My blog from Houston, Texas. Updated most weeks, usually on Sundays.
Last night (Wednesday evening), students and parents gathered in the PAAC for what is a peculiarly American annual occasion. The purpose was to induct students into the various Honor Societies in which our outstanding students (of whom Awty has many!) participate in order to develop their leadership, their scholarship, their character and their service to others.
We inducted 140 new students into Honor Societies, and in addition, we presented 120 Honor Cords to our Grade 12 students who will graduate this Saturday.
In my opening address, I tried to challenge our Honor Society students to overcome the inertia they will inevitably encounter in their lives and act as a positive force in the world for what they believe is right. The ultimate theme of my address was that ‘Barnacles hate chilli sauce”, and here is the text of my address to the students:
Ladies and gentlemen, students of the Awty International School,
Welcome to this special evening in which we will induct many of you into our Honor Societies. To paraphrase the great French writer, Voltaire: with great honor comes great responsibility, and I want to spend a few minutes at the beginning of this evening’s ceremony to reflect on this a little.
I expect that most of you have never seen a copy of William Hickling Prescott’s massive book, ‘The History of the Conquest of Mexico’, written in 1843, and ‘The History of the Conquest of Peru’, written in 1847. Originally they were five volumes, but some enterprising publisher combined them together into one, to become the type of book that would sit on a school library shelf and then be thrown out when a methodical librarian noticed that it had not been borrowed in the past twenty years or so.
I knew someone who had once seen an original copy of this book, and although he is now old, he says that it is still etched into his mind, never to be eradicated. Even to this day, he says that the descriptions of Aztec human sacrifices chill the blood.
Not long after he left Harvard University in 1821, the author, William Hickling Prescott, lost his eye in an accident. Soon after that he gradually went blind in the other. So he amassed his incredible historical details by having specially trained readers read to him. Though he was almost blind, he wrote by means of a ‘noctograph’, which was a special frame made out of brass wires that kept him from running his lines together. His combined book, The Conquest of Mexico and Peru, took him twenty years to complete. While he was awaiting publication, all his manuscripts were destroyed in a fire. He put aside his understandable and very deep distress, and, by now completely blind, he re-wrote the entire work from memory.
Most of us, me included, are no William Hickling Prescotts when it comes to using our memory. Of course, we can manage irrelevant trivia, like 80,000 fleas weigh 30 grams, but memorising huge quantities of information, and even using our memory to learn new languages, is not easy for us because our memories are no longer trained as they were in past years. And even more so than Prescott’s memory, I suspect very few of us would have his persistence. We might be able to excuse not memorising huge amounts of material, because it is now so easy to access information using computers and the internet, where the problem is the glut of information, but how do we excuse the lack of persistence that was once taken as the norm?
Now, maybe I am speaking to the wrong group about this. After all, you are the ones who have shown persistence, and you have made the extra effort. That is why we are applauding you and recognising your achievements this evening.
Nonetheless, the reality is that all of us could always give more of ourselves to a task – any task – despite what we think to the contrary. In our hearts we know we are as lazy as we dare to be. We do have very well defined limits in our minds beyond which we will not pass unless we gain from it. Great schools like Awty have always been built on what I call ‘generosity of spirit’ – that spirit of giving more from our hearts and doing more, which leads us to keep on giving when something else within us says “no more”. Whether this is something as simple as turning off the television set and really trying to understand mitosis and meiosis, or reading all of Euripides’ plays when only one is on the reading list, or whether it is the committed teacher (of which we are blessed with so many here) spending time with a struggling student when it would be far more comfortable to be around a cup of coffee and some cake with colleagues, all these and many more are examples of the tension between ‘more’ and ‘no more’.
As you know, it is to encourage the ‘more’, and to discourage the ‘no more’, that we are recognising your efforts this evening. If ever the ‘enough is enough’ attitude gains traction here at Awty, as it has done in so many other schools here in the US, then Awty itself will be ‘no more’, at least in the sense that we know it today and it has been in the past. What made this school so special for so many has been the attitude of ‘going the extra mile’ from faculty, students, parents, board members and alumni. Of course, there will always be those who see the school only in terms of what it can do for them or their children, but that minority is not what gives us the great community that we all enjoy and benefit from today.
In fact, that minority that claims ‘enough is enough’ is a little like the barnacles on the hull of a ship. Barnacles on a ship are not deep thinkers, so they never know, I suppose, that that the ship may be 30% less efficient because of them, and 30% more costly to run. I once read that someone, by chance, found out that barnacles hated chilli sauce (there’s another of those useful facts like the weight of 80,000 fleas!). He extracted oil from the seeds of the chillies (which is the basis of their heat) and, because this is miscible with organic solvent in paint, he produced a marine paint that forever stops barnacles attaching to a ship’s hull.
So the thought I want to leave you with this evening is this – barnacles hate chilli sauce. The fact that you are here means that none of you is a barnacle. My challenge to you is to make sure you are the chilli sauce, and you do everything you can to stop those other barnacles having their way.
Barnacles hate chilli sauce
Thursday, 23 May 2013