LOVE LEARNING: Prepared text of speech.
Thank you for having me tonight. It is a great honor and a privilege to be standing here in front of you. Congratulations for all you have already achieved academically. You have earned your honors through hard work and diligence. But, you may not realize that you are only at the beginning of your long journey. I expect that all of you will pursue higher education; you should. You might be asking yourself, "What comes ahead?
Unfortunately, neither I nor anyone else knows the answer to that question. However, it is possible to look at the past for answers. As the philosopher George Santayana said: Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Thus, the past has lessons for all of us and most of those lessons are hard ones.
I'd like to share some lessons learned from my past. Try not to laugh too much. Mostly, I'll concentrate on technology, although you may question my use of the term once you hear the examples.
When I was in high school I had to buy a slide rule or a slip stick, as we called it. Slide rules were the calculators of the day and came in a wide variety of styles and materials, depending on the scales engraved on them or how they were made. All of the math classes had 8 foot ones mounted on the front wall. My slide rule was optic yellow and was made of aluminum. It cost me about $20 and I recently sold it on e-Bay for much less.
I took a manual portable typewriter to college. It cost $79. I once had to show my children how to use one. They asked, "Where's the display." I said, "It only produces hard copy." Then they asked how to fix errors. I showed them a typewriter eraser. Try finding one of those at Walmart.
In grad school I upgraded to an IBM Selectric full size typewriter, my PhD dissertation was typed on it. I also bought a new-fangled device, a handheld calculator. It cost $149 and could take square roots! Of course, the complex statistical computations I needed to make took hours and required large pieces of paper.
I arrived at SAU over 30 years ago just as computers started to take off. Late at night I would sit at a dumb terminal of our Digital PDP-11 minicomputer, mini in name only; it filled a room and cost well over $50,000, and learn to program in BASIC, another now moribund computer language.
Next year you'll probably go to college equipped with a laptop, smartphone, and, if your lucky, a tablet. That will set your parents back at least $2,000 (probably more). Right now, most of you avoid e-mail, FaceBook constantly (I see you in the back) or Twitter or Skype. Ask yourself, will those apps be around in 30 years? The smart money says no. What would you say about me if I still used a slide rule, typewriter, or simple hand calculator?
So, what's the answer to the question, "What lies ahead." The one sure answer is something different, something new. More important than what those new things will be is whether you will be able to use them. Will you end up like some adults today, clueless in the face of change. Does your mother have a Twitter account? Does your father have his own FaceBook page? Will you friend him if he does?
The real question then is NOT what lies ahead. Instead, the question is how will I deal with the inevitable changes I will witness during my life? Fortunately, it's a simple answer: LOVE LEARNING.
Learning is the answer. The content you learned yesterday will be useless soon, but how you learned it will not. In other words, you are sitting here because you are good learners. Don't believe that your learning days are over. No, they have just begun. Too many people either stop learning or never started to learn. They have no chance to keep up with our ever-changing world. You don't want to join their ranks.
So, don't stop learning; I know you won't. LOVE LEARNING. It will carry you through any change coming down the road.
Thank you.
No comments:
Post a Comment