Appreciation speech of a university graduate. Speech of a university graduate on graduation. NEWS, NOOSPHERE HEALING ARTS INTERNATIONAL

This story began before I was born. My biological mother, a young single graduate student, decided to give me up for adoption. She really wanted to be adopted by people with higher education. And everything was ready for me to be brought up in the family of a certain lawyer. But by the time I was born, the lawyer and his wife suddenly decided that what they really wanted was a girl, not a boy. So my parents-to-be, who were next in line, got a call in the middle of the night asking, “We have an unplanned baby. Boy. Will you take it?" And they said, "Of course." Later, my biological mother found out that my real mother did not graduate from any college, and that my father did not even graduate. high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. Only a few months later my parents managed to persuade her. They are They promised that they would definitely send me to college. This is how my life began.

17 years later, I did go to college. Naively, I chose a very expensive college - almost like Stanford - and all the savings of my poor parents went to pay for my studies. Six months later, I realized that there was no point in studying: I had no idea what I wanted to do in life, nor how college would help me understand this. At the same time, I spent everything that my parents had accumulated over their entire lives for my studies. So I decided to quit my studies and hope that everything will work out somehow.

I didn't feel comfortable at the time, but looking back now, I realize that it was one of the best decisions of my life. I was expelled. This meant that there was no more need to go to compulsory courses- and you can only go to what seems interesting.

Of course, not everything went smoothly. I didn't have a dorm room and had to sleep on the floor in my friends' rooms. I rented cola bottles for 5 cents each to buy food. Every Sunday I walked 7 miles across the city to have a good meal at the Hare Krishnas once a week. The food there was amazing (Originally "I loved it", a paraphrase of the famous McDonalds slogan).

Much of what I discovered in those days, obeying my curiosity and intuition, later turned out to be invaluable. I will give one example. reed college then offered the best education in the field of calligraphy in the country. Any poster, any inscription on any locker in any place of the campus was wonderfully hand-drawn according to all the laws of the art of calligraphy. I was expelled, I did not have to attend regular classes, and I decided to study calligraphy. I learned a lot about typefaces ( serif, sans-serif ), about varying the spacing between different combinations of letters—everything that makes great typography great. In these classes there was some kind of beauty, history, subtlety of art, inaccessible to science ... it fascinated me.

Then it seemed to me that all this did not have the slightest chance of practical use. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh, all my knowledge of calligraphy came back to me - and came in handy. The Macintosh was the first computer with beautiful fonts. If I hadn't taken these classes in college, Macs wouldn't be able to use different typefaces, the fonts wouldn't be proportional... And since Windows - this is just a tracing paper of the Macintosh, with a high probability that no computer in the world would have it. So, if I hadn't dropped out of college and taken a calligraphy course, today's computers probably wouldn't have the great fonts they have today.

Of course, in college, I did not expect that in the future all the dots would converge, but ten years later it became obvious that they could not help but converge. And again, it is impossible to connect the dots when you look to the future - they can only be connected by looking back at the past. Therefore, in the present, you need to believe that in the future the points will somehow converge. You need to believe in something: in God, Destiny, Life, Karma, whatever. Believing that the dots will converge as you go will give you the courage to follow your heart, even if your heart takes you off the well-trodden path. That's the difference.

My second story is about love and loss

I'm lucky. I found my passion early. I was 20 years old when Woz (Steve Wozniak) and I founded " Apple in my parents' garage. We worked hard, and in 10 years our "garage business" became a $2 billion company with over 6,000 employees. The year before, we had released our best creation, the Macintosh, and I had just turned 30. And then I was fired.

But how can you get fired from the company you founded? The following happened. The company grew, and we hired one, in my opinion, talented person to run the company with me. For a year or so everything was fine. But gradually we parted in our vision of the future, and at some point we finally quarreled. The Board of Directors took his side at that moment. And at the age of 30 I was fired with noise. Everything I had devoted my adult life to was gone, and I felt empty. For several months, I didn't know what to do. I felt like I let down the previous generation of entrepreneurs—they passed the baton to me, and I dropped it. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for ruining everything. My failure was so public that I even considered running away from the Valley.

But little by little I began to come to my senses. I felt that I still love my job. The way things turned out with Apple nothing has changed in me. I was rejected, but still loved. And I decided to start over.

