“Some of life’s strongest bonds
are the ones we forge when everything around us seems broken... We are stronger
together than we are alone”
President Barack
Obama
By Tommie Saylor
Truman High School Principal
Last week we graduated some 280
students from Harry S Truman High School, Titan and the Career Center,
and the Taylor Virtual Learning Academy. Though the ceremony was
joyous, rewarding, and rather solemn, it brought a tear to the eye of every
educator in the building. If it didn’t, they ought to get out of the business.
Graduation is the goal, the epitome
of our profession, the great reward we as educators all seek. To see those who
you have placed so much effort, so many tears, so much sweat and agony, to see
those who you have worried over, fought over, and even prayed over, to see
those who you have pushed, prodded, and pulled through good times and bad
finally achieve the ultimate educational goal is very emotional, to say the
least.
Some of us handle this swelling of
emotion by crying, others by laughing, and those like myself, try very hard to
suppress the flood while fighting back the tears.
Graduation is a joyous occasion, but
it is also sad. For educators it is like Christmas, the Fourth of July and a
birthday all rolled up in one.
You are losing students with whom you
have spent years forging a relationship; it’s like losing one of your own kids
with no guarantee that you will ever see them again. So you put on a brave face,
give them a hug and send them out into the world hoping that you prepared them
well. Once in a while one or two may return for a short visit, but most of the
time they are lost to memory.
Graduation is the saddest, happiest
event of the school year, and of an educator’s career.
To the new graduates I say good luck,
and Godspeed.
I hope and pray that we did our job
well in preparing you for the “real world.” For those of us in the
educational trenches, I say it is time to dry our eyes, wipe our noses, close
out the rest of this school year and begin to prepare for the next.
Before we know it, another graduation
will be upon us.
Remember, their future is in
our hands. Improving one week at a time. The New Truman High School….
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