Before the Lenten holidays and during the graduation season, we saw at least three examples of graduation messages go awry.
First, a high school salutatorian was stopped by school administrators to deliver the rest of her Welcome Remarks. The girl did something other than welcome parents and guests to their graduation; she ranted about how the school used unfair academic measures and gave the top award to another student when it should have been her.
Because the video went viral online, the matter came to the attention of the Education Department which ordered an investigation. The girl’s teachers countered that she had always been overly grade conscious and defended their decision to make someone else valedictorian. The ensuing commentary on social media consisted of advice to the girl to let the matter go and change her mindset that grades are everything—because they aren’t.
The second graduation incident was an invitation by a Manila university to its alumna to be guest of honor and speaker for the PhD and MA graduates. The alumna, now a doctor at an international humanitarian medical team based in France, decided to fly back to the Philippines for the event.
When the school asked if it could have an advance copy of her speech, she said she did not have it yet because she was still going to write it during her long flight home. The university then sent her a note—a rude one clothed in attempts at politeness — telling her it was canceling the invitation because she would not give a copy of her speech. The doctor turned to social media to vent her anger and frustration.
Is not an invitation a sign of complete confidence in whatever a person decides to speak about and the and manner he or she wishes to conduct that speech? Aren’t guests of honor entitled to a bit of, well, honor, and respect?
Finally, there is a congressman’s atrocious use of the English language in congratulating his city’s graduates in a written message. The rambling, convoluted sentences make us wonder, reading word after painful word, why the politician did not just use a simple subject-verb structure, write in Tagalog, or even employ a quality-control staff member for the purpose instead.
Whatever good intentions the congressman may have had—assuming he was sincere —for his district’s graduates were thus lost in the language.
If speech, spoken or written, were indeed a window into one’s mind, then we can imagine with horror what this congressman’s mind is like.
These anecdotes remind us that while graduations are supposed to be conventional ceremonies that bring students from one stage of their life to another, such ceremonies are not immune to surprises. Whether we react to such surprises with amusement, compassion, humor, or disdain depends on our willingness to discover yet more things about human nature.