You're Not Special:
Friday, June 8, 2012
High School Commencement Speech "You're NOT Special"
David McCullough, Wellesley High English teacher, slices and dices teen exceptionalism. 'You’re not special,' he says, 'Your planet ... is not the center of its solar system, your solar system is not the center of its galaxy, your galaxy is not the center of the universe.' WOW! What do you think?
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3 comments:
Kudos to that English Teacher.
Amazing. No phoney, hypocritical Hyperbole. Just the plain down to earth truth, which may not be Politically Correct but comes straight from the gut.
Will be 'swiping' this- thanks-
Carol-CS
To be perfectly honest, I wish that our graduation speaker at uni had shown us even one iota of the resepct that David McCullough showed those students. He clearly cared about what happened to them when they left school, clearly wanted them to have the best lives they possibly could. Look at these lines:
"Climb the mountain not to plant your flag, but to embrace the challenge, enjoy the air and behold the view. Climb it so you can see the world, not so the world can see you."
Forget about the "you're not special" soundbite just for a moment. How could those "mountain" lines be seen as anything other than encouragement, to go at life with everything they have and to do it for the right reasons?
That's one of the things this speech is really trying to hammer home; having the proper motivation. If you're aspiring to be "special", you're probably going to run into trouble. That's a really egotistical reason for doing anything. If you're trying to become a doctor or an engineer, that's great, so long as you're doing it because that's what you want to do with your life. Not because those are the graduate jobs that will make people nod approvingly and say "Yes, that's worthwhile".
You decide what's worthwhile, not those around you.
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