On occasion, I like to go back to my older pieces of writing, and this is one that has mattered very much to me over the years; I return to it regularly. I attended a very small, very special private school, one that was committed to teaching its students to think upon the good, the true, and the beautiful. I continue to place my family in the Orlando area so that my children can attend school there now.
It was so small that for many classes, Juniors and Seniors attended the same courses, which alternated each year so that that each subsequent set of Juniors and Seniors would learn the same material, just at different ages. One such course was Aesthetics, which was a unique combination of study into how culture, traditions, and value systems impacted art over time.
One of the first days of the school year was dedicated to The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The joint classes had spent an emotional time discussing the heroic deeds of these soldiers who marched to carry out orders that they knew would lead to their death. The primary discussion topic for our class to mull over was what things were worth fighting for. If worth fighting for, then one should certainly understand that death was a possible outcome. But what our teacher asked us to consider instead, was whether we could instead choose to live for those things.
Anyone can choose to die for something they care about, but it takes an even stronger person to choose every day what they are willing to live for. And so I give you my charge to the Junior classes, delivered at my high school graduation, to inspire them when they chose the path they would take.
Melissa Stevens – Charge to the Junior Class
The student’s journey toward education seems sometimes like a soldier’s march, sometimes an athlete’s sprint and sometimes a snail’s painful crawl.
Though much of the work during your final year of high school may feel like the dragging of a heavy shell over broken terrain, it’s the last month, this one, that leaves the snail in the dust, that becomes the marathon run
at the sprinter’s pace. One is left in wonder as to how and, in fact, whether all necessary credits, classes, or assignments have been completed.
The pace least often found is that of the soldier’s determined march – a purposeful striving to do what must be done, in a dignified, respectable and responsible manner.
Nearly 100 students began the next leg of their upper-school journey this last fall at Geneva, some as newcomers to the school and some as veterans. Eager, and somewhat nervous, at the beginning of the year, they tried to settle in quickly through the halting and unsettled hurricane-filled weeks of summer.
Homework to right of them,
Teachers to left of them,
Future in front of them,
Volleyed and thundered.
Flashed all their textbooks bare,
Flashed as they turned in air,
Penning the papers there,
Noble young students.
Throughout the past nine months at Geneva, some among us have fallen, and others have joined our ranks in the charge for education–to prepare us for life.
My challenge to you, young scholars, is to choose the bold march of the martial pace less traveled, knowing that in the end, this will have made all the difference.
Some things, it has been said, are worth fighting for; and if worth fighting for, then worth dying for; and if worth dying for, then most surely worth living for.
In your continued journey toward education, my friends, may your work be honorable, your goals respectable and your minds full of the wisdom gained as you press on in the march – right across the finish line.