Wallowa County schools have turned out another fine roster of graduates and there should be high-fives all around. Graduates, teachers, parents, coaches and everybody else who helped these kids along through their schooling careers—you done good. All of you. High five.
I don't have any photos related to high school graduation, so this sunset symbolizes attendance records. Beautiful. Except the ones you missed.It’s tradition to fill these graduates full of last-minute nuggets of advice as they step over into being adults. But I’ve been thinking. These graduates just sat through twelve years of instruction, they’ve seen how our ideas are working out and I’d like to hear what they have in the way of advice for us.
We had plenty of time to tamp our message in. They’ve been tested and graded along the way so it seems fair that graduates get a chance to evaluate us on this world we’re handing over to them.
We hear from valedictorians during commencement ceremonies, but what about the kid with the record for being sent to the principal’s office the most during the past twelve years … I’d wager that would be a lively address and I’m sure we could all use some insight on getting into a little trouble but still managing to come out alright.
What about the shy kids? They’ll be quietly running things before long anyway so we might as well get a sneak preview. The kids with purple hair. They end up surprising you. I’ve seen it happen. The ones going after rodeo buckles instead of college degrees. The ones who want to travel. The ones wanting to stay put. I’d say there’s valuable insight to be heard from all of these newly-minted adults.
Still don't have graduation-type pictures, so here's an image of the chimney of life, shown emitting vapors from the fuel of your earthly toils that you keep adding and adding, except when the weather's nice and you don't need to. Think about that for a minute. Yeah.A big long commencement ceremony where every graduate gets to speak would feel like it’s taking twelve years, so instead of that we could have sort of an open house where all the graduating seniors are on hand and you can walk up, congratulate them on finishing school and warn them against taking wooden nickels or advise them to buy low and sell high or whatever. Then it’s their turn to tell us what they think. If they feel like giving advice, I’d probably ask for help in making sense out of cell phone plans. Used to be that teenagers were the only ones able to program a VCR but these days we need younger folks to explain phones.
All these kids—pardon, young adults—have something worth hearing and I for one would like a breakdown on what our twelve years of telling them what we think they need to know has boiled down to. Lay it on me, graduates. Send your general observations, advice and detailed instructions on how to turn off the annoying voice command thing on my phone to jonrombach@gmail.com.
So bon voyage, graduates, whatever your voyaging preferences might be. College, run the family ranch, or my favorite—don’t really know. If ever I do stumble on a pile of money I believe I’ll set up a scholarship to assist those interested in pursuing I Dunno.
I majored in Business at first, then changed it five minutes later to Art, then Taking A Year Off, then I forget what and -- oh, I declared just about every major in the catalog except for Accounting and ended up with History. My academic advisor liked to drink.Just like offering advice, it’s tradition to give a graduating senior analogies. Life is like (something) and you’ve got to (something). So here’s mine.
Graduates, life is like an analogy. It’s one thing, but some people think of it another way and you’re both probably kind of right, depending on how you look at it.
And just like an analogy, sometimes it won’t really make much sense but that’s OK. So just remember that little bit of wisdom and you should be fine. Now go out there and make us proud and make cell phones easier to understand and maybe clean up all this international conflict and do something about the economy and don’t take no for an answer unless it’s the right one and a bunch of other stuff. You’ll figure it out.
No comments:
Post a Comment