Another Speech

Henning recently posted a link to a very entertaining graduation speech, which made me recall the speech I wrote and delivered to my school last October at the Fall Family Weekend event. Every year two faculty members are selected by the headmaster to be faculty representatives for the annual giving fund (we're a non-profit private boarding school for students with diagnosed learning disabilities) and last year I was one of the two picked. I won't get into all the details, only to say that the faculty reps are called upon to give speeches at the yearly big event on campus called Fall Family Weekend where teachers have conferences with parents, and there are student musical and dramatic performances, big athletic events, alumni come out of the woodwork, etc. Saturday night several hundred people pile into the gym for a banquet and part of the evening's festivities are given to speeches. The only criteria for the speech is that it be about 5 minutes long (mine takes a bit longer but I was careful not to exceed 10) and that it basically expresses something about why I have chosen to teach at this school. And so here is what I came up with:



As with many other speeches you’ve heard before, this one shall begin with a quotation:

“The hyperbola is defined as a locus of points, that is, a collection of points sharing a property, located on a plane such that the absolute value, or real number, of the difference of the distances between any given point of the set to two fixed points, also called the foci (used in geometry to describe conic sections, of which hyperbola is one), of the plane is constant.”

Since individuals from the fields of literature, politics, art, and occasionally science seem to get all the great quotes, I figured I’d give a nod to the field of mathematics for a change. The person to whom that particular quote is attributed will remain un-credited for the time being, however. We’ll get to him in a bit.

For those of you that don’t know, I actually am not a math teacher but an English teacher. As a result, language is of utmost importance to me. When I first applied for a position at EHS, I was struck by the school’s mission statement, which goes like this: “Eagle Hill School educates students with learning (dis)abilities by providing an intimate and encouraging community that honors the individual, values learning diversity, and fosters personal and social growth.” If you look at the mission statement in its printed form, you’ll see a set of parentheses around the "dis" in the word "disabilities." Since I had never seen that before, I wondered what that was supposed to mean.

Well, first, the “dis” part suggests something negative, such as when you pop that “dis” in front of "pleasure," you get "displeasure" or turn "respect" into "disrespect." You turn a positive into a negative. But then I thought about that delightful word "disgruntled." That has a negative ring to it as well, as in “disgruntled employee,” yet if you take away the “dis,” you are left with just “gruntled.” Is there such a word as “gruntled”? Would anyone say “It’s such a beautiful day, I feel so gruntled?” By the pattern of the previous examples, that would seem to be the case and yet obviously it is not. Hmmmm, I thought, maybe there’s more to that “dis-” than I ever imagined. Maybe one could apply the rules of algebra, of all things, to language, you know, you would have to solve for the part that is inside the parentheses like you would solve for “x” and that is a variable, so that "dis-" could represent more than one thing. But that would mean having to do math, the one subject in school I always struggled with.

Growing up, for whatever reason, reading and writing were always strengths of mine but math was the academic subject that shut my brain right down. For instance, in 2nd grade, my testing indicated that I was reading at an 8th grade level. However, as soon as the process of subtraction was introduced to me, I was lost. All those other kids around me seemed to get it while I was stuck. Tutors and extra help after school were necessary to get me through subtraction and later, division, fractions, etc. while at the same time, reading and writing were easy and fun, like being a shark tossed into a kiddie pool filled with goldfish. Now let's fast-forward to 11th grade and Mrs. Mildred's algebra class.

Picture a woman with the scowling face of a bulldog and the body of a Sherman tank stuffed into one of those 1980s pantsuits with the poofy shoulders. And the glasses that sat perched way down at the end of her nose. Mrs. Mildred. The English student in me thought that was so apt. Mildred. You could hear both the words “ill” and “dread” in her name. Anyway, Mrs. Mildred would sit at her desk barking at us to come up to the front one by one to write our work on the chalkboard for her to criticize and point out the flaws in our computations. I don’t think she even had to turn around from her desk to look. I swear she could hear the sound of my fingers tentatively etching the numeral 4 on the board when it should’ve been an 8. “No, no, no, it’s 8, not 4, ya meatball!” Yes, that was her somewhat affectionate yet still mildly insulting name for us when we did something wrong- we were all a bunch of meatballs. Or at least I was.

