A message to the graduates...
I have been at my current workplace for four and a half years, which is pretty long for a foreign teacher in Japan. For the last three years, I have been officially a member of the same "team" of teachers, meaning I've been helping supervise the same class of students from admission until graduation.
As an assistant homeroom teacher, I was asked to write a little inspirational message to go in the graduation album. I actually agonized over my little composition for about a week, knowing that I had to translate it into Japanese and that anything I wrote would be likely ignored by the target audience and be full of cliches to boot. In the end, I Googled "message to graduates," looking for something to copy and paste so as to save myself the effort.
The text I ended up borrowing was a block quote from Hamlet, in which Polonius gives all sorts of advice to Laertes before he leaves home. I originally picked this passage ironically; my high school English teacher derided Polonius' advice as warnings to Laertes to not embarrass himself. As I read and re-read it while trying to translate (I eventually just Googled it in Japanese), I realized it was all pretty good advice. Don't go around broadcasting your opinions, don't start fights but be ready to finish them, live within your means-- throw in a line about brushing your teeth and wearing clean deodorant and you have a pretty complete set of rules for living as an adult. I wonder: did my teacher completely misread the scene in question, of have I simply changed that much in the last 20 years...
As an assistant homeroom teacher, I was asked to write a little inspirational message to go in the graduation album. I actually agonized over my little composition for about a week, knowing that I had to translate it into Japanese and that anything I wrote would be likely ignored by the target audience and be full of cliches to boot. In the end, I Googled "message to graduates," looking for something to copy and paste so as to save myself the effort.
The text I ended up borrowing was a block quote from Hamlet, in which Polonius gives all sorts of advice to Laertes before he leaves home. I originally picked this passage ironically; my high school English teacher derided Polonius' advice as warnings to Laertes to not embarrass himself. As I read and re-read it while trying to translate (I eventually just Googled it in Japanese), I realized it was all pretty good advice. Don't go around broadcasting your opinions, don't start fights but be ready to finish them, live within your means-- throw in a line about brushing your teeth and wearing clean deodorant and you have a pretty complete set of rules for living as an adult. I wonder: did my teacher completely misread the scene in question, of have I simply changed that much in the last 20 years...