Stories Now Told

Here are my two biggest gripes with commencement addresses: they are usually too long and the speaker usually doesn’t actually address the graduates. I once sat through an hour and a half long commencement address. It was bad enough that it was overly lengthy (he even had supplemental material in the lobby because he just couldn’t get to it in a “reasonable time”), but the worst offense was that it had absolutely nothing to do with the graduating class (or even graduating in general). I also sat in the audience at a high school stadium as the state senator who gave the address completely failed to look at the graduating class (who sat to her left) even once. She addressed her remarks to those of us in the audience who weren’t, you know, graduating. Continue reading →