By Emily Mortensen

The below is a transcription of a speech given by Emily Mortensen, Waterford History Teacher, during an Upper School Assembly.

---

Ms. Guzman’s speech yesterday was the perfect chapter one to what I want to share today. She spoke of purpose, of signals, of joy. 

I wish we were sitting around a campfire in Alaska’s Chugach Mountains because that is my favorite place in the world. But the concert hall will do. 

You are, by virtue of sitting here, about 20 rungs up the ladder from many students in this world by sheer luck of the draw. In some ways. In other ways, maybe not. I guess it depends on what ladder you are climbing.

Appropriately, you are short on life experience. You have not yet gone to college, lived alone, attended grad school, maybe raised a family or chosen a partner, taken care of aging parents. Maybe you have achieved nothing or very little alone, independent of anyone’s support. Some of these things might await you.

Teenage confidence is a double-edged sword. You think you can do it all. At seventeen I decided I was done with high school. My college admissions were secure, I was bored with school, itching to get out into the world. 

My parents let me graduate early from high school and move, alone, to London when I was seventeen. Just barely seventeen. But this is not something I would have encouraged any of my three own precocious daughters to do. I’m not sure why they thought this was a good idea. But I have to say, I salute my younger self for that courage. 

But when I look back, I see that this felt to me like a necessary experience, this need to break away from parental protection and see how I landed. I was trying, I see now, to discover a sense of my own self. You all might feel this need, and it hits in fits and starts right about now, and it can feel both urgent and terrifying. 

My parents believed strongly that my life was my job. Life was different in the 80s, beyond the big hair and the leg warmers and funky styles. We had great music—U2, Rush, Boston, Journey, ABBA. The times then were not simpler, but different. For example, in college, I was in Virginia and my family was in Alaska, almost 4,000 miles away. I spoke to them for about ten minutes every Sunday night. We sent occasional letters by snail mail. 

My parents never asked me about my grades. I don’t remember if I even told them where I applied to college. 

But they believed in me. They gave me both nature through DNA and nurture through a loving childhood. They handed me my life to create. They knew I needed to create a self, a personhood, separate from them. I am forever grateful for the gift they gave me of independence and this chance to create my own selfhood.

There are some philosophical disagreements about the idea of an ego or self. You might consider learning how great thinkers view a self and how one can flourish as an individual within a society. But for the sake of today think of it as your unique identity. 

You cannot AI a self. 

You cannot google a self. 

It is not a To Do list or a transcript.

Social media doesn’t reveal the depth a self can be. 

A developed self is not a series of labels or categories or tidy columns of traits. Forget about those. You will change and shift between columns and categories. They don’t hold.

Creating and discovering a self is arduous, exciting and necessary. It is a lifelong process of absorption and adaptation. You, yourself, will evolve.

You will get some things wrong. I used to think that what mattered most was having the right answers. 

But I have come to believe that what matters most in understanding and forming a self is the quality of our questions, not necessarily the answers. A thoughtful question redirects and transforms. 

I want to tell you about an ordinary man who posed an extraordinary question. He believed in the value of humanities courses, but above all he believed in the value of humanity.

He was a professor named Earl Shorris, living in NYC. It was the mid-90s. He created not just a self of compassion, but he devoted his adult life to helping others expand their sense of self in the world. 

The extraordinary question he asked was, “What would happen if we taught those fellow human beings living in the most dire poverty in NYC about Socrates, philosophy, history, literature, art?” These are things you learn about every day at Waterford. But this is not the case for most MS or US or adults in our world. 

But he didn’t just wonder. He acted. His question changed lives. He actually committed a big part of his life to the ideal that ALL people should learn to think, should learn the humanities, these big ideas and things you are practically drowning in at Waterford. 

So his single curious question led to the formation of the Clemente program, and over time it spread from New York to Chicago to San Francisco and Portland and SLC. Thousands of people have experienced the education he created.

