Members of the Class of 2019, fifth, sixth and seventh grade students, families, friends and colleagues it is truly an honor to be able to stand before you today on the occasion of the Moving Up of the Class of 2019. Congratulations to all of you for the work that you have done to bring us to this moment.

Before we turn our focus on this most excellent collection of eighth graders, I would like to say a few words to this group -- my esteemed colleagues. For the last 11 years, it has been my distinct privilege to serve, to learn with and from you and to call you friends. You have made me a better leader, teacher, parent and person. For that I am truly grateful. I hope that in some small way you have received from me in equal measure what you have given. Thank you. I look forward to what the future holds for this new chapter in our work together.

And now to you, the members of the Class of 2019. For 11 years, I have been giving some version of this speech. It’s origins come from having waited until the very last minute 11 years ago to figure out what to say (I would not generally recommend this as a useful preparation strategy). On that evening before my first Moving Up as I was hanging our first set of dream flags, I realized that they contained a story about the Class of 2009 that I might tell. And so it is that we arrive here today to tell not the last story, but my last version of this story. When it first dawned on me that this would be my last telling, I felt a profound sadness. It had not really dawned on me that at some point this might cease being my story to tell. But that feeling was replaced a great happiness. Not because I wouldn’t have to do it, but because I would be witness to its transformation into the next thing that it might be. You see, the future excites me. And while there is much to learn from the past, I am not one to over sentimentalize it. I believe that the best moments in our lives are always just ahead of us. The moment we stop becoming we lose the essential characteristic of what it means to be fully human.

The irony here is that we often spend significant energy resisting change, when the reality is that we are in constant change and that we are actually quite good at navigating ourselves through it. We just can’t always see the flux that surrounds us. We hold on to the past sometimes too tightly.

As I have mentioned iat other Moving Up ceremonies, it is worth noting that you will not be together again in this way. So look around and take it in. Remember what you are feeling and thinking and know that it is already falling away into the past as you move forward into the soon to be discovered future.

What can you take with you on this journey? I offer you your story.

The major challenge of solving the puzzle of this story is figuring out where to start. The flag that quotes Sherlock Holmes offers some sage advice,

 

Which leads us to the following flag from Shawn Spencer a character on the show Psych,

 

And so the question is which kid are you? For those of you wondering about Mikey who starred in the famous Life cereal commercials, he is now 44, alive and well and not the victim of eating pop rocks while drinking coke. But that is beside the point. What matters for us today, is that Mikey tried it and liked it. And it was not about the prize; it was about the cereal. And that the cereal was called Life should not be so easily overlooked

There is much to be proud of today as we celebrate the “life” of the class of 2019 and the journey that has brought each of you here together today. It would not be out of place for you to shout as video game character Johnny Cage and one of your flags does,

My preference would be to exchange the “I am” for a “We are,” but in both iterations the sentiment is heartfelt and appropriate. Occasions like this one often provide moments for the making of grand statements and the offering of profound truths. Maybe that is not called for today if it truly is the case that that each of you can claim as did the rapper Drake,

 

Which if true, suggests that there is a lot of vision bottled up right here in this room. That collective vision, its potential and possibilities, is producing a sort of pressure as a consequence of your middle school experience. It is looking for an escape into the wider and deeper world of high school.

The journey that you have undertaken has not been an easy one; you have not always been your best selves and you have not always been the self that your peers needed you to be. Some of your parents worried a lot. Really. But because I live quite comfortably with the inevitability of change, growth and hope, I simply told them and told them again and again, “Give them time. They will grow into the people they need to be.” And you have because you have come to understand the truth in the flags that say, first from Baron in the film The Cat Returns,

and second from Ralph Waldo Emerson

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else

is the greatest accomplishment.    

 

In the fifth grade, you read the Tales of Ulysses, which like many stories conforms to a structure that has come to be known as the “Hero’s Journey.” In it’s simplest form, the Hero leaves the familiar world behind after receiving a call to action, then, often with the help of others, learns to navigate the unfamiliar world of adventure and, in the end, returns to the familiar world transformed with a deeper understanding of herself, others and the world. This moment, this Moving Up -- a return of sorts -- stands at the beginning of a new call to action and offers an opportunity for reflection. What have you learned? The following flags offer some insights into the perspective you’ve gained as a result of the trials and tribulations of your adventure. From basketball coach John Wooden,

from painter Bob Ross,

from Theodore Roosevelt,

 

and from Franklin Delano Roosevelt,

 

I think that these ideas are fully aligned with the core values the underlie what it means to be a learner at LREI. This is a fundamentally optimistic place; we believe deeply in the capacity of all to grow and change; we believe in the possibility of an equitable and just world. Optimistic, but not naive. We recognize that change requires dedicated and committed work and that in doing this work we are often faced by what can seem like insurmountable obstacles. This is the truth that Elisabeth Irwin was aiming for when she said,

And how do we do this? We do it by making the best of things, seeing mistakes as opportunities, grounding a bold vision in the practical realities of daily living, and confronting honestly what is hardest and most uncomfortable.

