Photo Credit: Johnny King

 

An excerpt from the Fearless Teaching story entitled: Bigness

 

...We’re settled into a comfortable flow. The President has figured out that there will be three seconds per student. (At Pepperdine Law Commencement in Malibu it was seven seconds per grad, nine seconds at Bates College in Maine.) It’s going to be two hours no matter what.

 

I’d flown 2,000 miles for those three seconds. We scan a bit more for Danielle.

 

But we’ve adjusted to the scale of this whole show, and we know she’ll come around in good time. I have a little emailing on my smartphone to catch up on anyway; I understand that I’m
complicit in modern disruptive technology. Now we’ve gone through Masters of Real Estate,Agribusiness, and are up to Bachelors of Spacial Science, then Rangeland Ecology and Management.

 

“Is that her? Look, is that Danielle?” Flo asks. No, it’s not her, but Flo figures out that Danielle would have to be in the second to last row on the far side. We’ve been looking completely in the wrong section.

The College of Science Dean is up now. “Biology: Francisco Adolfo Barrios . . . Bret Shannon Taylor.” Hispanic and Irish, I figure. The names are amazing. The students all have three
names, and most of them express two or even three different nationalities for their roots. I give the whole idea of ethnicity in American maybe three more generations of relevance. The president shows no sign of wear as the two people assigned to hand diplomas to him keep them fl owing. They can’t hand out a single wrong one! But they seem confident. After all, these are folks who manage a football arena that holds 40,000. That’s about the size of a typical Roman Empire city. Their quarterback has just won the Heisman trophy.

And at last we reach page 29 of the program, Danielle’s page. Our hearts quicken.

 

Danielle’s group has risen, we’re sure of it, and have proceeded down the side aisle, taking their places in line leading up to the podium. “Applied Mathematical Sciences.” Yes! We look madly for her, scanning the line from front to back, but she is not in there. She must be in there … but what of the computer transcript thing? We go down to the railings and lean over but none of us can find her anywhere.

“Danielle Andrea Grauer,” we hear over a long-range acoustical sound throw, oh my God. There! That is actually her ascending the portable steps unit to the stage. Now she is
hugging the president just as she had planned in advance, to save his hand, as we fumble for our cameras, but it is too late for that. Now she is walking off the other side of the stage and we
are clapping and maybe screaming a little. I have a grainy photo of the back of her head, with her waving somewhere, just after the hug...