From Luca and Zoë: To the Class of 2023
By Luca M.-K. (‘23) and Zoë P. (‘23)
(The following is a transcript of the student graduation speech for the Class of 2023:)
Zoë: Hi, I’m Zoë.
Luca: …and I’m Luca. Welcome! We’re so grateful to all of the teachers, faculty, family, and friends who have helped us reach this moment and have come to celebrate it with us. Months ago, Zoë shared a document with me titled “Graduation Speech.” It included the following plan:
Zoë: Start with a greeting: “Wow, can you believe it’s been four years,” nostalgic anecdotes of our memories together, Luca quotes Tara Westover, the author of Educated…
Luca: “Education isn’t access to the truth; it’s access to different points of view.”
Zoë: The audience is in awe of the depth and range of our scholarly liberal arts education. Our speech finishes with a dramatic circular ending that leaves the audience in tears, with Sue sobbing so hard she can’t even read our names.
Luca: I laughed out loud. I knew this was a joke, but it got me thinking about the “genre” of graduation speeches in general. This kind of speech often relies on platitudes and tropes to say something by spewing a whole lot of nothing. “Follow your dreams! Be the change! Never give up!”
Zoë: While we’re honored to be chosen to speak at graduation, Luca and I are in the same spot as all of you. We’re not people who have “lived,” so we aren’t able to share our hard-won wisdom. Like you, we’re proud to have completed our high school journeys, exhausted by all that it took to get here, and both excited about and terrified of the next chapter.
Luca: We know that while we were all studying for the SATs, applying to college, working through finals, and trying to remember to breathe every now and then, we had our eyes set on this day—this achievement. This was the accomplishment that would set us on yet another path with yet another faraway day where we’ll once more be able to say, “We did it!”
Zoë: But while we took on the Herculean effort that it was to get here, it was easy to let ourselves fall into a rhythm, focus on what comes next, and gloss over the small moments that happened along the way: For example, how Brian’s “catchy” vocab word-of-the-day (“muscid”: having the characteristics of a fruit fly) somehow found its way into every English class freshman year.
Luca: Or when our first dance turned into a live karaoke session with the whole school in the corner of the commons belting “Bohemian Rhapsody” and throwing their cash, coins, and credit cards at the piano.
Zoë: How about waiting to start every virtual assembly until we reached “critical mass.”
Luca: Or when Dan and Lupe tangoed around the tables during dinner at senior prom.
Zoë: Even sitting in George’s class desperately trying to make sense of the slowly slanting scrawl of wisdom that he was circling for the twelfth time.
Luca: While all of our brilliant teachers may be wise, the only thing that we know for sure is that we are who we are because of The Downtown School. And what matters just as much as finally graduating is every minute we spent building this community, laughing with each other, and verifying our attendance each morning with the sign-in app.
Zoë: None of us know what this next chapter holds. But we can count on two things: One, there will always be the next success to chase. And two, there’ll continue to be key moments we may rush past in our hurry to achieve it.
Luca: Fellow members of the Class of 2023, no matter what future path we take, let’s make a collective promise to savor the small stuff. Because, when we look back, that’s what will have made the journey worthwhile.