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| WAB Class of 2008, Confucius Temple, May 31, 2008 |
Highlights of graduation included a keynote address from HS Teacher Faye Cowin, who was specially selected to speak by the Grade 12 class, and a resonant message from HS Principal Rena Mirkin. Valedictorian Cat Munro spoke on the nature of adaptation and change, and Salutatorian Jean-Ai Heng performed "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" on piano. Other honored speakers included Michael Crook, a WAB Founder and China Studies Teacher, Dong Nai Qiang, the 75th generation descendant of Confucius, Board Chair Frank Whitaker and Interim Director David Randall. A transcript of Rena's address to the Class of 2008, her first class of Grade 12 students to graduate from WAB, follows below.
Good morning and welcome to the second graduation of the Western Academy of Beijing. WAB’s mission is to educate our children to reach their full potential within a warm and caring community that fosters excellence and responsibility. Each one of us in the WAB community is guided by this mission and by our core values: Learner Centered, China-Global Coherence, Mosaic of Diversity, WAB spirit, and Caring.
We are here today to celebrate the Class of 2008. Allow me to thank the people who have contributed to bringing you to this day and making this wonderful event happen. Thank you to Wenjing Wang, Sinead Collins, and Trish Smith and most especially to Leanda Wood for their devoted and hard work to prepare for this day. Our sincere appreciation to our secretaries who worked tirelessly to prepare for today and to Mr. Zhang and his crew for all their hard work. Thank you to the members of our outstanding faculty who work with intelligence, passion and respect for every student. They teach you and care about you, support you and challenge you, ultimately preparing you for the next phase of your life. Faculty, please stand. Mr. Wood was a counselor for many of you and has played a key role in your 12th grade year in his first year as assistant principal.
Today we extend a most special welcome to our former director, John McBryde who held a great vision and transmitted it with incredible magnetism to all of us in the WAB family. We are delighted to welcome Robin Klymow, previous DP coordinator and assistant principal, whose creative energy fueled WAB high school during the years of its creation.
It is your parents and the other most significant people in your life who absolutely must be thanked. They have nurtured you from the beginning and will continue to do so throughout your life. They knew when you were happy and when you were struggling. They were with you when you climbed what seemed like mighty mountains and now celebrate with you in your triumph. Please stand and give your parents and significant mentors the ovation they have earned.
WAB has entered a new phase of its existence as a complete high school and you, the class of 2008, are models of what we were, what we are, and what we will be. Always the first class you graduate as principal holds a special place in your memory. How fortunate am I that you are that first class at WAB. You are resourceful and bright, articulate and thoughtful, creative and committed. You care about the world and show it with your hearts, your minds, and your energy. As individuals and as a class, you care about justice, the environment, and one another. You embrace challenge.
You have succeeded mightily at WAB, leaving a legacy of commitment, dedication, action. You understand need and work to meet it. You support migrant schools and coffee farmers, orphans and earthquake survivors. From Personal Projects to the soccer field, from Dramatic Shorts to DP exams, from Green Generation to the Global Issues Network Conference, from ephemeral ideas to documented theses, you have learned, you have grown, you have achieved.
The decision you made for a class gift was truly inspiring. Rather than a tangible object, you have chosen to provide an education for Zhi Zhong Qiong, a young woman at a village school in Gulou. She will complete her remaining three years of high school solely because of your understanding and generosity. You are educated people who, knowing its importance, chose to provide an education for someone who otherwise would never have had one. There can be no better gift.
Throughout your years at WAB, you have worked together to learn and to complicate your thinking, entertaining new ideas and different philosophies. At WAB we strive to teach you how to think, not what to think. In our increasingly diverse world, you must be aware of many kinds of thinking, understanding the genesis of diversity, the reality of circumstance, and how their confluence may affect not only one particular society, but also the greater world culture. You have developed your own ideas, analyzing information and synthesizing thoughts from other people and other cultures, ultimately using them to develop your own unique framework. It is ideas that you must continue to develop, to refine, to use as a foundation for your lives.
In his book, The Courage to Teach, Parker Palmer says, “We invite diversity in our community because diverse viewpoints are demanded by the manifold mysteries of great things. We embrace ambiguity not because we are confused or indecisive but because we understand the inadequacy of our concepts to embrace the vastness of great things. We welcome creative conflict not because we are angry or hostile but because conflict is required to correct our biases and prejudices about the nature of great things.”
It is very rare that great things just happen. The first requirement to effect change is that one person with a vision. It is not sufficient, however, merely to have the vision – it must be communicated in a way so that other people “get it”, so that they understand its importance and incorporate it into their own visions. Then it needs a community of people to move it forward to become reality. It is to you we shall soon look for ideas, for thrilling new concepts, for answers to the questions that continue to determine the future of our different countries, our world, indeed the human race.
Sir Edmund Hillary noted,” It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.” Each one of you here has conquered something within you and now you are moving forward, knowing far better who you are. What is it that you want of yourself? Think carefully; life is full of options. Know that whatever it is you choose to do, you must attack it with passion, commitment, with verve and hope. Who thought of electricity, of computers and the Internet, of submarines and rockets, of Harry Potter and Homer Simpson? Who thought of world peace, and who thought of war? Who makes a positive contribution to our world and who diminishes it? We would like to think of global harmony, of many peoples joining hands in a worldwide circle of humanity. At this point in time, it is difficult even to imagine such a thing. Yet if we do not hope and plan and work towards it, never will it come to be. As Picasso said, “I am always doing things I can’t do, that’s how I get to do them.”
You have had the remarkable opportunity to live in China, in this vast country that is changing daily. China is dynamic, magnetic; it envelops you with its magic. It has much to teach us and we have learned. Many of you speak Chinese, make jiaozi, love blue sky days, and truly appreciate the depth of history. Always, China will be a part of your experience, your memory, your life. How many people have a class picture in their graduation coats on The Great Wall? Think of the scholars who have gone before you in this most significant place. How brilliant to be graduating in the magnificence of the Confucius Temple.
“The world is one family,” said Sun Yat Sen. Where better to appreciate the depth of his thinking than here in China. Look at your classmates and at the greater WAB community. The global village that is our world is reflected in our China cosmos. Soon, it will be seen through the giant telescopic lens of the Olympics. You are here graduating in China in the year of the Olympics, another life memory to incorporate.
While we as a faculty are at the end of our sojourn with you, your individual journeys have truly just begun. And what journeys you will have. You are going on to places throughout the world – to university, military service, internships. Your roads will separate and will again converge. Life makes these circles. On behalf of the entire faculty, let me say that we are proud to have made those ripples which, like a rock tossed into a lake, will create ever widening rings within the circles of your lives.
This is your world. Appreciate the exquisite moments of life.
Rena Mirkin, WAB HS Principal
Commencement Speech, May 31, 2008