Guidelines for Writing a Commencement Address The draft you write for consideration does not need to be a final version, but should give the panelists a clear idea of what you plan to say in your speech. The traditional commencement address has had content which reflects back on the class's experiences and also gives advice or guidance for the future. The tone should be one which inspires and motivates the listeners. Although the Commencement Address is directed at the graduating class, the message needs to be meaningful and appropriate for the adult audience present as well. Content, language, or style which parents or grandparents might find offensive is not suitable for a Commencement Address. Humor can be an effective minor element of a Commencement Address. The predominant message, and consequently the predominant writing style, should be serious, thoughtful and inspirational. Format: This a general map of graduation speeches. It is not required. Feel ...
In Brandon Taylor’s novel Real Life, he describes a scene where the main character Wallace, a black man, at a party is confronted by a racist comment made by someone there. He says, “No one said anything to him (the person making the racist comment). No one did anything. . . There will always be good white people who love him and want the best for him but who are more afraid of other white people than of letting him down. It is easier for them to let it happen, to triage the wound later than to introduce an element of the unknown into the situation. No matter how good they are, how loving, they will always be complicit, a danger, a wound waiting to happen”. The passage is a painful one to read, but it puts voice to the all-too-common experience where white people consciously ignore acts of prejudice for fear of disrupting the racial order of a group. This is my str...
As mentioned in the September newsletter, we will focus our attention this year on some of the earlier pillars of reading instruction to help understand the current interventions being employed within our curriculum and to potentially play with some of their elements in our own classrooms. To establish some common language, I am going to begin by defining three important terms of reading: dyslexia, phonemic awareness, and phonics. The first, dyslexia, is an often used, and largely misused term. Depending on who you ask, you are likely to get a different answer. In a general sense, people use it to indicate someone struggling with reading. Perhaps they have observed that the reader or writer transposes letters backwards or flips the order of the letters as they decode. Perhaps the reader struggles with multisyllabic or unique words. Or perhaps they read very slowly and deliberately. While all of these are ...
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