Head of School Allison Gaines Pell’s Commencement Remarks

Welcome all. A week ago, I stood over in the Field House just over there and watched our Pre-K students be celebrated as they moved into kindergarten. It was all of what you imagine and remember – the excitement that overwhelms the body that can happen in early childhood, the anxious looking out for loved ones in the bleachers, the wiggly inability to sit still. It was so moving, because of what the educators at the Nest have created, for sure, and also as a parent watching other parents and their children filled with pride and love. And here we are exactly one week later and for some of us, 12 years later, celebrating this beautiful group of people who are embarking on their own rite of passage. As they say, the days are long and the years are short – and here we are. Or, as an 8th grader said earlier this week before their moving up ceremony: “we low key did it but it’s high key sad.” It’s such a pleasure and privilege to see all of you here this morning on such an important day.

Thank you first to the team of people who have worked hard to make today possible, including Abraham Henderson, Dana Watkins, Grace Lehan, Danielle Kapachis, Anivelise Rivera, Keith Estey, Molly Reid, Adam Burke, Pam Levanos and the senior team, the Strategic Communications team, our performing arts faculty and our performers today, Dave Schiano and Wheeler Broadcasting. Thank you to the faculty and staff who have advised, counseled and taught these incredible students before you today, whether this year or in the past that they have been with us. Thank you to our trustees, who ensure we can continue to pursue our mission each year. Gratitude for the land on which we sit, and for Mary Colman Wheeler whose vision brought us the Wheeler Farm and the Wheeler School. Thank you to our parents, guardians and other family members who have been with us all along the journey of the class of 2025. And on that note, soon-to-be graduates, make sure you spend a lot of time heaping loads of thanks on them today even as they celebrate you. They made this possible.

I also want to begin today by acknowledging those across the world who are suffering today wherever they may be, and those in our lives close to home who are not able to be with us today. We live in a world that can be both joyful and painful at once, and even knowing there is pain, we can feel gratitude for that which we have and the spirit in which we gather today.
Let’s silence our thoughts (and our cell phones) and be present here for our graduates during this important moment. In welcoming you, I’d like to share a few words about this moment and where we are right now, and then, where we are going.

Right now.

Class of 2025, today you sit beside friends who have in no small part made you who you are, who have challenged you, helped you become more fully yourselves, laughed and maybe cried with you, won the game or completed the lab with you. No matter how close you are, if you run into one of them on the street in San Francisco or Boston or somewhere in between in 10 years, it will feel to you like it was yesterday; you will have the feeling of distant family. It’s something special that happens when you get to grow up together during some of the most formative years of your lives. You also sit amongst your loved ones. As a parent in the class of 2025 myself, I can tell you that we will likely be a bit of a mess today, too. I beg you to tolerate us and try hard not to roll your eyes!

You might think our general messiness is because we will miss you. And yes, of course that’s part of it. We have been with you nearly every day of your lives thus far and we are anticipating a change in the very near future. But, dear class of 2025, it’s more than that. We become emotional in those moments because there is so much else we feel. From the moment you enter our lives, we walk around with a piece of our hearts outside of our body. We worry for you, become annoyed by you, and feel immense pride in who you are and what you do. We get mad at you, you drive us crazy, we love you insanely. We worry about what will happen when you are away from us; we feel excited for what you will do when you are away from us. We raise you to be independent, and then all of a sudden, you are!

