Draft -- Promotion Speech

For posterity's sake, here is the last draft of the promotion speech I gave to the class of 2009 last June. I departed rather significantly from certain parts of the text, using it as a guide, but the spirit is the same.

Gracias. Buenas tardes. Quiero comenzar diciendo felicidades a todas las familias de nuestros alumnos. Estamos aquí a celebrarles en este dia muy especial, y por eso, quiero expresarme bien mis pensamientos y sentimientos. Y, por necesidad, hablaré en ingles. Espero que todos puedan entender el sentimiento de mis palabras, si no las palabras si mismos.

YES WE CAN.

I am deeply honored to represent my colleagues and to have the opportunity to speak to YOU today, Centennial’s first 8th grade class, the class of ’09!

When people find out that I’m a teacher, they always ask me where I teach. When I tell them I teach in Huntington Park, they will usually say, “Huntington Park? You teach 8th graders in Huntington Park?” And they’ll look at me like I’m a little crazy.

But then I tell them about you, the smart and beautiful students that make my day, every day.

I tell them about young people like Jenny Valle. In our writing snapshot a few weeks ago, you were asked to agree or disagree with the idea that this community is one of the worst places for teens to live. Jenny Valle wrote,

"I know that Los Angeles is not that bad because I live here."

I tell them about students like Karen Lares who wrote,

"Yes, you might say our community is ghetto, but we are strong enough that we are trying to make a difference to the area we live in."

This community is an amazing community. It’s a tough place, a tough place to grow up in, but there is a lot of good here in this community and some of the very best of it is sitting right here in front of me.

You are giving people something positive to say about Huntington Park. You are showing the state of California and the entire United States what the sons and daughters of immigrants can do.

I say YOU because YOU are the ones who have made this school by far the best in Huntington Park.

Arthur Vega wrote,

"There is one school in HP that does care. That school is called Centennial College Preparatory Academy. Every teacher in that school cares about their students. Now if every parent were to protest for more schools like this one, every student would get to actually learn something."

Arthur’s right, all of us teachers at Centennial, we do care about our students. We can’t stop talking about you. Seriously – we go to ER for dinner together and within five minutes all we’re talking about is you. Who likes who, who said what, who said something funny in class, etc.
 
But the teachers are not why this school is the best. This school is the best because of YOU.

YOU are the ones who made us improve 79 points on the CST last year, a better improvement than any of the other Aspire secondary schools.

YES WE CAN.

YOU are the ones who put our school in the top ten percent of all similar schools in the entire state of California.

YES WE CAN.

YOU are the ones who got Centennial the EPIC award that was given to only twenty-one schools in the entire country.

YES WE CAN.

The class of ’09 DOES shine.

YES WE CAN AND YES WE DID.

As Steph Palma says,

"I want people to come down here to see that we’re more than just gangs and drug dealing. Huntington Park has MORE to offer. For example, smart kids that want to go to college, teenagers that see a future for themselves. I mean, yeah, it’s real easy to judge a book by its cover, but why don’t you take some time and read it."

That’s a good point, Steph.

YES WE CAN.

E pluribus unum.

It’s Latin for “out of many, one.”

From the many elementary schools in our community, you helped create one amazing middle school.

And now, for some of us, it is time to separate again.

Whether you stay with us, go to Alliance, to Green Dot, to HP, or whatever high school you may end up at, you can know that you’ve done something great here. You’ve created not just a school, but a community. And you’re welcome back any time.

When people ask me about Huntington Park, I tell them that it is home to a bunch of young people that I love very dearly. As your teacher, I’m very proud of you. IF I WAS YOUR FATHER, I’d also be very proud of you. Being your teacher these past two years has been the great honor of my life.

End of a Decade

Greetings, prez2012 blog readers (aka mom, dad, and maybe Mark?)! A new year, and a new decade, is upon us. And so, let's continue the revered prez2012.com New Year's tradition and present 2009, the year in review.

(see my first blogs of 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, and 2005).

In 2009:

* I blogged just 20 times. That's one less blog than I wrote in all of 2008. Compare that to 50 blogs in 2007 and 76 blogs in 2006. Hmmm...

