A nice thing about getting an education is that at each summit, you get to sit through another graduation speech and ponder: Is there any wisdom I can learn from this? My first such speech was delivered by our public school's revered 10th grade literature teacher. She told us: "The world is beautiful." This was a long time ago.
Then she nudged us to "dare to dream … find what you can do and do it … speak your truth quietly and clearly."
When I took her class, we read a short story about a Russian man who, on the condition of a bet, isolated himself for 15 years inside a solitary room. We were teenagers up to our ears in "why aren't my clothes alluring, why aren't I the toast of the school," but we read that story and stopped to think about man's capacity for evil toward his fellow man, and for good.
One of my favorite parts of my public, rural N.C. middle school was our yearly wetlands unit in coalition with the Soil and Water Conservation District. An old red-cheeked lady in overalls with her gray hair braided into two long plaits, accompanied by her more sedate and sober partner, would give out prizes for the best speech, poster and essay. We learned all about the quiet of wetlands — black rippling water harboring dozens of unique wildlife species. Our teachers walked us to the lake across from the school and we described what we saw: the water mirroring the gloomy depths of sky, fall colors rimmed around us on the trees.
I didn't live in N.C. during the fourth grade, so I missed that year's curriculum of state history: that our coast stormed its way to the 'Graveyard of the Atlantic,' and how 700 new public schools dotted the landscape under Governor Aycock's reign during the early 1900s. But in keeping my eyes open, I learn all the same: how in Greensboro, Black students protested Jim Crow laws at Woolworth's Drug Store; how the highest peak east of the Mississippi is in N.C., and how it's named after one of the first chairs of UNC's geology department who explored its slopes back in the 1830s and fell to his death on his third expedition, and how the whole area is now a state park protected by rangers. I learned about the cardinal, the long leaf pine, the Scotch bonnet — all of which have namesakes on the cars of N.C.'s Amtrak passenger train.
Once in my hometown library, right there amid "Number the Stars" and "Does My Head Look Big in This?" I found a children's book about George Moses Horton, the slave in Chatham County who taught himself to read. He would walk eight miles to UNC every Saturday to sell poetry to male students with which they charmed their sweethearts. Lines like:
"I'll love thee as long as I live,
Whate'er thy condition may be" and
"When first my bosom glowed with hope.
