Good afternoon and welcome.
To really appreciate NJSP (which by
the way does not stand for New Jersey Smart People, or New Jersey Singers
program), I’d like everybody to fast forward in their minds with a mental
remote to a date five weeks in the future.
It’s the first day of school, and
normally you would be excited for another year of classes and learning, but for
some reason, something is missing. You walk into your classroom, and instead of
a seat around a Harkness table, you have a regular,
boring desk. You look at the teacher in front of the room, making a silent
mental note not to call her by her first name, and doubting that she will start
the class with meditation, or ask you to write your personal reflections in a
journal, or bring up Lyndon Baines Johnson at any point.
As for the students around you:
yes, you might be sitting at the same lunch table as them, but you didn’t sleep
next door to them the night before; you didn’t go on a treasure hunt with them,
have an air hockey tournament with them, relax on the beach with them, play
them constantly in Othello and chess, jam your favorite music with them, and
eat dinner last night at Fedora’s with them.
You try to engage the person next
to you in a conversation about the death penalty, or Asian history, or the tree
of ethics, and he looks at you sort of blankly. The teacher assigns you the
homework -- instead of a provocative Irving Kristol
reading or a video of Billy Graham, you’ve been assigned a fill-in-the-blank
worksheet, to be handed in for a grade. Chances are that after class, your
peers will talk about GPAs and college applications instead of Sir Thomas More
and Milosevic.
After the school day ends, the
students won’t swing dance together or go into
Instead of putting your mental
remote on fast forward this time, let’s put it on rewind, to five weeks ago. I
know that when I came here, I didn’t know quite what to expect. But soon I met
amazing people who showed me the way. I met Mr. Sauerman,
who taught me, perhaps, the best lesson I’ve ever learned about motor vehicle
traffic patterns and the nature of mortality. I met Mrs. Calvert and Scott,
masters of our house, who helped us find everything we needed. I met Nina
McCune, history expert extraordinaire, and Mr. Champ Atlee, a combined literary
master and legal wizard. I met Kate Dodd, skilled teacher, interpreter, and
maker of art, and Amy Glenn, our religion guru and philosophy instructor.
Look back over the last five weeks
with our mental remote. Five weeks isn’t long enough for all the conversations we
could have had, all the experiences we could have shared – it feels like our
journey is just beginning. Yet, think of how much we’ve really grown as a
group, how we each went from being surrounded by 38 complete strangers to 38
amazing friends.
I'm going to miss all of the
students a lot and I want to thank you all, most of everybody. You’ve made my
summer incredible -- you've always been there for me, you’ve challenged the way
I think, and you’ve been both my teachers and my friends.
I’d like to close with this: we’ve
been spending all summer talking about human rights, and much of our
conversation has revolved around the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. So,
I propose an NJSP Declaration of Student Rights. It goes like this:
Article One: All New Jersey
Scholars have the right to fair living conditions, including, but not limited
to:
a)
air conditioning. Enough said.
b)
a campus free of construction workers, gaping holes in the ground, and
fences obstructing the most convenient pathways.
c)
a piano where the high G doesn’t sound like a weasel dying.
Article Two: All New Jersey
Scholars have the right to freely hold and express their opinions in lecture
and seminar, except when said opinions originate from Wikipedia.
Article Three: All New Jersey
Scholars have the right to a reunion sometime very soon in the future, because
I’m going to miss all of you a huge amount.
Thank you and best of luck to
everyone.
Scott Greenberg ‘10