* Pam and I nearly got snowed in at Big Bear when it took us HOURS to get my car up and out of a slippery, icy driveway in what I had planned to be a cute, romantic getaway vacation. In the end, things turned out just fine and we got an upgrade to a huge house for the remaining two days. That snowboarding trip also marked the first time that I did not a) get a concussion and b) fall (b, of course, being directly correlated with a).

* I was invited to present my work on academic discourse at Aspire's summer leadership retreat to all the Aspire big wigs, principals, coaches, and lead teachers. It was a big hit -- at least two other schools used my blueprint for launching and evaluating academic discourse initiatives, and Aspire adopted "my" definition of academic discourse for the entire organization (I put "my" in quotes because I just added one word to Dr. Kate Kinsella's definition; I gave Dr. Kate plenty of credit in my presentation, but nobody seems to remember that!).

* Barack Obama was elected President of the United States. Watching his inauguration with our entire school community is something that I won't soon forget. I think a lot of the momentum from that day has been slowed by our plodding efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, but perhaps even more so from scared white people who for reasons I can't easily explain are easily swayed by words from the likes of Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, and Rush Limbaugh. I'd say in 2009, fear trumped hope.

* I completed the second semester of my administrative credential program, this time focusing on better supporting high-achieving students. I especially enjoyed this project. Rather than working with teachers and teacher practice, most of it was spent interviewing our best students about what it's like to be in a school like ours where they are surrounded, quite literally, by so many deficits. The work from this project helped lead to a big change in our schedule for the 2009-10 school year: the addition of a differentiated class called FOCUS for an hour a day, three times a week, where students are grouped homogeneously. It also was at least partly responsible for a school-wide goal of increasing differentiation.

* I rode my bike around Lake Tahoe, for the third (and by far the slowest) time. Mark and Sal weren't there this year (Mark was still nursing a broken collarbone), and JLO was probably in the best cycling condition of his life. I, on the other hand, barely trained at all, what with finishing my second semester credential work just a month previously. I was already empty by the time we hit Truckee, and the major cramping started just a few miles short of King's Beach. But I still did it -- JLO beat me to the top by something crazy like 25 minutes, but I got there with a little help from a mini-peloton of several ladies who looked to be in their late thirties or early forties, probably wondering what I was doing drafting off of them. 2009 is also the year I surpassed 3,000 total miles on my bike.

* In what was probably the highlight of 2009, I was selected by our 8th graders to speak at their promotion ceremony (the lame name for "graduation" since some people think that term should be reserved only for high school and college). When I first chose to teach 8th grade at Centennial, a secret dream of mine was that I would speak at promotion. I was always jealous each year at Garfield when the students selected a teacher to speak. I *so* wanted them to remember with such fondness their 5th grade memories with me that I would somehow be selected. But, of course, it never happened, and they always picked someone far more contemporary (understandably -- 5th grade, to an 8th grader, seems light years away).

But when the time came for our 232 8th graders to vote for teacher speakers, they picked me. It was probably the *greatest* gift I have ever received from students, the honor and the privilege to speak to them on the most important day in their young educational careers, the very first "promoting" class of our three-year-old school. What a day.

* I took the summer off again. I enjoyed it so much last year that I did it again. Despite riding about a hundred miles a week on my bike, I gained about ten pounds. Damn you late early-thirties metabolism!

The summer was a time for several trips. First, Pam and I visited Dan and Nancy in Vancouver, a trip that included time up at Whistler, home to the 2010 Winter Olympics. We also spent a couple of days in Catalina, which wasn't nearly as big or as fun as I remembered it. And Mark and I spent a couple of fearful, skunk-ful nights at Lake Cachuma, our base for a beautiful ride out of Solvang and later along the coast in Santa Barbara.

* I completed the third and final semester of my admin credential program in December. Without exaggeration, I barely made it to the end. Emotionally, mentally, and physically exhausted, I limped towards December 12th, the final day that consisted of an interview panel of four charter world heavyweights (I mean that figuratively) grilling me with difficult questions about a transformative project that I never really was able to fully wrap my head around. Though I got "exceeds expectations" on every part of the rubric for my written work (another 30+ page behemoth), my presentation to the panel was shaky at best. But as Coach Merk always said, "a W is a W."