Teaching History Matters

(What if you imagined something, beyond imagination?)

My last child graduated from high school today, the same high school that I graduated from nearly 40 years ago.

The two of us piled into the truck for the 15-minute commute to the school, one we have been making for the past 13 years. She had her green graduation gown already on, and before I turned the key, I turned to look at her and say, ‘You know, this is our last trip together to the school.’ Mary replied, ‘Let’s go Dad! I’m going to be late!’ And that was that…

I got the call about 6 weeks ago that they wanted to start a new tradition, and add a keynote speaker to the graduation program. They picked me for the inaugural. This is a class I regretted leaving when I retired just before their senior year.

The venue, our air conditioned high school gymnasium, was packed. The salutatorian and valedictorian, who I was so proud of, delivered their own addresses to their peers that mirrored what we all had to say perfectly.

Anyway, I was grateful for the opportunity to speak. Afterwards, I went to the cemetery and stood before my parents’ grave, in the pouring rain. I updated them on the kids, read their inscriptions aloud, wished them a happy upcoming anniversary, told them I hoped I’d made them and my hometown proud.

I walked away with the rain, and maybe something else, streaming down my face.

***

Today is the day of your high school graduation. It’s called commencement because today is the beginning of the rest of your life, beyond these hallowed halls.

This is the day that you have long awaited, that some of you perhaps are meeting with equal parts excitement and sorrow, a day that you may remember for the rest of your life. So when I was asked to address you, the Class of 2018, I was honored, I was flattered, and I was happy to know I would have your full and complete attention for at least one time in my life.

*

You are going out into a brave new world, a scary place to navigate. It helps to have a bedrock of confidence, a road map, a plan ‘A’, a plan ‘B’. But the fact is that you can’t plan. Some of my best planned lessons were destroyed by factors beyond my control, like the 3-minute PA announcement of Prom Court just as a World War II veteran was finishing a tearful story. And sometimes the best received lessons were totally unscripted and from the heart.

But alas, today I am forced to stay on message, so to keep this short, I came up with a ‘graduation advice list’ on my own, without cheating on Google. I now gift you with Mr. Rozell’s 15 Words of Wisdom.

#1. Don’t address your new boss, or your new drill instructor, or your new college professor by their last name only, no matter how cool it sounds. It’s not going to end well.

#2. It’s nice to have a plan. But if you don’t know what you want to do with your life right now, you don’t have to collapse into a quivering mess after the ceremony.

#3. A plan is a nice touch, but your life will thank you more if you have a passion. Now take that further. Turn your passion into a PURPOSE.

#4 Accept that ‘stuff’ happens. For example, as I was typing this, my daughter decided that that exact moment would be the best time to finally turn on the vacuum cleaner and attack her room, instigating major writer’s distraction. But life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.

#5. Recognize that your setbacks are gifts in disguise. How you react to your failures or disappointments can be defining moments and set the table for your achievements. [The noisy vacuum reminds me of my delight in being Mary’s dad, the daily gift of her presence in our lives, tinged with a bittersweet understanding that someday all will be quiet.]

#6. Appreciate your education. Value learning. Teach yourself something new every day. Ignorance is not really bliss, as proven hourly in your social media feed. Recognize too that knowledge does not always equate to understanding. Sometimes you just have to accept the mystery.

#7. See the world with a sense of wonder. Be open to new experiences and new people. Un-plug. If you can’t travel, lose yourself in a book.

#8. Try to see something good in a person or a situation where you think there can’t possibly be anything good. Take a sad song, and make it better.

#9 Be curious. Ask questions. Recognize that having the question is more important than getting the answer.

#10. Be terrified of that first new step. Then take it. Take risks. Ask yourself “WHAT IF?”

#11. Guard your reputation. Honor your integrity. Cultivate your character. And audit your friends for the same.

#12. Use your gifts for the power of good. Kindness is contagious. There’s no such thing as coincidence. There is such a thing as karma.

#13. Miracles happen. Recognize the miracles in your life. Recognize that your existence is a miracle.

#14. No matter how much you want to get out of Hudson Falls or the high school, don’t forget where you came from and the people who shaped you. I’ve met people who were honored by their school who then talked trash about their own hometown. Don’t be that guy or girl, ever. If you don’t like what you see, change it. Don’t walk away and badmouth it from a safe distance.