Either way, Mrs. Mildred was a master at algebra. I should be able to learn from this woman, I thought at the time. And yet I was failing her class. At the onset of the 4th quarter, when it seemed hopeless and that the final exam would just be further proof of my mathematical ineptitude, Mrs. Mildred gave us an assignment in which we had to write a 10-page paper explaining in writing how quadratic functions worked with graphs and examples. It would be worth 25% of our grade! The class was stunned, perhaps so stunned that we were unable to focus on the day’s lesson. Not just me this time but the whole class. Mrs. Mildred got so frustrated trying to get us to pick up the day’s concept that she did something she rarely did- she read the explanation from the textbook. Now, she didn’t like to do this any more than we did. And that day I began to see why. When she read aloud, Mrs. Mildred had difficulty pronouncing words, halting at polysyllabic or even hyphenated words that continued onto the next line. This woman, for all her expertise in the field of mathematics, seemed to struggle to some extent with reading. All at once she seemed vulnerable, much the same way I felt in her class everyday. And this little meatball saw an opportunity.

I spent an entire week on this paper, stuffing it with long, drawn-out explanations full of excessive vocabulary and plenty of hyphenated words, stretching every sentence and paragraph to the breaking point. It was from this very assignment that I derived the quote I started this speech with. Remember? "The hyperbola is defined as a locus of points, that is, a collection of points sharing a property, etc. etc." Anyway, when I was finished, I didn’t turn in a mere 10-page paper but one that was 27 pages long! I thought I was so smart when the paper was returned to me stamped with an A on it, smugly thinking I had perhaps taken advantage of a teacher.

But as I think about it now- how then do I explain my passing grade on the final exam I took a month later? There was no writing involved on that exam, only problems to solve and despite failing similar tests throughout the year, somehow I was able to pass the final. Could it be that Mrs. Mildred’s writing assignment, which forced my mind to crawl inside the very concept of quadratic functions to be able to express it in language, made it possible for me to actually, finally learn this material that previously seemed so impenetrable?

I never realized it at the time but now that I’ve been teaching here at EHS, it’s so clear to me. Mrs. Mildred was my teacher in an academic area that presented a significant challenge to me but she had made it possible for me to draw upon my strengths in reading and writing to succeed. This idea is inherent in the mission statement of EHS; that every student can learn, because while there may be weaknesses, there are also strengths.

So, before I finish this speech, let's go back to that word "(dis)abilities," with the "dis-" in parentheses. And let's treat it as a variable. If you research the etymology of the prefix "dis-" you'll find it actually is a variable- it has several meanings. "Dis-" can mean "the opposite of" so when you add "dis-" to "respect," you get the opposite, "disrespect." However, when it comes to that strange word, "disgruntled," you will find that in old English, there exists the word, "gruntled" and it means "grumbling." However the prefix of "dis-" in this case means "intensified," so “disgruntled” does not mean simply "grumbling", but "intensified grumbling." So now I've got it! In the EHS mission statement, by putting those parentheses around the "dis-" in "disabilities," a variable is created and our options are: the "dis-" could mean "the opposite of," so "disabilities" would mean "the opposite of abilities" but it could also mean "intensified abilities."

So, just as each student has academic weaknesses, each student also has strengths and abilities, some of which are intensified, perhaps to compensate for any weaknesses. It’s our mission as faculty to draw upon these strengths to help our students learn what they need to know to succeed. Whether it’s Mr. G having his students compose written answers to essay questions to explain concepts in physics (that would work for me!) or Mrs. B incorporating the process of building models in order to learn geometry, which works for those who are brilliant when they get to use their hands, like B.H., or my own students understanding literary concepts like irony by playing music and writing songs, which is a natural talent for kids like E.T., the mission statement of EHS is in action everyday here at this school and we all benefit from this way of approaching education. Thank you for listening, ya meatballs.