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HACKLEY REVIEW COMMENCEMENT SUPPLEMENT 2021
click here for video of the Address
The Commencement Addresses Doug Clark This year, both Doug Clark and Philip Variano delivered commencement speeches, ensuring that we learn from their 41 years at Hackley (each!) before their July 1st retirement. The first speaker was Upper School math teacher Doug Clark.
Back in February when I was contemplating retiring at the end of this year (my 41st at Hackley), I thought, “Well, there was one good thing that came out of this pandemic. There was no big fuss made over the gargoyle that was put up to honor 40 years of service and there will be no big to-do about my retirement, and, thankfully, I won’t have to give any speeches. Well, here we are. When I told my friends that I was asked to give a speech and that I wasn’t too confident that I could pull it off, some tried to comfort me by saying, “Don’t worry. Half of them aren’t even listening, and, fifteen minutes after you’ve finished, the other half won’t remember anything that you said.” So, raise your hand if you’re not listening. I don’t know that any of that is true, but I appreciated their telling me that I can’t really mess this up too badly. After 45 years of teaching, I have found out quite a few things that I wish I had known when I was your age, things I wish someone had told me. I might not have listened to them, but it would have given me something to think about, and I might have done some things differently. One thing that I found out through experience, and that our professional development recently confirmed, is that saying too many things at one time is not productive. So, as one of my students said before making a presentation, “I will make this short but brief.” It was 1981 or 82 and I was teaching an Algebra II class. We were solving trigonometric equations. One of the students was leading me through his solution,
which I was writing on the board. He took 10 or 12 steps to solve the problem, which he did correctly. I then wrote another possible way to solve the problem using some trig identity that took just 3 or 4 steps, and I said for the first time, “It’s good to know stuff.” I’m telling this story because, now that it is literally written in stone, I want to say what it means to me and what I hope it means to my students and to all of you. People who haven’t been in class with me might think that it has something to do with winning at Jeopardy or solving the Sunday Times crossword. But actually it was and is about having more ways to think about how to solve problems. And not just math problems but problems in life. For example, over the last decade, I have had an occasional problem with my lower back. I looked on line for ways to relieve lower back pain and found several stretching exercises for the lower back, none of which helped. Talking to a friend who had a similar problem, he showed me stretches given to him by the trainer at his gym that targeted specific muscles. These were different from those that I had seen online, and, happily, they worked for me. When I played sports in high school, coaches introduced me to stretching, but never told that stretching one group
