Posted April 30, 2010
Hey, seniors! June is just a couple of months away, and you'd better start steeling yourself, because graduation is coming, and there's nothing you can do to stop it. Pretty soon, you'll be attending your own ceremony, marching to the strains of Pomp and Circumstance, sporting a highly unflattering polyester gown and a funny-looking hat, and listening to the deluded rambling of your graduation speaker as he or she utters one bald-faced falsehood after another.
There. We said it.
Graduation speeches are many things: dull, cliched, and full of inside-jokey references to things people did that they hoped everyone had forgotten by now. ("And who could forget the Goat Tickling incident? Not Johnny Bugglewacker, that's for sure! Ha! Ha!... No, seriously, Johnny. You're going to jail.") But more than that, graduation speeches are chock full of total lies that the speaker expects you to swallow hook, line, and sinker. Well, no more! Because your SparkNotes editors have come together to make this list of the top five Inherent Lies in Grad Speeches. If you hear one of these whoppers, just smile and nod.
"High school is the best time of your life!"
Um, no. No, no, no. High school has its perks, its mysteries, its little excitements...but it also has lunch-table freeze-outs, prom drama, scary hormonal acne, curfews, and forced readings of dry literary works by people with names like Leonryxhdkiv Chrewskyvolla. Give yourselves a little credit, guys. It's gonna get better than this.
"We've had an incredible ride."
Granted, there are people in your class who probably believe that high school was an incredible ride. They are the same people who like to sniff paint. But for most of us, high school is a plodding journey in the direction of grownup freedom, punctuated by occasional triumphs in the fields of romance/sports/academia, and also by occasional fears that some paint-sniffing wacko is going to shove us in a locker. Again.
"We're all destined for greatness."
You can't blame them for this one; after all, it's not like your speaker can say, "We're all destined for greatness... except you, Doris von Dribbler. You'll be cleaning toilets for the rest of your life!" But your graduation speaker would have you believe that every person in your class—including the doofuses, the derelicts, and the one dude who just surreptitiously picked his nose and wiped it on his mortarboard—will go on to become a CEO, President of Denmark, or Batman. And we can't all be Batman, you guys.
"You can do anything you set your mind to."
This is obviously false. Just ask the ambitious young man who really, really, reeeeeeeeeeally believed he could fly, if he just got a running start from a large enough rooftop. (Hint: It didn't work out.) (Other hint: You can find him in the hospital with his entire body encased in plaster.)
"If you throw your caps in the air, you will be severely punished."
Administrators love to tack this on at the tail end of your closing speech, in an attempt to remind you just one more time that school is the boss of you, mister... except it's not. You're DONE. So you may receive a stern look from your deeply disappointed principal—if he can even tell who threw which hat in the ensuing melee—but nobody is going to jail for tossin' the mortarboard around. Trust.
Except Johnny Bugglewacker, but he had it coming.
By: kat_rosenfield
Tags: graduation guide
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