Faculty Response

The honors banquot was tonight. I was honored to give the faculty response, which was the closing comments.

Below is the draft of the speech.

The highlight, though, was that two parents actually recalled having Myrtle (my grandmother) as their kindergarden teacher. Both said she was their favorite teacher. And one of those students not only had known my dad, but he actually sold sheep to him.

Nostalgia for yesterday and pessimism for today.

In the last couple of years I have lost both my parents and gotten married. Now that I have two step-kids and one of my on the way, I have begun to reflect on the past, on the events that helped shape me and make me who I am today.

This has gotten me thinking about nostalgia. I have become interested in how people tend to romanticize the past, whether it was really great or not.

I recall a conversation I overhead in my British Lit class two years ago.

Two juniors were discussing their volunteer work out at Challenger elementary.

One said, “Those kids are crazy. They don’t listen. They are disrespectful. They are mean. They’re nuts . . .”

I couldn’t help but giggle.

“What so funny?” They asked.

I had to admit: “You guys sound just like Nordine and I talking about you guys in the lunch room!”

“What? We were never like that?”

“Wanna bet?”

“There’s not way we were ever like these kids today . . .”

“Ahhh, those famous words. No you probably are not as bad as the elementary kids. Nor are they really as bad as you think they are.”

Well, the girls didn’t quite believe this. But it’s true.

Seniors, think of the freshman now. Remember how odd and small they look. How confused they are. How they worry about silly things.

Well, you were just like them four years ago.

Thanks to nostalgia, though, you don’t remember it that way.

Just know that when you start to begin sentences with “When I was young” or “When I was your age” that you are falling victim to nostalgia.

For some reason humans have this phenomenon of romanticizing the past. The older we get the more we tend to look back on the past with tinted glasses. Even the bad things are seen in a more positive light.

I am guilty of this. When Casey, my stepson, laments about having to take the trash out, I say, “Hey, suck it up. When I was your age, I had to bale hay all day long.”

And it was true. In the late ‘80s the state allowed farmers to bale their CRP land. Since my dad’s friend owned several hundred acres of prime CRP seeded with alfalfa, we baled thousands of bales. Sure, now I think of how it taught me to work hard and the sense of accomplishment as a result of hard work. But, really, I’m sure if I went back in time 17 years and put myself back on the lurching hay rack in the scorching July sun with my mullet and stone-washed Levi’s on, I’m sure I hated every wretched second of it.

But I don’t think of it that way now.

Now this is not necessarily bad. It might even be unavoidable.

The danger, though, comes when the nostalgia for yesterday leads us to think negatively about today.

Soon “When I was young . . .” leads into “The kids today . . .” or “The world today . . .”

I was alerted to this phenomenon when I read a book by Leon Botstein, who is a progressive educator, called “Jefferson’s Children.”

Botstein focused on how politicians and the public tend to bash not just education but our culture as if it is really in a constant state of decline. There are plenty of problems certainly, some real some fabricated by nostalgia and pessimism.

For example – you might hear a lot about literacy rates. But it’s readily clear that more kids read today than ever before. More kids graduate and more kids go to college and more earn degrees. Is this not progress?

Botstein claims that most politicians or administrators tend to glorify the education system of the 40 and 50s as if that was the golden age of education. Yet, less than half of all students graduated. Teachers readily used corporal punishment. Schools excluded community members based on race. My grandmother, who taught at Knox here years ago, grew up in RLF. Though she graduated valedictorian, she was suspended twice. Once for a week because she cut her hair – she spent that week writing the school song. Later for wearing pants (she was a flapper) – she and a friend canoed the boundary waters. Are those the good old days?

This is also apparent in the news. When have you ever heard ‘good’ news on the news?

Just watch the Discovery Channel and you’ll see all the looming apocalypses – meteoroids, asteroids, the super volcano under Yellowstone, gamma rays, global warming, snowball earth theory . . .

Again, the nostalgia for yesterday causes many to view today as the end of days. Yet, if I’m not mistaken there were plenty of bad things in the past . . . polio, the black plague, yellow fever, TB, the nuclear proliferation,

The pessimistic view of today was magnified when William Dagget Jr spoke here two years ago. His great fear was China’s role in the global market. His messages were all doom and gloom.

I began to think how is this different than when I grew up during the cold war and was taught to fear the Russians? Or how my parents were taught to fear the Nazis.

This pessimistic view is often what our students have to rise above.

So what to do? I ‘ll offer you an exchanged I witness on a Magnets Art trip some years ago.

We were on a bus leaving the Guthrie. The bus driver was a grumpy old sot. He was complaining about these young kids – “They have blue hair. Their jeans hang too low. They have their underwear hanging out. Look at all that crop in their faces. Look at all those tattoos. Why do they all dress in black?”

Finally, John Sylvester, who was a senior then, said, “You know sir, I don’t recall us starting World War Two or developing the atom bomb or causing the Cold War or toxic waste.”

I thought that was brilliant. John had shut the bus driver up completely.

Do not let the previous generation dampen your spirits. The worst thing you can do is adopting the attitude of “Well, what can you do?”

That is lunacy. That is sticking your head in the sand. That will never solve any problems. Likewise, don’t fall victim to blindly thinking everything is wonderful and it will always be that way. That is foolish too.

Instead, you can know that you will solve the problems that plague us today – global warming, our addiction to fossil fuel, recycling, cancer . . . just like previous generations solved polio, DDT scare, nuclear arms race . . .

Just as my parents’ generations found the vaccines and cures for the diseases that killed my grandparents, your generation – maybe even some of you sitting right here tonight – will help find a vaccine or cure for the cancers that killed my parents.


So the goal for you guys it enjoy your nostalgia for yesterday, but know that it is not necessarily how you remember it. Don’t let that ruin your views on today. There is always hope . . . because of you and your peers.

One of my favorite thinkers is James Burke, the scientific historian, when asked how do we solve all of these problems, he simply said we don’t need any more genuieses or prodigies. Instead, we need to make the most out of all the vast talent available to us. That is we have to find ways that allow us to challenge ourselves and use our brains. Here is my favorite quote from him . . .

“Every healthy human being has about the same number of neurons in the skull - about 100 billion. Each one of them has up to 50,000 connecting dendrites, each of which can be in contact with other connecting dendrites up to the same number, which means that inside the brain a thought can go any one of a number of routes which are larger than the number of atoms in the known universe! And everyone has one.”

The trick is to maximize the potential every single one of us has in here. Use that incredible mechanism not to just reflect on the past or worry about today but to do solve problems and accomplish things. To fight that pessimism with hope.

Thank you. It has been an honor to learn from your children.