This year at the Class of 2010 Commencement Ceremony we had 5 fabulous senior speakers. And then an extra one who was so moved he had to get up and add his spontaneous words of praise and thanks! It was a little surprising, but his heartfelt words of thanks and praise for the school were well received.
The whole ceremony, with advisors sharing personal words about each graduate, was memorable, classy, and moving. For those of you who were not able to be there with us, we are reproducing below the speech of one of the speakers, Nora, a student who came to us halfway through her junior year:
I came to Avalon half way through my junior year looking for a challenge. I needed to be more engaged in my education. The traditional school system I was in had left me with a passive attitude towards high school. My goals were superficial: all I wanted to get out of high school was a good GPA. I remember filling out a goals sheet when my class went to the college and career center, feeling disappointed because the only goal that I could come up, the same goal that I had written down the last time, was to earn A’s in my classes, and I’m sure my peers wrote the same thing. My whole high school career was going to culminate in to a number on a piece of paper that didn’t really mean anything to me. I would have seen my diploma as just a necessary precursor, a representation of those four years of my life that weren’t that important in themselves; they were just something you had to do to get in to college.
That’s how the story would have gone, had I not come to Avalon. Through the project-based learning here, I was allowed to decide how I best learn and to go in depth in to topics of my choice. For example, at my previous school I had to mindlessly sit through a Spanish class with peers who weren’t interested in learning, and a teacher who wasn’t teaching me anything new. When I came to Avalon I was able to do a Spanish project in which I challenged myself by reading a Spanish novel and writing a journal in Spanish every day. I became engaged in my own education because I was able to incorporate my passions, my ideas, and my individuality in to what I learned.
My goals became significant because my advisors challenged me to do schoolwork that applied to my life outside of school and to the community around me. I learned that grades aren’t the most important thing in the world. I was welcomed into a school with a strong, active community and a cooperative, democratic structure. I had a say in how the school ran, and my goals started to extend into Avalon’s future. High school became a holistic experience for me because I was encouraged to incorporate what I learned “out there” in to my time at Avalon, and to seek out and utilize experts in the community. Watching the senior presentations at the end of the year confirmed the fact that my classmates were incredibly committed to and passionate about their education as well.
All of the skills and values important to being successful at Avalon get tied together in the senior project. As “straight off the website” as it sounds, my senior project has taught me what having a passion for learning really means. It means craving the feeling that you get when you’ve satisfied your curiosity, or when you’ve successfully won an argument because you have the support to back up your point. We all spent over 300 hours each, independently learning about something we love, and we have something to show for it. Not a lot of other high school graduates can say that. I know people who have walked across the stage, thinking that they just wasted four years of their life. We will walk across the stage knowing that what we spent our senior year doing at Avalon is important and meaningful, because we chose to do it.
This is the class I am graduating with today. And we’re not your average high school class. First of all, because we are graduating from Avalon I can say with confidence that we are a class that knows what it means to be an active member of a community. At Avalon, it means stepping up when you see something that needs to be done, like picking up trash in the hallway, or making an announcement to remind people of school rules, or resetting the wireless internet. It means helping each other out, like editing your friend’s paper, or fixing the paper jam in the copier, or suggesting a good resource for a project you overhear someone talking about. It means participating in activities, like attending congress and checking in and out with your advisory every day. Being an active community member means sharing, like suggesting a fantastic book to someone else, or going to a poetry reading, or doing a presentation of your project, or creating a museum for the whole school. It means working to improve the community, like helping set up fundraisers, or start a new recycling initiative, or doing a senior project that gives something back to the school, such as a Project Foundry iPhone application, a mural, or a future commitment to provide free computer help.
I can also say with confidence that we are a class of critical thinkers and we aren’t afraid to ask questions. For example, when Kevin decided not to speak for a whole class, the students ran the discussion themselves. We are leaders and creative, innovative thinkers. We can look at a problem from multiple perspectives and brainstorm solutions as a group, as in congress. We know what it means to give back to the community and we know what we can learn through service. Whether it’s painting a mural or volunteering at an organic farm, service week is always an unforgettable experience.
We can think for ourselves. We have curiosity, and probably a mental list of things we want to learn about. We can procrastinate by holding intellectual discussions…or creating art, or reading a book. We know how to (and how not to) manage our time. And believe me; we know what it’s like to share space.
We know that there’s more to learn than what you could ever find in a textbook, like how to make puppets for your own artistic film, or record an oral history of post WWII Ukrainian immigrants, or write a one-act play, or do an in-depth inquiry of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. In fact, we know that there’s a lot more to learn than what could ever fit in a school, like how to build a national hiking trail, or convert a car to run on used vegetable oil. We are writers, artists, cooks, debaters, photographers, teachers, playwrights… We are actors, poets, computer technicians, musicians, mechanics, citizens and individuals… We are Avalon’s graduating class of 2010.