The sound system always seems to blare piercing static through the speakers. The weather is often too hot or disappointingly overcast. And the audience is a restless sea of camera-toting relatives and revved-up teenagers packed into uncomfortable seating.
Talk about a tough crowd.
SEAN M. HAFFEY / Union-Tribune Steele Canyon High valedictorian Miriam Ruiz, who will attend Johns Hopkins University, gave her commencement speech Thursday night. She said one goal was to keep it simple. It's high school commencement season, and a select group of earnest teenagers is flipping through poetry books, surfing the Internet and practicing before a mirror in hopes of delivering the perfect graduation speech.
These presentations can be profound and inspirational. At times, they are trite and self-important. Others manage to pull off funny and sentimental.
For some spectators or eager seniors, the speeches are nothing but a speed bump, an obstacle to the main event. However, the graduation address is also a tradition and link to the past that has remained unchanged for generations.
“The graduation speech is a perfect example of epideictic rhetoric and probably dates back to Roman times,” said Skip Rutledge, a speech professor and director of forensics at Point Loma Nazarene University.
But even Rutledge acknowledges that the speeches can be painful. Really painful.
“There is only so much of you the audience can take,” he said. “I'm a big fan of utilizing humor. But the whole thing is not to be blown off with a series of jokes.”
At some high schools, academic standouts, such as the valedictorian and salutatorian, are chosen to deliver graduation speeches. Others hold auditions open to all graduates.
LAURA EMBRY / Union-Tribune Lorene Lopez, Sweetwater High's valedictorian, shared a smile with her friend Raul Perez as they attended a scholarship ceremony this week along with fellow seniors Michael Bautista (second row) and Sarah Bice. Some speakers spend days drafting their address, carefully crafting it word by word. Others prefer to wait until close to the ceremony to harness the energy of the moment.
For those who have trouble coming up with the perfect words, they can find a cure for writer's block at a cost of about $20 and any heartfelt originality. Several Web sites offer a menu of graduation speeches for students, principals and invited speakers.
With titles such as, “A Few Caring People,” “Finding Your Own Way” or “Journey into Learning,” the Joseph A. Hughes & Son site promises perfect prose e-mailed just in time for commencement.
For example, “Finding Your Own Way” includes quotes by writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and James Joyce, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and motivational speaker Les Brown. It covers “decisions which students face regarding their futures and many possibilities that lie ahead.”
These speech Web sites promise edited, updated prose that is ready to deliver or can be doctored – kind of like a fill-in-the-specifics “Mad Libs” graduation speech. Any fist pumping or victory signs are up to each individual – no charge, of course.
Lorene Lopez, 17, isn't the least bit nervous about giving the valedictory address at Sweetwater High School in National City. She's seen it as her destiny since she heard of the concept in ninth grade.
“I've worked for it all my life,” she said.
Lorene has pictured it before: rows of bleachers, all eyes on her, she at the lectern in the white gown worn by California Scholarship Federation honorees.
Public speaking isn't new to Lorene. As a Jehovah's Witness, she has re-enacted biblical scenes before fellow worshippers during services. She has gone door-to-door proselytizing to strangers. She took a communications class at Southwestern College, and one of her assignments was to attend a Toastmasters meeting and make a short introductory speech.
CHARLIE NEUMAN / Union-Tribune While some students said they were looking forward to delivering their graduation addresses, El Camino High senior Jennifer Wong said she was nervous about speaking in public. She said the theme of her speech is "to always keep learning." Lorene said that in the moments before she's introduced to make a speech, her knees shake and her heart pounds, but once she starts she's comfortable.
“Once I get up there, I like the attention,” she said.
By the end of May she hadn't written a word despite having found out some months ago that she'd be valedictorian. She'd think about it often, though, especially in the shower.
Lorene is a bit short on content but knows how she wants to approach the delivery. First, engage the audience. Congratulate her peers on a job well done. Acknowledge the support of friends and family. Talk about a personal memory, then tie it in with the entire graduating class. Dispense a little advice. Then sit down before she taxes the audience's attention span.
