THE INEFFECTIVE SPEECH WRITER

No pandemonium at today's graduation ceremony. In fact, I'd call the whole affair a real yawner. The greatest controversy (one that few staff members knew about) was probably the school principal's speech. Just the other day she said, "Jim, you're a writer, how about writing me something? You know, not too long, but make it interesting."


I'll admit, I wasn't very enthused about it, but after ten to fifteen minutes banging away at my computer keyboard, I reappeared in her office. "Here," I said, placing the finished copy on her desk, "Make it your own."

She quickly read through it and got all excited. "This is good," she said, "I'm going to use it. How'd you come up with it so quickly?"

"I dunno. It just happened."

So I sat upfront with the warden, teachers, and guest speaker, waiting for the school principal to deliver the speech I had written. I wanted to study the reactions on the inmates; I wanted to hear her spin on it. I finally had a genuine interest in the whole ceremony, and for what? She wrote her own speech. A real snooze-fest. Here's my speech (and feel free to tell me if you would've used it in front of a bunch of GED graduates/convicts):

Richard Bach, best known for his inspirational novels, mainly Jonathan Livingston Seagull, once wrote: "Learning is finding out what you already know."

Think about it—“Learning is finding out what you already know.”

Perhaps what he had meant was that each individual has an infinite amount of possibilities, that each individual is capable of learning whatever they choose—that the sky is the limit. Although very inspirational, this may not be grounded in reality.

I'm sure when those test scores first came back—whatever self-doubt you were feeling changed to a sudden sense of accomplishment. You might have felt vindicated, you might have realized, “Hey, I knew this material all along.”

“Learning is finding out what you already know.”

Yet, there's another saying that puts everything back into perspective. Something I'm sure you've probably heard many times before. Perhaps your teacher or a parent told you this: “The sign of an intelligent person is the person that realizes that he doesn't have all the answers.”

So here we are, everything has come full circle. Two rather profound statements that contradict one another. So what should we do? I think that answer’s quite evident. Continue to learn.