’t, although the idea of taking classes has a certain appeal). I was going to (at the time) join the Army, who would train me up to be a journalist. Yeah, that fell through, but the point was, this was the only graduation of mine they’d ever be able to attend. So I went, and I brought a book. A big one. And of course, I was sitting out in the hot Nevada desert sun for three hours and I forgot to put sunscreen on, so I had that interesting inverted-triangle sunburn on my forehead for a week or so.
The principle at the time (who has since retired) talked for a record thirty minutes. And that was because the vice principle (the new current principle) walked up to him and started shushing him. In front of six hundred graduates and three thousand plus parents/family members. It was awsome.
The valedictorians and saludatorians were all jackasses at my high school. Most of the kids threw inflated objects at them while they were talking - we would have understood it if they’d done a ton of hard work to get there, but ninety percent of their success was ass-kissing.
~Tasha
I’ve learned to bring a book to read to school awards ceremonies. “Oh, they’re doing Academic Team now? Ivyboy is on that team…yay, Ivyboy! Now…where was I?” He’s told me for his graduation, ALL the kids make speeches. It’s a small class, maybe 15-20 kids. He was thinking about doing something silly and off the wall, until I told him we’d have at least 16 family members there to see him graduate, and that he needed to be serious, since we are going to be very proud of him.
At our university graduation, a boy proposed to his girlfriend right then and there as he got his diploma. She said yes. That livened things up a bit.
Wow. Lincoln was surprisingly spry in 1963. I guess he recovered from that nasty gunshot wound.
Same here! I skipped both of my post-secondary convocation ceremonies, I convinced my husband to skip his ceremony, and I will skip any other that I have the opportunity to. In fact, I can safely say, from this point forward I will skip every single graduation ceremony that ever occurs, in any place, anywhere. Every single one. And I won’t regret it, either!
Oh, and also, if you hate this kind of thing, NEVER work for the public service. There are often little “ceremonies” we have to go to, most recently to honor the volunteers we sent down to help with the Katrina aftermath. The volunteers were all there. And we listened to an hour, a full hour, of back-slapping and self-important drivel from all the high-ranking civil servants and politicians present.
But it’s a bad career move to skip such events.
This makes me extra-super-glad about my resolution to boycott every graduation ceremony, ever. You gotta miss these things when you get the chance.
Bwa ha ha! that’s awesome. Perhaps I will keep this in mind for the next civil servant back-slapping ceremony.
I feel that large high schools (my daughter graduated from a HS that has over 2000 students) should NOT combine with other high schools for graduation ceremonies. Sheesh, it’s long enough already! For her community college graduation, all five or six campuses were in the same arena…reading out the names of the grads would have taken long enough, but they had to have teacher award ceremonies, several speakers, and school award ceremonies. I really, really doubt that most of the students or their families were interested in any of those three events. I was, at that time, recovering from a hysterectomy, and the wound had become infected. I was still having discharge from the operation, plus I had a lot of pus leakage. I spent most of my time wondering if I was going to have to get up and change various dressings. I have pretty much blanked out the ceremony when my daughter got her bachelor’s degree, which is a pity, I think, but I had had just about ENOUGH.
I do remember that a few people were roaming around in the last ceremony, making the grads remove the decorations from their caps, and confiscating beach balls.
When I got my masters… Joe Walsh got an honory doctorate. It was quite interesting juxtaposition.
We were hopeing he would speak, although I’m sure we would have needed a translator.
Very nice guy tho, he took the time to meet and greet w/ the graduates.
I don’t remember anything my high school valedictorian said when we graduated - I think he threw some politics into it, and not everyone appreciated it. I didn’t care. What I do remember is that the salutatorian was awful. Most of her speech concerned her regrets now that four years of high school were over. Not only does nobody want to hear whining at a graduation, it was high school- a little early for the woeful “road not taken” stuff. Yick. Maybe high school will prove to be the best years of her life, but I didn’t know her well enough to care.
Tom Brokaw spoke at my college graduation. It was pretty long, I’m sure, but it was good. The graduation for my particular school featured a reporter from NPR, and the speaker at my brother’s graduation last month was Cokie Roberts. They were all good. It makes me feel better about my career to see journalists all over the graduation circuit. 
The valedictorian of my class was a kid who attended all his classes at a local college his senior year. Sure he must have been pretty smart but wasn’t even physically at our school for his final year. So we were all pretty much like, who is this guy again? Does he even go to our school anymore?
Made for a nice speech. Along the lines of “I have surpassed you all and am already in college, I don’t have connections to anyone here or your shared experiences, but I am the Valedictorian.”
I agree with the keep it short crowd. It’s not exciting to anyone but your parents. Both my sisters were valedictorian (not me though! No pressure there ) and even the family just wants to get the ceremony over with already.
It wasn’t the year I graduated, but my college’s graduation speech was delivered by President Bush last year. Now that drew a crowd (and security!). He kept it under 20 minutes though. My favorite lines from his speech were “Someday you will appreciate the grammar and verbal skills you learned here. And if any of you wonder how far a mastery of the English language can take you, just look what it did for me.” and also : “I said, you know, Laura, I love being around so many young folks. You know, it gives me a chance to re-live my glory days in academia. She said, George, that’s not exactly how I would describe your college experience.”
At least he was entertaining.
D’oh, that should be, “several grads and one faculty member walked off stage and left”.
It may have been 1863.
At the time apparently Everett speech was received very well by those present and by the newspapers reporting it. Lincoln did not get a great reception by the crowd or the newspapers the next day. Lincoln himself thought afterwards the speech was not so great.
I have heard that this is a myth.
There is also this quote
"Because Lincoln’s Gettysburg work has become so famous, sometimes it is assumed that he always gave short, pithy speeches. By looking at his previous speeches we can see that the reverse is more typical. A quick check of sources such as The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln will reveal this. For example, in 1858 a Chicago newspaper reporter remarked, “Of his speech I will only say that it lasted three hours, and that during all that time the whole audience seemed perfectly wrapt in attention, and that in power, pathos, and eloquence, I have never heard it equalled.”
from here http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/sites/gettysburg.htm
I think that’s a great choice! Good on her. I thought about that as I typed the last post–what other theme can be covered? The topic is somewhat focused, I grant you.
I just hope and pray that there are no longwinded people tonoc–I have painted trim and walls for 5+ hours today and I will stiffen up, if I have to sit in the bleachers too long. Agh.
That’s awesome! Too bad they didn’t let him do a guitar solo.
My daughter’s graduation is Sunday. At 3pm. Outside. And I get to sit with the stepfather she’s been fighting with for 5 years.
Don’t remember my high school graduation (except they seemed to be real concerned with our shoes). I did skip all three of my college graduations though, and with no regrets.
At my son’s high school graduation a few years ago, the only speakers were the valedictorians (2 or 3, I think), who each kept it under 3 minutes. Which was good since there were several hundred kids in the graduating class.
But the painful moment was when they had one student get up to sing the Star Spangled Banner. No cheat sheet for her, no siree bob! So you can guess what happened. She forgot the words, skipped phrases, sped up and slowed down randomly, repeated a line or two, and since it was the high school band accompanying her thus not gifted for their improvisational skills, stumbled staggered to a conclusion at an entirely different moment (and in a different key) than they did. I mean, she tried, but oy, if that’s the highlight of her high school career…