Walking around campus Tuesday wearing a T-shirt that read “Equal Rights Are Not Special Rights,” Steele Canyon High School senior Miriam Ruiz was carrying a copy of the most important speech of her young life.
The East County high school's 2006 valedictorian wrote her graduation speech the night before at home and brought a copy to show advanced-placement government teacher Charles Tyler, whose opinion she values.
Ruiz did not delve into politics in the five-minute speech. Her goal was to keep it simple and not stray from her desire to get students thinking about the memories they were taking with them into adulthood.
She recalled a few memories of her own: A shy freshman from little Jamul getting lost on the way to English class at the campus of nearly 2,000 students; a confident senior taking AP classes, applying for colleges, competing in sports. She'll never forget her prom. She had a track meet that day and barely made the ball on time.
Tyler gave his student the approving nod she was hoping for. The speech wasn't controversial. It wasn't laden with fancy words. “She seemed to speak from the heart,” he said.
Ruiz knows more than a little about the heart. She plans to study medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, where she has been accepted. She was born with a heart condition and has been around cardiologists her whole life, she said, explaining her career choice.
A straight-A student, she finished high school with a 4.8 grade-point average and a deep appreciation of the opportunity she had earned to address her class of 354 seniors on one of the most important days in their lives.
“People walk in and out of your life, but the people you got close to have left permanent footprints in your heart,” she wrote in her speech. “And I bet you all have someone you got close to here at Steele Canyon, maybe a best friend, a boyfriend, a girlfriend, or maybe even a teacher.”
Not everyone is overjoyed about delivering their graduation speech.
Jennifer Wong, a senior at El Camino High School in Oceanside, was psyched to be named valedictorian, but when a school administrator called to remind her about the obligatory speech, she balked.
“It's pretty hard because it has to be, like, five minutes,” she said. It's like five minutes of one person up there talking. That's hard for me. I'm not very good at public speaking.”
Wong said she's gabby with her friends but more reserved around people who don't know her. She is strong in math and science but less fired up about English.
However, this will be among the most crucial writing assignments of the year.
“They say five minutes is 1,000 words, and so far I have, like, 400 words,” she said Sunday. “I'm going to finish it tonight.”
However, come Monday morning she was still no further.
“I'm going to write something about something everyone can remember and show how it has helped us,” she said.
But she hadn't figured out what that something is.
Wong said she didn't want to write the typical cliché-laden speech, but she felt those are the speeches that appeal most to parents.
On Tuesday, her speech was done.
“I'm not really sure what to think of it,” she said. “I hope it's not boring. I didn't make it funny because that might turn out badly. . . . My theme is to always keep learning, but it doesn't always have to be learning in the conventional way – just learning from everyday experiences.”
Wong will graduate with a 4.38 grade-point average and plans to attend UCLA to prepare for a career in immunology.
Caitlin Couey, who calls herself a “reluctant valedictorian,” is preparing to deliver an address at the School of Creative and Performing Arts in San Diego's Paradise Hills.
If there is anything she dreads more than public speaking its doling out advice. And she is loath to say anything clichéd.
“I'm really trying to avoid the cliché thing,” she said. “I'm not going to go up there and thank all my friends or talk about being together in the future.”
Caitlin will take her own pragmatic approach to life to the microphone. The inspiration for her speech came to her in calculus class, when her teacher was explaining the chaos theory, which got her thinking about finding the underlying order in apparent disorder. The whole notion of cause and effect has become a key component of her speech.
“Choices you make, even the littlest things you do, can really change your future. They can have consequences,” she said. “That's kind of my message.”
A future chemical engineer who will attend UC Berkeley in the fall, Caitlin is also taken with the “butterfly effect.” “A butterfly flapping its wings would cause tiny changes in the atmosphere that could ultimately change weather patterns. It could create a hurricane in Indonesia or even stop one.”
She won't rely completely on her own words. Bob Dylan's famous quote “Chaos is a friend of mine” will find its way into her speech. SCPA is a performing arts school, after all.