At that moment, of course, I did not understand that the dismissal from Apple - this is the best thing that could happen to me. The heavy burden of success has been replaced by a feeling of lightness: I am again a beginner. Less confident about everything that's going on. With this feeling began one of the most creative periods in my life. Over the next 5 years, I founded companies NeXT and Pixar and fell in love with beautiful woman who became my wife. Studio Pixar released the world's first computer-generated cartoon, Toy Story. Today it is the most successful animation studio in the world. Due to a remarkable set of circumstances, the company Apple bought NeXT and thus I returned to Apple . The technology we have developed in NeXT , formed the basis of the current revival Apple . And Lauryn and I have a wonderful family.

I'm sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple . The medicine tasted terrible, but the patient seemed to need it. Sometimes life will hit you in the head with a key - do not lose faith. I am convinced that the only thing, thanks to which I continued to move forward - this is what I loved my job. You need to find what you love - and this is true both for work and for personal life. Work will take up a lot of space in your life, and therefore the only way to be truly satisfied with life - to do what you consider great. And the only way to do great things is to love what you do. If you haven't found what you love yet, keep looking, don't be complacent. As with all matters of the heart, when you find it, you will understand that this is the one. And like any real relationship, this relationship will only get better over the years. So look. Don't calm down.

My third story is about death

When I was 17 years old, I read the thought that "If you live each day as if it were your last, one day you will surely be right." It made a strong impression on me, and since then for 33 years I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today was the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am going to do”? And every time I answer “No” to myself for too many days in a row, I understand that something needs to change.

The memory that we are all going to die is the best thing to help me make the big decisions in life. After all, in the face of death, almost everything loses its meaning - the opinions of others, ambitions, fear of shame or failure - and only what is truly important remains. The memory that you will die is the best way I know to avoid the mental trap that makes you think you have something to lose. You are already naked. And there is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. At half past seven in the morning I had a scan that clearly showed a tumor in the pancreas. I had no idea that I had a pancreas. The doctors said it was almost certainly an incurable type of cancer and that I had 3 to 6 months to live.

My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which in the language of doctors means "prepare to die." It means to get together and tell your children everything that you wanted to tell them. You thought you had the next ten years to do it, but it turned out to be only a couple of months. This means preparing everything so that it is as easy as possible for your family to cope with everything. It means saying goodbye to everyone.

I lived with this diagnosis all day long. Later in the evening, I had a biopsy: they put an endoscope through my throat and stomach into my intestines, inserted a needle into my pancreas, and took some cells from the tumor for analysis. I was under anesthesia, but my wife, who was present, said that when the doctors looked at the cell samples under a microscope, they began to cry. It turned out that I have a very rare type of pancreatic cancer, which is treated with surgery.

I had surgery and, thank God, I'm fine now.

It was the closest encounter I've ever had with death, and I hope I won't have to face it any closer for the next 20 years. Having lived through this, I can now tell you much more confidently than before, when death was a useful but purely speculative construct for me:

Nobody wants to die. Even people who want to go to Heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet, death is the final stop common to all of us. No one will go further.

And so it should be, since Death, apparently, is the best invention of Life. For Life, she is an agent of change. She clears the old to make room for the new. Right now the New is you, but in a little while you will gradually become the Old that needs to be moved out of the way. I apologize for the drama, but that's the way it is.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Do not fall into the trap of dogma - do not live in other people's thoughts. Don't let the noise of other people's opinions drown out your own. inner voice. And most importantly, have the courage to follow your heart and mind. They somehow already know what you're supposed to be. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was a wonderful magazine, The Catalog of Everything in the World. It was one of the bibles of my generation. A guy called Stuart Brand published it in Menlo Park, not far from here.

This was in the late 60s, before computers and computer-aided layout, so everything was done by hand, with typewriters, scissors and a polaroid. It was something like Google's paper form, but 35 years before the advent of Google. The edition was idealistic, full of wonderful tools and ideas.

Stewart and his team made several issues of the magazine, and when he fulfilled his mission, they decided to release the final one.

It was in the mid 70s, I was your age then. On the back cover of the magazine was a photograph of a rural road taken in the early morning. The kind of road that adventurers usually hitchhike. Beneath this photo were the words: “Stay hungry. Stay stupid." They were leaving the game and that was their farewell message. Stay hungry. Stay stupid. I have always wanted this for myself. And now that you're graduating from university to start fresh, I wish you the same.

