AVReading Newsletter December

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AVReading Newsletter June 2025: Looking Back

  Years ago, I had a student who told me that I should have her uncle come as a guest speaker to my class.   She gave me no prompt as to why he might be a good fit, or even what he would talk about but the class was called Sex, Drugs, and RocknRoll: a Study of the the Counter Culture of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, so I went with it.   I was comforted by the fact that   he was a teacher in Minneapolis, so I wasn’t taking a huge risk in inviting him to class.   When he showed up,   I learned that he taught theatre in a high school.   He wore glasses, but he was missing one of the stems so they sat askew on his face.   This was the 90s and   AVHS was almost exclusively white, so his first comment to me was, “Wow!   I’m in a White Palace here!”   There is so much I remember about his talk that day.   He was a recovering addict, so he had a few stories about some of his wild adventures.   He talked about race at ...
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AVReading Newsletter April: Silence

  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...
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Sr Speaker Materials

  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 ...
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