Klein Forest AVID Senior Celebration

Klein Forest AVID Senior Celebration

May 30, 2012

First, I want to tell you how honored I am to be invited to celebrate your achievements with you here at the Klein Forest AVID Senior Celebration. I also want to extend my gratitude to Ms. Balthazar, the Klein ISD AVID District Coordinator, for the kind invitation. Thank you all very much.

It’s difficult to know what to tell high school seniors about to graduate that you haven’t already heard. You’re entering the world of adulthood—some of you may already be 18 and legally adults. You’re excited about the future, excited about graduation on Saturday, excited about not having to go to school anymore.
I am reminded of a speech in Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. In the play, one of the characters, Polonius, is speaking to his son Laertes, who is about to go on a trip to France. Polonius is an advisor to the king, and is known for long-winded speeches. Polonius has quite a bit of of advice for the young Laertes, and it reminded me of the typical graduation speech. Here are a few examples:

• “The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail (in other words, you can do anything you want or the future is yours!) 
• Give thy thoughts no tongue, Nor any unproportioned thought his act. (this means, know when to keep quite and not tell everyone what you’re thinking)
• Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar. (Be friendly, but not rude)
• Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice (Listen more than you talk) 
• Neither a borrower nor a lender be (pretty self-explanatory)

It is, however, the last piece of advice that I think is important. Polonius tells his son, “This above all: to thine ownself be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.” I think this really is a good piece of advice, and one that unfortunately, takes most people years to come to grips with. People spend years of their lives, and thousands of dollars in trying to find out who they are, what their role in this world is. The marvelous thing to keep in mind is that you sitting here probably have the tools you already need to understand who you are and your character. You’ve all been involved with AVID. What does AVID stand for? Advancement Via Individual Determination. The skills you’ve learned through AVID will help you as you continue to grow, learn, and succeed.

What does it mean, to be true to yourself? It means knowing who you are. It means you have to be comfortable in who you are. In order to do this, you’re going to have to 

1. Set your definition of Success 
2. Develop your Character What is Success?

You’re going to have expectations as you enter your adult life, some certainly of your own, some expectations from your family’s, your friends will also have expectations. Everyone has high hopes for you. We all want you to succeed, but what exactly does that mean? Success is defined different ways by different people. Let me give you some examples:
To The General Community: For most people, being successful means being able to become an productive individual in society. A college or university education should prepare graduates to think and act for themselves, and to communicate those thoughts effectively to others. Graduates should be able to live well with others, and make a contribution to the communities in which they live: locally, nationally, and globally, and earn a living.
To The Academic Community: Students should be continually enrolled and pass their courses with “C”s or better, until they gain enough credits until they graduate or earn a certification.
To The Business Community: Graduates who are prepared to work in an increasingly complex, technologically-driven, and constantly changing global economy. Employers expect graduates to be able to apply the education they received in college to the “real-world.” Graduates should be knowledgeable and informed in their degree fields, possess critical thinking, analytical, research, and communication skills. They should be team-players, and work ethically.

By knowing yourself, and being true to yourself, and understanding of what success means for you. You have to know your limitations. It means don’t try to sell yourself as something your not. Abraham Lincoln once stated, “No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar.” You have to know what you are capable of and what your limitations are. At the same time, you have to be comfortable enough to stretch your self and set higher, yet realistic goals. The book Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, examines characteristics of successful people. Gladwell talks about the “ten-thousand hour rule” that it takes constant and repeated practices in order to master a skill. Unfortunately, Gladwell states, most Americans aren’t used to practice. We don’t want to waste long hours learning the basics; we want to be experts from the beginning.
Several years ago, basketball legend Michael Jordan made a commercial where he mentioned the statistics that marked his career. He didn’t talk about how many times he was named MVP, his All-Star Game appearances, or his scoring average. Instead, Jordan said

“I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

Success in life, however you define success, isn’t about always winning, or about having good things happen to you. It’s about how you face the bad times, it’s about character, and getting back up after you’ve failed, and trying again.

What is character?

As a historian I’m very interested in how people meet adversity and difficulty. History is often written around the challenges, struggles, and tragedies of life. “War makes rattling good history, but peace poor reading.” People like stories about how human beings act and react under pressure, and in times of difficulty. How many books have been written about the Civil War, or any war, for that matter? History, then, is often the story of human character. It is who we are in hard times.

            In 1956, British Historian R. G. Collingwood in his book, The Idea of History, wrote:

History is ‘for’ human self-knowledge. It is generally thought to be of importance to man that he should know himself: where knowing himself means knowing not his merely personal peculiarities, the things that distinguish him from other men, but his nature as man. Knowing yourself means knowing, first, what it is to be a man; secondly, knowing what it is to be the kind of man you are and nobody else is. Knowing yourself means knowing what you can do; and since nobody knows what he can do until he tries, the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.

