Speech to the Del Mar Graduating Class 2005

By Merrill Boyce

The future belongs to you who have blazed a trail and to your successors who next year will have their own laptop computers in class and at home.

What I want to do today is to thank you (the graduates) and to make a couple of requests.

First I need to thank your parents for getting you this far while maintaining a modest degree of sanity at home and still balancing their careers and getting on with the lives they imagined for themselves when they were your age.

Next I need to thank your teachers for herding you through the middle school years, for tolerating you and your middle school enthusiasm, and for letting you learn a thing or two while teaching you what you are expected to know. And I need to thank the administrators who protect your teachers from distant bureaucrats and many other distractions so they can spend their time with you.

Finally, I want to thank you who are graduating. I want to get onto your bandwagon as it trundles off into the green hills of the future. You see, we started school together. You were in kindergarten the year I became a member of the school board. I watched you and followed you for school board reasons as well as for personal reasons, one of whom is sitting among you now.

Why do I want to thank you? And one can seriously ask why I should thank a class that has a reputation of trashing every school it has passed through. I am sure you have been back to Reed School and to Bel Aire, and you have seen that they have been rebuilt (or are under construction, as is Del Mar) since you were there. The improved schools are a part of your legacy. We realized from spending time with you and from seeing how you worked and played, that you needed better facilities for all of your activities. Thank you for showing us what you could do and for giving us ideas of what was possible. First you showed us what you could accomplish when we provided you better resources and when we put you together with the best trained teachers. Second, you showed a level of responsibility and achievement that allowed each of our schools to be named California Distinguished Schools. More importantly, you put the Reed School District on the national map when Bel Aire became a Blue Ribbon School for technology. That happened when you were at Bel Aire showing us how technology could be used in schools and classrooms. You pushed the limit of that technology and you challenged your teachers to learn along with you. For all of that I want to thank you.

Having said that, let me digress a moment and say that while you have ridden the wave, some of the bigger waves are coming after you leave. Next year every student at Del Mar will have a computer. Eight years ago, some of you spent Saturdays here with your parents trying to get the right kind of wires pulled into the classrooms so we could put a few used computers in every classroom; now there will be one computer for every student and there will be no wires. You are responsible in large part for that change. You proved to us that the technology we had was not enough for you to reach the outer limits of what you wanted to do. We actually had a technology bottleneck throughout the year. There were never enough computers for the work you needed to do. You also convinced us that you were ripe enough to manage and maintain the tools of technology better than anyone else could.

But you suffer the fate of all pioneers. You are leading the wagon train into new territory but others will gain the benefits. But if this change somehow seems too much too soon for a middle school, you need to know that it is already being done. It should be second nature to you, an 8th grade class that is connected by cell phones and whose favorite way of passing notes in class is text messaging.

Let's look at the facts. The trains and planes and automobiles that today are so much a part of our life were once inelegant, unsafe, sputtering, hissing kludges of technology that have become smoother and easier to use and are now available to everyone. It was mostly the adventurous and brave or the foolish and hardy who first tried them out and wrestled mind against metal to bring them to common use. We have the tragic stories of Casey Jones and Amelia Earhart and even Jimmy Dean to attest to the valor it took to be a pioneer in technology. Their final encounters with a technology we take for granted made them icons for those who followed and who improved on the technologies that were fatal to them. Travel is safer, easier, and cheaper and more comfortable and more available in part because of them, and because of heroes both large and small who made incremental improvements in safety and efficiency. You did not have to make the same sacrifice to have a legacy in this district.

Your fortune was to be at the confluence of a newer technology and its potential in the classroom.

The first digital computer will celebrate its 60th birthday next year. It was the size of this multipurpose room here behind me and they were both probably built about the same time. What's left of that computer is however happily and appropriately in a museum where it will do no harm. That computer called the ENIAC took a large staff around the clock to keep it running; on average it ran less than 6 hours before it had to be shut down, repaired and restarted; at a time before anyone knew what a download was, it took weeks to reprogram and upgrade. That computer had less computing power than a handheld calculator has today, but it consumed so much electricity that it would be considered an environmental threat by today's standards. Did I mention that it cost $500,000 to build? When I put that number into an online calculator this morning, I learned that was equivalent to $5,103,320.89. In the fall, the Del Mar computer, more reliable and friendlier to the environment, will cost a very small fraction of that, about 1/5,000th.

A computer for every student will become as common as the pencils, pens, paper and calculators that every student uses. Even the pens and paper were wondrous inventions in their time and at first their use was limited to those who could afford them and who knew how to use them. In time they have all become common and cheap and easy to use, only because the first users used them well, taught others how to use them and then improved on them to gain time and to be more productive. That dynamic has never changed.

As for the requests I want to make of you:

First, never stop asking questions. Your ability to ask "why" and "why not" and then to ask the next question (rather than to accept the first answer) is important to moving forward not just for you but for every one. Never trust anything that will not open itself to your questions. You are alive only as long as you keep asking questions.

Second, do something new this summer. Use the summer to try out your newly graduated self. Take yourself for a test run. Find out something about yourself you don't already know. Plant a garden, see how it grows; make a new friend, learn from what they know; climb a mountain, seek a new vista. In every case leave a bit of yourself behind and take your new knowledge with you as a mirror to reflect in when life seems confusing.

In closing I will not caution you, I have no words of admonition, I will not even try to tell you anything insightful about your future. I have seen enough to know that there is nothing I can tell you that you don't already know; and I know enough to tell that you will figure it all out for yourselves.

Perhaps the only thing that might give you some comfort at this time, as you all leave Del Mar to explore the horizon a little more closely is this: Your parents and relatives and their extraterrestrial friends who have somehow become dense and stupid and uncool over the past few years will actually shed some of their alien habits and become smarter and cleverer and more familiar and more helpful than they are now. I think I can guarantee that.

Good luck and may all that you have learned, and I include the social and personal as well as the mere academic, serve you as a solid foundation for all that you build in the future.