Alumni Graduation Speech
By Ari Kriegel, Class of 2007
June 13, 2010

I am so honored to have been invited to speak today. As per Gann tradition, I was a senior when the graduates were freshmen. As a result, I had the opportunity to get to know many of them well enough to call them friends—including one who also happens to be my cousin. You’ll be hearing from him soon. Perry, speak slowly and en-un-ci-ate. Seriously, I am so proud of you.

As a senior at Gann Academy, you rule the world--or, your world, at least. You walk through the hallway alone, unintimidated. These are your hallways. And you’ve earned that confidence. You have taken tanach in the Krakow classroom 3 years running; you’ve been cited for dress code violation by Mr. Neudel more times than you can count; you’ve accumulated eight teachers’ numbers after only four exploration weeks. Graduates, I know you've been appreciating it the whole year, but I ask you to once more think about just how cool it is to be a senior at Gann Academy.

Because in the world of school, every grade is a promotion. It is undisputed that as you go up, you wield more power, and are allowed more privileges. Twelfth grade is the pinnacle; the top of the mountain that is and has been your world since you toddled into your first day of Kindergarten. You know the ropes—you always see the pop quiz coming a day in advance, you can rattle off a three page paper like it’s nothing (seriously, remember how hard that used to be??), you dominate lower grades in sports by the sheer force of your will.  
 
Standing in this gym, in which the rich tradition of Heifer basketball has found a home, and of course, with the Celtics’ game five only hours away, I find it appropriate to remember the great Coach John Wooden, who passed last week at the age of 99. Coaching at UCLA for 27 years, Wooden was a man who not only taught his players basketball at the highest level, but actively took an interest in and cared about them as people. One such player was the legendary Kareem Abdul Jabaar, then known as Lew Alcindor. After finishing one of history’s greatest high school basketball careers, Alcindor went on to play for Coach Wooden at UCLA. Wooden watched this young talent dominate his first practice, and complimented the freshman on his performance. Instead of simply praising him, though, Wooden famously added this valuable piece of wisdom: “It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.”

Today, I’m here to tell you with complete sincerity that you—every single one of you—know it all.

Some of this knowledge comes from simple experience. This knowledge is shared by every graduating senior, the wisdom gleaned from 13 years of negotiating peers, parents and teachers—when to speak up in class, when to interfere in an argument between friends, when to call your parents and tell them what you did before they hear it from Rabbi Baker…But more important, you have all received an education here at Gann Academy that has truly taught you all you need to know. Because more than just teaching facts, Gann has taught you how to think, how to debate, and how to question. You’ve learned the intellectual skills most valued by both Western and Jewish culture. You’ve learned how to consider perspectives other than your own, how to criticize respectfully and respectfully accept criticism, to engage in dialogue in which both sides are active participants and listeners. These are skills which seem all too rare in our world, and which I believe is the greatest strength of a Gann education. These are the tools of a great mind, the hardware needed to understand and assess new material, new people, and new ideas.

But like the young Lew Alcindor, your most important learning is in front of you. Whether you plan to spend the year in Israel or go directly to college, you will spend next year (and many years after) in a new world, a new stage of your life. There is no thirteenth grade—twelfth is truly the end of an era. Up until now, you have learned in a highly structured environment, and taken a mostly standardized curriculum. Next year, you enter a new world, where structure is a thing of the past. You choose your classes, you choose when to go to sleep and when to wake up, you choose how you spend your free time—remember free time? And you won’t know it all anymore. All the comfort and confidence of senior year will seem a distant memory, as you search for classes in a course manual 3 inches thick, or jockey for position in line for falafel while 3 people try to cut you, or confront a Holocaust-denying classmate. What you have learned here at Gann will stay with you for the rest of your life. How to analyze, how to sympathize, how to recognize when you can make a difference. But these are only tools—it’s what you do with these tools that will define your future.

Right now, you know all you need to know. Quite soon, you will feel like you know nothing. But there’s a reason you do things in this order. What you learn in the next few years—about economics, or diversity, or how to sleep through your roommates’ snoring—what you learn about both the world around you, and importantly, about yourself, is in large part predicated on what you have learned here, what you know now. Gann has helped you develop inquisitive minds and kind hearts; with these tools, the world is at your fingertips.

So congratulations Gann Academy class of 2010. You finally know it all—just in time to graduate into the great unknown. Take it from someone who is there now: you know what you need to know to learn what you want to learn. Just remember what Coach Wooden taught: it’s what you learn after you know it all that counts. Thank you.