 Character is forged in the fires of adversity. But it is not who we are to an audience. It is who we are, not in front of our friends, but it is who we are when we are alone, when no one is watching. President “Teddy” Roosevelt said, “I care not what others think of what I do, but I care very much about what I think of what I do! That is character!” Character is how you handle defeat.

So, how do you develop character? As I stated earlier, your involvement with AVID has already equipped you with what you need to develop character. In fact, that is exactly what AVID means, Advancement via Individual Determination…success through will…success through “grit”!

•  Set Realistic Goals: Don’t set yourself up for failure, but don’t settle for good enough. You should be have pride in your efforts. Understand that You cannot please everyone. You have to make hard decisions. Sometimes you’ll make decisions that no one will like. Sometimes people will be hurt by your decisions, but you have to make decisions that will serve the greater good, that will be of the most benefit in the long run.
•  And you have to understand that one of the most important, yet toughest decision you’ll have to make is to decide who you want to be, and then surround yourself with those who are going to help you get there and celebrate your accomplishments. Some people warn against the crab or crawfish mentality. When one tries to escape from a boiling pot, the others will pull him back down. Once told “don’t forget where you came from.” Some people interpret that to mean that you should not rise above your station in life, but what it really means is that you should not forget the hard work that got you where you are, and the people who made sacrifices to help you get there.

As a professional educator, I get numerous advertisements for new books that come to my mailbox or email inbox almost on a daily basis. In fact, yesterday, I learned about a new book that was just published, Dear Marcus: A Letter to the Man Who Shot Me, by Jerry McGill. When he was thirteen years old, he was walking home from friends’ house one evening when, three blocks from home when a bullet stuck him. He doesn’t know why someone shot him. I’ll never know; why what happened happened.”  In the book, he writes, "My life, in a way, has been formed by some kind of darkness; but not in a way that you would think . . . there is a beauty in darkness…and there is so much to be learned and gained in darkness, if you just know how to process it and channel it. . . It’s damaging at times, its scary, but there is also a great beauty in it.” As McGill’s story illustrates Life happens. It happens quickly, and its effects are profound and lasting. As I stated earlier, however, success in life, however you define success, isn’t about always winning, or about having good things happen to you. It’s about how you face the bad times, it’s about character, and getting back up after you’ve failed, and trying again.

In the introduction to his book, McGill writes that the book isn’t about being shot, or being angry at the unknown person who changed his life suddenly and violently. “I didn’t write this book for you, Marcus,” he states. “I wrote this for a certain population of the world: Those who endure, those who manage, those who cope, those who get out of bed every morning going on with the business of their lives knowing what they know, those who look into the eyes of the storm and step out battered, drenched and unbeaten, those who are determined to move on. Maybe you’re one of us; now that would truly make for a great story, wouldn’t it?”

A few years ago at a conference, I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Freeman A. Hrabowski, president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, in the 1960s and spent a week in jail when he was 12 years old as a result of a civil rights protest. On Sunday morning, September 15, 1963, just as Sunday School was out at the 16^th Street Baptist Church, and church services were about to begin, a box of dynamite exploded under the steps of the church by the basement. Twenty-two people were injured, but the bombing of the 16^th Street Baptist Church is remembered for the four young women who lost their lives as a result of hatred of the Klan members who planted the bomb. Freeman Hrabowski went to school with those children. For Dr. Hrabowski, life hasn’t been about the struggles he faced growing up in a segregated community, about facing discrimination daily, about being jailed as a child, or about his school friends dying because of racism and hatred. For him, it’s about setting achievable goals, about surrounding yourself with people who help you, not hinder you, and keeping your sights on your goals. 

As Jerry McGill says, “just getting up and going on with the business of living, and appreciating what you have.” As a result of his efforts, Hrabowski was named one of America’s Best Leaders by US News and World Report in 2008, and one of the Top Ten College Presidents by Time Magazine in 2009.This year Time Magazine named him one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World.” The Time write up on Dr. Hrabowski states that as president of the institution, he turned “a humble commuter school into one of the nation’s leading sources of African Americans who get PhDs in science and engineering.” Dr. Hrabowski ended his presentation at the conference with a statement that I thought was profound, and inspirational. And in conclusion, I’d like to pass it along to you today:

“Watch your thoughts, for they become words.

Watch your words, for they become actions.

Watch your actions, for they become habits.

Watch your habits, for they become character.

Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.”