One of your flags, which quotes Winnie the Pooh, hints at an essential truth that makes committing to the above ideas possible,

 

Let’s be clear. The “nothing” here is not about being lazy. It is about something deeper that connects us to the world and to others. As Benjamin Hoffwrites in The Tao of Pooh

And here it is worth a quick return to Mikey who started us on this journey. For both Mikey and Pooh, it is not about overvaluing the prize , it is simply about the joy in eating the cereal or, Pooh’s case, the honey; that is where the fun lives. To do this, one needs to achieve a certain kind of peace and stillness to reveal what in our quite busy world is too often easily overlooked and disregarded.

A flag quoting Tupac Shakur amplifies this idea by suggesting that

So we need to be wide awake in order to move from that inner place of stillness to the place where dreams can become portals to the possible. And with eyes wide open you can as Kanye West suggests,

 

This act of “rising,” of becoming you, of embracing the constancy of change is not about being a passive voyager through the events that constitute your life, but rather comes from the realization that at every moment we are compelled to choose; this existential crisis of choice is at the core of what it means to be a human being. The flag that quotes Stephen Hawking gets at this idea in a far simpler formulation,

 

 

And as Shay Carl Butler observes,

 

Now I must confess that until I started working on this speech I had never heard of Shay Carl Butler. It turns out he is something of a YouTube celebrity for his show The Shytards that chronicles through daily video posts the goings on in his family. I watched a few of the videos and I must say that I was drawn into what seems like a perfectly normal family that in the context of what passes for most “reality” TV was most refreshing.  I don’t really have an opinion about YouTube celebrity, but Carl, his wife and his kids seem pretty happy to me.

Their choice is an affirmation of what the flag quoting Dr. Suess reminds us,

 

One of the things that I cherish most about this place and that you will eventually come to find is not so common elsewhere is that real freedom comes when we are able to choose the alternate path, to stand alone and be respected and supported in that choice. To know that as Snufkin from Tove Jansson’s Moomin books says,  

 

Over the last four years, we have tried to establish a set of conditions for learning that places the challenge just outside of your comfort zone. Not too far so that the risk of significant failure might cause you to scale back on your effort, but just far enough so that you can continue to pick yourself up after each attempt. And with each attempt, you gained new insights not only into how best to solve the immediate challenge, but you gained greater insight into who you are as learner. As the flag quoting T.S. Eliot suggests,

and as one of you quoting yourself says,

 

One of the things that we hope that you have learned over the course of your middle school years is that having a vision or dream and choosing to follow it are necessary components for success, but they are not sufficient. You also need to fully commit to the choice; this means putting in the hard work and time that are required to realize it. You need to learn from mistakes, revise plans, seek feedback, connect with others and regularly recommit to your purpose. Only when you do these things, can you truly understand the meaning of the flags that say,

and

 

Sustaining this commitment is never easy. And as our culture becomes increasingly focused on the “just in time” satisfaction of our many wants and needs, we can easily lose sight of the value that comes from hard work. So the quote from the Order of the Stick character Elan the Bard should serve as a caution,

Your classes, especially this year’s Social Justice Project and your Science for Change projects have shown you that the change process is often uncomfortable and sometimes quite hard. You’ve also discovered through direct experience that very little happens if you wait for someone else to clear the obstacles in your path. As writer, actress and comedian Mindy Kaling observes,

 

 

And in her book Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, she suggests that one way to minimize having the need to have to pretend is to

So dreams, choice and commitment really do matter. It can be lonely work, but most of the time our work is done in the company of others and with their support. And maybe as I look back over the last four years of middle school and further back into lower school, this is the area that you have worked the hardest at and travelled the greatest distance. Friendship is complicated work and sometimes it can feel like it demands too much. We might claim as the flag that quotes Sigmund Freud does that,

While we might need on occasion a respite from each other, emotion and conflict are at the center of what it means to be human. In the end, we cannot really turn away from, we can only turn towards the other.

