|
I was going through my computer documents when I stumbled upon my high school graduation address and I thought I would post it here:
"Good evening and welcome to the 2006 graduation ceremony. It is my pleasure to welcome members of the board of Education, faculty and staff, family members, friends and of course, my fellow graduates. The last few years have flown by leaving us with loving memories of high school. Somehow I never expected to finally be here – at my own graduation. It always seemed so far away. During the last four years, we, seated before you, have changed. We gained knowledge, built friendships and became more aware of the future that lies ahead of us. We were encouraged, trusted and unconditionally loved by our family and friends. And, we were taught by teachers who cared, who prepared us for our lives ahead and who gave us the skills necessary to successfully begin our new journeys. We, like many graduates before us, were given much and were encouraged to set goals in pursuit of our dreams. Think of the many great Americans who once, like us, stood in line to receive a high school diploma. For example, consider the story of Robert H. Goddard. Robert Goddard was an American physicist who dreamed of one day developing a liquid fuel rocket. In 1926, his first liquid fuel rocket reached a height of one hundred eighty four feet. His dream had come to pass and yet he was not satisfied and set yet another goal …… build a rocket that would reach higher altitudes. By 1935, less than 10 years later, he fired a rocket that reached seventy five hundred feet. Until his death, Goddard set goals and dreamed of conquering the vastness of space. He began and lived his dream until his death and then it was passed to the next generation. And, the next generation did indeed carry on for on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first men put into space. Dreams, ideas and ideals are useless if they are not translated into effective action. Because of man’s dreams, the world is constantly changing. As we, the class of 2006, dream of tomorrow, we must not forget the responsibilities of today. In a few minutes when we receive our diplomas, we will be making another step toward our dream. We will be the leaders of tomorrow. Today we are seeing part of our dream turn into reality as we graduate from high school. For this is our commencement - our beginning – the beginning of new dreams, dreams of the future. No one knows what our future holds. We can only dream of tomorrow but we can set goals for today. For what great thing has ever been accomplished that was not at first a dream? As Thomas Edison said, “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” Or the great Walt Disney who said, “All dreams can come true – if we have the courage to pursue them.” A dream is something that begins with one individual. One man with a dream developed a rocket. A nation with a dream landed a man on the moon. Yet for dreams to come true we need to set goals for the starting point of any achievement begins there, with a goal. Tonight Little Wolf High School is no longer our high school but it is our alma mater……and there’s a reason why they call this commencement. Commencement is a beginning, not an ending. From this time foreword, we will go our separate ways in pursuit of our dream. Some of us will stay in touch; others may not. Regardless, each of us will have memories of the past and plans for the future. For it is our future that counts…not an ACT score or the rigor of our curriculum. We will be judged on who we’ve become as people, employees, spouses, parents, and citizens. Class of 2006, we have only just begun!" In his book Peter Drucker states the following:
"The most important, and indeed the truly unique, contribution of management in the 20th century was the fifty-fold increase in the productivity of the "manual worker" in manufacturing. The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is similarly to increase the productivity of "knowledge work" and the "knowledge worker." The most valuable assets of a 20th-century company were its production equipment. The most valuable assets of a 21st-century institution, whether business or non-business, will be its knowledge workers and their productivity." It is imperative that our corporate and educational institutions create pupils equipped with the skills that are necessary to "learn how to learn," if not our society will fall prey to the rote memorization and repetition of tasks. The ability to learn is not dependent upon the regurgitation of facts and follow the leader but upon diverse thinking processes that lead to new and innovative ways of accomplishing a task. I personally define intelligence as the application of knowledge. The world is a very unfair and crude world, like a siren singing her predatory song, we too become drawn into the idea that intelligence is made and molded in the classroom, in higher academia, that it is the ability to solve complex trigonometry and calculus equations; but I beg to differ. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs never finished their college degrees but are both widely held as being very bright and intelligent men of our time. This is not to dissuade people from further education on the contrary both were heavily influenced by university. Bill Gates grew up around the University in Seattle and would often visit the campus’s large computer mainframe. In a show of his intelligence, he scored a 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT. Steve Jobs dropped out of college because of the financial burden he was putting his family through, but he decided to continue attending classes (for free) and credits his calligraphy class as the inspiration for his creation of textual fonts in his NEXT system. These two men show the power of further education and its direct impact on them, but without their active application, such instruction would be found useless. One may be the most knowledgeable person yet know little of human empathy and lacks the ability to communicate, is this person considered intelligent? As said previously, intelligence is the application of knowledge, not the context of it! One standard by which the world tries to dictate who is an intelligent person is by means of an IQ test, but we now realize there are many different scales of intelligence ranging from emotional to existential to linguistic…… Instead of trying to stereotype people based on their educational background or employment, which is then used to judge one’s value to society, we need to start looking at the PERSON because we are not all the same, nor should we be. WE each bring our own diversity, and it is that diversity, that different way of thinking, that increases our global intelligence and allows for new knowledge. For sake of my reader, you the class, I will promptly end here and not even discuss my views of musician, fashion victims, or the such. |
|
Michael Nemmetz's Professional Portfolio