Einstein once wrote in a letter to a friend, ‘The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Indeed, some have posited that time is in fact non-linear, and that all moments exist all at once. So, let’s imagine for a moment that all of it exists right now: all of our histories as individuals, classmates, families, are here with us right now. Right now is the moment you scraped your knee, started kindergarten, scored that impossible goal. It is that famous family dinner when you laughed so hard your stomach hurt, when you moved, when you cried for the loss of a friendship or felt giddy inside with a new one. It is the moment of your first brush with love, the Folklore Fair, the 18 Wheelers concert, your first completed piece of Wheeler ceramics (of so many!), the 6th grade Farm dinner, your 5th grade graduation, the day you met your closest friend. It is the moment you found a real passion after a certain speaker came to your club or the time you sat with your friends on the floor with Crumble cookies all night long. And, it is your family members’ experiences and memories, too: all at once it is the day you came into our lives, the day you rode your bike or drove away in the car, performed at the recital, got into college, the day you were hurt in a way that we could not fix, the day you opened your eyes. Here too are all of our hopes that we have all done enough to give you what you need to go off to have a joyful and meaningful life on a path that you will make that is uniquely your own. That, class of 2025, is the beautiful glowing jumble of noise and history and experience in which we sit today. That’s all right now here under this tent. That’s why we’re all gushy today.

And so now, what will be on that future list? We don’t yet know, which is what’s so great about life, but I do have a few hopes for you that I’d like to share.

I am a passionate and compulsive podcast listener, and I have been listening, perhaps more than one should, to many different perspectives on the revolution in artificial intelligence and what it might mean for all of us. If you’ve been anywhere near pop culture right now, from Black Mirror to Mission Impossible, you know that we are trying to sort this out in our imaginations and here in this real world.
But the more I listen to the pundits wring their hands about your generation and your connection to technology, the more I realize that those people don’t often work with young people- and they certainly don’t work at Wheeler – because if they did, they would see YOU. You, who are courageous and kind, who know how to debate and discuss, who push through productive struggle, who exhibit curiosity and delight in the face of a compelling idea, who exert effort to do meaningful work, who write and sing to the heavens, who question and converse, who cheer and cry, who appreciate literature and big ideas. Who have experienced firsthand what human flourishing can feel like.
Humanity is very much alive in you. Class of 2025 member Robert O’Hara put a fine point on this in his senior assembly remarks when he spoke of his time here: I urge you to love every second you get with the people you love. Doing the things you love. Love the warmth of the faculty members who greet you outside the gates in the morning. Love how your teacher dedicates their life to supporting your future. Love when a stranger takes the time to hold the door for you. Love when your friend cracks a joke on the bus ride home to ease the sting of a heavy defeat. Love when the courtyard is teeming with excitement on a warm day in May.

These moments are frightfully easy to miss, he goes on, if you’re staring at a phone, stressing about a test—and of course there’s a time and place for all that. But at the risk of sounding like I belong in the 1960s: love can take you a long way.

So in the context of this moment of endless handwringing about the robots, I will urge you to flip an old adage on its head. At the beginning of the digital revolution, one technologist, Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab posited that a huge shift was underway and that we should “move bits, not atom.”

Today, I want you to go forward thinking about the reverse: move atoms, not bits. I urge you to traffic in people, and impact, and the world you can touch. In what ways will you impact our own human, tactical, physical world? How will you love people, move people, move the world? You have already been picking up the breadcrumbs that will guide you to your future while at Wheeler – you have pursued ideas and curiosities, felt satisfied and achieved in new ways, tried, succeeded and failed in new domains and you have enjoyed one another. Follow the breadcrumbs towards your delights, your curiosities, towards what and whom you love.

Our founder Miss Wheeler would exclaim at the way something looked in the light or a delightful new fact about an archeological insight. The ability to delight, to make, to inspire, to leave your handprints on this real, whole world – that is, in the end, a gift of your time at Wheeler that I hope you will take with you.

On a personal note, because I too will be embarking on a new chapter, I want to tell you that it’s okay to be sad and excited at the same time. It’s okay to wonder if things will be alright. It’s okay to not know what’s going to happen. It’s okay to be impatient for what is to come and sad about leaving something behind you. All of those feelings matter, and they are good.

I have loved the chance to watch you all grow up, to see your group morph and reshape and find itself as the coherent whole it is today.
Thank you, class of 2025, for having me and all of us walk alongside you, for making us better, for keeping us whole. We won’t be the same without you, and we cannot wait to see what you will do.

With that, let us commence.