The clearest manifestation of this understanding is revealed in the fact that the one of you who choose the above quote ended up making a flag with a different quote. In the end, you could not help but turn towards. And as the filmmaker Hayo Miyazaki said, “I'm not going to make movies that tell children, ‘You should despair and run away’,” you chose the quote of his that says,

When we started the preparation for Moving Up some months I mentioned that now was the time to reach out to a classmate that you’ve never really gotten to know, to make amends for the wrongs you’ve done, to accept sincerely the apology for the wrong done to you and to engage in the simple repair and mendings of friendships that have become frayed over time. It is the case as the Friends character Joey Tribbiani says to his paleontologist friend Ross who is unsure about communicating his feelings for his true love Rachel,

And I think that you have not given up and I know that you -- that we -- are the better for it. You really are the Class of 2019 today. And so it as the character Barney Stinson from How I Met Your Mother reminds us that,

 

And as Patrick Star says to his best friend SpongeBob SquarePants,

And perhaps most simply put from Wes Anderson’s film Moonrise Kingdom,    

 

 

At the center of true friendship and understanding is empathy. The idea as stated by Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, which you just read is that “You never really know a man until you understand things from his point of view, until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

And on one flag perhaps put more poetically by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince,

 

Or more humorously, from the character Michael Scott in The Office,

Empathy is connective and it sits at the center of the design process, which you used this year as part of your Social Justice Project work and Science for Change projects. As Seung Chan Lin notes in Realizing Empathy,

The empathic stance recognizes as the flag that quotes Yoko Ono reminds us that               

 

In this light, two flags stand out for me here. I know they are offered in the spirit of good fun and connected to other contexts and shared memories, but for the these purposes I use them to offer a cautionary warning. From a former classmate,

I know stuff more than you.      

 

And from Mythbuster Adam Savage referencing the movie The Dungeonmaster,

The claim to be somehow more entitled, more right, better than some other and that our diversity ought to be the basis for creating divisions between us is a dangerous one. It is one of the root causes of the inequity that has framed much of your study of the narrative of our nation’s history. As I have suggested earlier, the vision of a just and equitable society is indeed a noble one, but realizing that vision falls to the domain of committed, sometimes tireless and often unthanked hard work. So the claim in the flag that quotes John F. Kennedy is true that

Each of you sitting before us is the beneficiary of a varied set of privileges. Some are well-earned and the result of efforts that you have undertaken. For many, a subset of these privileges were not earned. They are the result of circumstances that were not of your making and many of them are also the product of a complicated history of power and politics. It is possible that you are not even aware yet that they are privileges that you enjoy.

 

And that is why one of the goals of your middle school experience has been to help you to develop an ethic that compels you to choose to participate. Through empathy and participation we can come to see what really matters and what the work is that really needs to be done. But it is not easy to see what is essential. As another flag quoting Tupac Shakur suggests,

As a nation, we are drawn to the story of the tenacious individual who overcomes the odds, who rises out of deprivation and transcends the circumstances of her situation. And we should recognize that effort; it is indeed important. But we too often turn that story into a version of the cereal box prize that stands in the way of what really matters. We say, “Why can’t that person or those people be more like . . .” And that is the trouble that confronts us, it is the struggle that you will have to help us to overcome. For as much as we are drawn to the struggle of the rose, the problem is the concrete. Our task is not to create a more resilient rose, it is to tear up the concrete. It is incumbent on us to see more clearly the mechanisms that perpetuate injustice and inequality. Circling back to our friend Mikey; this work is really about shifting our focus away from the prize and back onto the cereal.

And you might say, “Mark, that’s a heavy burden to place on us. We’re just a bunch of soon-to-be high schoolers and our bowls are already pretty full with the cereal of life.” And to that I would only suggest that you already know the answer and that it is writ large on two of your flags. From Albert Einstein,

 

And from Ernest Hemingway

Wise words. So where does that leave us?

Last week, you had the opportunity to learn with Holocaust survivor Sally Frishberg - a tenacious rose growing out of the concrete if ever there was one. And her message was a simple one. We must care. From caring we arrive at connection and from connection we discover love. And then we must act. You do not need to change the world, but you need to commit to it. For Sally, the path from silence to finding her voice has made all of the difference. So the question then is what is the path that will you take you out of silence and into the world.

The journey that has gotten you here today has been a most excellent one, but the best part of that journey is yet to come. My wish for you is that your best moments will always lie just ahead of where you happen to be and that you are always in the process of becoming. My gift to you is the permission to always find room for another “what if” or “how might we” question. And how can you ensure that this gift is always available to you? It is here that we can return to our friend Mikey who reminds us in the most obvious of ways  that with regards to this thing called life, all we need to do is just “try it.” I’m pretty sure that you’ll like it.

Congratulations!