Professors around the country advertised free college classes in homeless shelters, laundromats, food bank lines, health clinics. They sought out the people in the margins. People we often, in our own hubris and neglect, pass by, or think of as numbers not people. They put up signs, they passed out fliers, they asked for applications from those who wanted to learn. Since 1995, when he first asked the question, thousands of curious, eager students took the Clemente program up on its offer. In Salt Lake it was called the Venture Program. 

Clemente wasn’t about transcripts or grades. It wasn’t about getting into a top college or pleasing parents or earning an income to buy a bunch of stuff or live in a fancy house or material status in shoes or cars or vacations. 

Nothing is wrong with that, except that education for these students had no connection or consideration of such superficialities. They were hungry, physically and metaphorically. Hungry. 

Some students enrolled to role model a beautiful hope to their children while they lived in homeless shelters. 

Some students enrolled for a second chance. 

Some yearned for confidence. 

Some for the light that great ideas bring to the drudgery of disappointing lives.

Some for a sense of control in lives with very little within their control. 

There was an urgency for them. Most Clemente students had seen their education interrupted because of poverty, early parenthood, homelessness, or addiction. 

Folding chairs were set up in makeshift classrooms in public spaces. There was no dining hall, or concert hall, or art studio or uniform or Chromebooks. Just a teacher and probably eager but hesitant students.  

Imagine the first day of class. Imagine being asked to write a paragraph for the first time in your life at age forty. Would you have the tenacity to show up, and risk and push into that uncomfortable space? What might the students be wearing, feeling that first class? What lives would they be returning to afterward? 

They studied Shakespeare, and shared great works of music, paintings, literature, writing, and all about some of the world’s best thinkers. Imagine seeing Dorothea Lange’s masterful photos of the Great Depression, or a Van Gogh for the first time in your thirties. They learned about American History, and loved that history even within a country that had often systematically failed them or their families. They read “Odysseus,” like you did in VIIIs, and William Carlos Williams and Emily Dickinson or this quote by Pablo Neruda. 

“Someday, somewhere — anywhere, unfailingly, you’ll find yourself, and that, and only that, can be the happiest or bitterest hour of your life.”

Or this…do you recognize its source?

“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them…”

Can you imagine first hearing such ideas as an adult? Or learning ideas that are the foundation of our nation, within which you are marginalized? Maybe had never voted? Could you be the same person, the same self, after hearing emotion and heart and beauty of such depth? They weren’t.

Changes happened. Even as adults, we change constantly and I assure you that the creation of a self is lifelong. You will change! I love the Mark Twain quote, at least he gets credit for it, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

What you see as true and certain will change. Experience and education will transform you. 

Now, because the program started in 1995 with a single question still exists. 

Clemente students began to have a voice. They began to attend city council meetings and PTA meetings, and community clean up days. They had hope for their place in their country. Our country. They began to view themselves and their place in the world differently. Today, students who took part in Clemente are graduate students, government officials, nonprofit activists, and small-business owners. 

Another important thing that happened is that the professors changed their view of the word “poor.” These adult students, living financially impoverished lives, that they called poor, were not poor of mind or spirit. In fact, their economic conditions were the only thing related to the word “poor.” They were hungry for the feast of knowledge you get every day at Waterford. In classes, they shared stories of their lives and trials. They brought a wealth of life experience to the makeshift classrooms. 

Know thyself. I have this posted in my classroom. I think it is perhaps the most essential imperative for our lifetimes. You get one life. One brain.

The story of the Clemente students is not your story. But I love the idea that ideas can transform at any stage of life, and that we are all capable of change at any age. 

I hope someday you feel the same hunger for education and learning as the Clemente students felt. I hope you find ideas and subjects that ignite you. 

Go after it! Make meaning out of this life. You don’t have one purpose in life. You have many, layers upon layers. You can do it.

I hope you honor your future selves by being careful with these present moments.

Ironically, it is those adults less absorbed with self that create the largest lives, and the richest selves, with meaning and purpose. 

Maybe you will create a self with much to offer in generosity of spirit and care of others if you think beyond yourself.

I hope the legacy of nature and nurture you inherit will have greater meaning than any material inheritance.

Maybe with this legacy and your education, you will create a self that promotes a more selfless world. 

Thank you.