Finally, #15. If you ever have to give a speech like this, remember that no one will remember your advice unless you tell a story to go with it. Also remind your audience at that point that your remarks are half over.

*

Forty years ago when I was a senior in high school, I told my parents that I did not know what I wanted to do, but I did know I was not going to stay in Hudson Falls. I also smugly informed my father, a history teacher, that I was not going to be a teacher. Seven years later I was living back under their roof and driving his car up Main Street to Hudson Falls High School. Most of the waking hours of my life were spent in these very halls.

When I started as a teacher I was the students’ third teacher that year. They did not welcome me with open arms, and I saw them as mean 9^th graders. It was rough. I was still living with my parents down across from the Dog Shack praying I would get laid off because I was too chicken to quit. I got through the first year, but I almost cried when I saw my class list the next fall. But a funny thing happened, the now-tenth graders were genuinely glad to see me. I became their class advisor, and some of them are friends and teachers today.

When we began to interview World War II veterans I let my passion become a purpose in the classroom and it became contagious. Seventeen summers ago, I interviewed Judge Walsh on Coleman Avenue. I was going to shut the video camera off, but his daughter Elizabeth Connolly prodded him to tell me about a train he encountered with another tank commander at the end of WW2. My PASSION to learn more would not allow me to let it go. I contacted the other tank commander, who had more stories and even pictures of the liberation of a train full of concentration camp victims.

With PURPOSE I put them on the school website I built. Four whole years went by and then I heard from a grandmother in Australia who had been a 7-year-old girl on that train. Just then three more survivors appeared-all organically, and all within reasonable distance, but in hindsight, I don’t believe in coincidences.

At the time I just asked myself, “WHAT IF?” And our school community got behind it and we pulled off a reunion at the high school between the survivors and Judge Walsh in 2007, the first of 11 reunions worldwide that reunited 300 survivors and their families with the soldiers who freed them. I had taken the risk and spent many sleepless nights, I was terrified. What if the students are rude? What if one of the elderly people has a heart attack? But it was nothing less than an outpouring of love from this school and this community. And this love was powerful enough to break the barriers of space and time; we all became overnight best friends.

*

I want to close with the miracles and mysteries of life. Leslie Meisels, a survivor from Hungary, told me he had always thought for all his adult life that he had been graced with three miracles.

The first was after the Germans had invaded his country and the family was forced to wait for transports that, unknown to his community were heading straight to Auschwitz where up to 25,000 people were being murdered every day. At a time when 17-year-old boys did not talk back to their mothers (his father was already taken) he defied her and insisted that his mother and his younger siblings board a train they were not supposed to be on. She relented, and that transport was the only one shunted away from Auschwitz that day.

The second miracle was as he just finished handing off a bag of stolen beets to his mother behind a guard’s back when the guard suddenly whipped around and barked orders to him. The guard then shot another boy to death, catching him in the act of stealing beets for survival as Leslie had just done.

The third miracle, he would tell his audiences, was the day of his liberation at the hands of U.S. forces. April 13^th, 1945. Friday the 13^th. His luckiest day, his new birthday.

Today Leslie goes to schools and tells of the fourth miracle, being able to meet and laugh and cry with his actual liberators, whom he met at this very high school nine years ago —and that it was ‘just beyond imagination’. And every April 13^th, he emails birthday greetings to all his ‘twins’, his fellow survivors of that train whom he met right here in Hudson Falls.

Most of the soldiers are dead now, but those ripples go forth, still, and for all time. Why did that ‘fourth miracle’ unfold at that time in his life? That is the question I have asked myself many, many times. And to me it will have to remain a MYSTERY, one that began with another question: “WHAT IF?”

A final thought: Students like you had good questions, too. One asked another survivor if anything good came out of the Holocaust. The survivor thought a minute, because it was an important question, and replied, ‘Yes. My rescuers.’ A victim of the greatest crime in the history of the world found some good out of the evil.

*

Some of you will remember the days when I began my lessons with, ‘Today is the first day of the rest of your life’, and it wasn’t just on the days when I was passing tests back.

Maybe today you will take me seriously.

Your life is a miracle and you are adored by everyone in this room.

Have a purpose, cherish your honor, and don’t look back in old age with regrets.

Have fun, keep that sense of wonder, and don’t be afraid to ask the words, “WHAT IF?”

***