Stay hungry. Stay stupid.

Thank you very much.

Greetings parents and congratulations to the 2005 graduates.

Somehow two young fish are swimming, and towards them an older fish, nods and says: “Hello, guys, well, how is the water?” The fish swim on, and after a while one asks the other: “What is this “water”?”

Standard requirement for a parting note graduation speech- use moralizing stories, parables, which I am trying to demonstrate. This, generally speaking, is one of the best conventions of the genre, but if you are already worried that I am going to appear before you as a wise old pike perch explaining to young people what water is, you should not. I'm not a wise old fish at all. The idea of ​​this story is simple: it is the most obvious and important aspects the surrounding reality is often the hardest to see and put into words. In this formulation, it is, of course, trite and hackneyed, but the fact is that in the trenches of everyday adult life hackneyed platitudes can decide questions of life and death, or at least in this light I want to present them to you on this wonderful clear morning.

Of course, the basic requirement for such a speech is that I am supposed to be talking about the meaning of your "liberal arts" training, trying to explain why the degree you are about to receive has universal value and not exclusively material. So let's talk about the most important stamp in this genre. The fact that learning the "free arts" does not directly endow you with knowledge, but teaches you to think. If you're anything like me when I was a student, you never liked to hear it and you tend to find it a little offensive - the question of whether you need to be taught to think is already decided by the fact that you entered a college of this level. But I want to show you that this cliché is not offensive at all, because the really important part of the "thinking" training you get in college is not about the ability to think at all, but rather about choosing what to think about. If absolute freedom of choice about what to think seems too obvious to you to waste time discussing it, I ask you to think about fish and water and calm down a little your skepticism in assessing the significance of the absolutely obvious.

Here is another little instructive story. Two people are sitting in a bar somewhere in the remote wilderness of Alaska. One of them is deeply religious, the other is an atheist, and they argue about the existence of God with that special ardor that appears after the fourth mug. So the atheist says, “Don't you think I don't have specific reasons not to believe in God? Do you think that I have never experimented with prayers and appeals to the Lord? Last month, I got lost somewhere far from the camp and got into a wild snowstorm, you can’t see a single light, minus fifty ... Then I fell to my knees and cried out: “Lord, if you exist, I’m lost in a snowstorm, I can’t survive if you don't help me." And here, in a bar, a believer looks at him in bewilderment in complete bewilderment and says: “Well, now you have to believe. You're here, alive and well." To which the atheist just rolls his eyes: "No, buddy, just a couple of Eskimos happened to pass by and they showed me the way to the camp."

It is very easy to analyze this story from the standpoint of the “liberal arts”: the same situation can be interpreted by two people in completely different ways if these two people believe in different things and are characterized by different ways extracting meaning from life experience. Since we value tolerance and diversity of beliefs, we will never say that the conclusions of one of them are correct, and the second - incorrect or incorrect. And this is good. But we will never come to an answer to the question of where exactly the patterns and beliefs of these people come from. I mean where in them they originate. As if the basic relation of a person to the world, the meaning of his experience is somehow “embedded” in him, like height or size of a foot; or it follows automatically from culture, say, through language. As if the way in which we extract meaning from experience is not the result of personal, purposeful choice. Let's add more self-confidence here. See how absolutely and categorically that atheist is sure that the Eskimos passing by had nothing to do with his prayer! Of course, many religious people are also self-confident and do not doubt their interpretation of events either. They are probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least for most of us. But the problem of religious dogmatists is exactly the same as the problem of the unbeliever in my story: a blind certainty, a shortsightedness that leads to such a perfect conclusion that the prisoner does not even suspect that he is locked up.

This story teaches us what actually should be included in the concept of "teaching to think." Be a little less confident. Be a little critical and conscious of yourself and your beliefs. Because so much of what we tend to be involuntarily sure of is completely wrong and turns out to be the result of our delusions. I figured it out on own experience And to you, graduates, I predict the same.

Here is one simple example of a completely wrong thing that I am involuntarily sure of: all my personal experience supports the strong conviction that I am the real center of the universe; most alive and important person in everything existing world. We rarely think about this natural, fundamental egocentricity because it is socially undesirable. But it belongs to each of us. It is a default property built into our being from birth. Think about it: the center of everything that you know from experience is only yourself. The world as you know it is what is in front of YOU, or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on the screen of YOUR TV or computer. Etc. Thoughts and feelings of other people must be conveyed to you in one way or another, while your own are so direct, urgent, authentic.

Don't worry, I'm not starting to moralize you about compassion, consideration for others, or other so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. I just prefer to make an effort and somehow change or discard my natural, “initially laid”, initial property to be the center of the world, to see and understand everything only through the prism of my own essence. People who are able to regulate their natural, original properties, we sometimes call "opportunists" (those who know how to adapt - ed.; another translation is "balanced"), and I insist that this is not an accidental word.

Given the academic brilliance that surrounds me, it is appropriate to wonder how much this task of managing "embedded" properties requires knowledge or intelligence. This is a very tricky question. Probably the most dangerous side academic education- at least in my case - that it encourages a tendency to be over-intellectual about life, a tendency to argue with oneself about abstract things, instead of just looking closely at what is happening right in front of me, at what is happening inside me.

In fact, I'm sure you guys already know how difficult it is to stay alert and "on" without succumbing to the constant hypnotic monologue that sounds in your head (perhaps it continues now). Twenty years after graduating from college, I gradually came to realize that this "liberal arts" cliché about learning to think is actually a shortened version of a deeper and more serious thought: "learning to think" essentially means "learning to control how and what to think about. That is, to be conscious and understanding enough to choose what to pay attention to, and to establish your own way of extracting meaning from experience. Because if you, as an adult, cannot control it, your life will go to hell. Remember another common phrase that the mind is a magnificent servant, but a terrible master. It, like many banal phrases, is unconvincing and uninteresting at first glance, but in essence it expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not a bit accidental that people, when shooting, almost always point their weapons where? To the head. They want to end the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are in fact dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I argue that the real, not nonsense value of your training should be precisely this ability to get away from living your cozy, successful, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your own mind, and the natural initial property of being unambiguously, absolutely, unconditionally lonely from day to day. This may seem like an exaggeration or abstract nonsense, so I'll get to the specifics. Obviously, you graduates still have absolutely no idea what "day by day" means. It turns out that in adult life there are such significant, essential aspects that no one talks about at graduation. One of them is boredom, routine and minor disappointments. Parents and senior comrades present here perfectly understand what I mean.

As an example, let's imagine a typical adult day. You get up in the morning, you go to a challenging but exciting white-collar job with a college degree, you work eight or ten hours, and by the end of the day you're tired and stressed and all you want to do is get home as soon as possible, eat a good dinner, maybe maybe an hour to air out and go to bed early, because, of course, the next day - everything will happen again. But here you are, you remember that this week you haven’t replenished your food supplies yet, and therefore today you can’t get away from visiting the supermarket. The end of the working day, the situation on the roads corresponds: everything is worse than ever. So it takes more time than you might think. When you do reach your destination, the supermarket is full of people - because it's rush hour, the same time when all the other people try to run to the grocery store after work. The trading floor is filled with terrible light, which is complemented by the ubiquitous exhausting pop music, and in general, this is the last place on Earth where you would like to be, but you can’t just get in and out: you have to go around all these huge dazzling rows to find the right products , you have to maneuver this stupid cart between other tired, rushing people and their carts (and so on and so forth, I won’t go into details), but in the end you find everything you wanted to take for dinner, only now it turns out that cash registers are openly insufficient and they cannot cope with the crowd of tired customers besieging the store. So the queue is unimaginably long, which is terribly stupid and just as annoying. But you can't vent your dissatisfaction on an already distraught cashier overworking for jobs whose day-to-day boredom and meaninglessness are beyond the imagination of us graduates of prestigious colleges.

Nevertheless, you still get to the checkout and pay for groceries and you are told " have a good day” in a voice that is more suitable for Death itself. You're hauling creepy, torn plastic bags of food in a cart, one stupid wheel of which pulls maniacally to the left, through all that junkyard in a littered parking lot, all so you can then trudge home at rush hour in an SUV-packed, barely moving traffic. , etc.

Of course, you all know this. But until now, this has not been part of your life as a routine - for days, weeks, months, years.

But it will. As well as many other monotonous, annoying, seemingly meaningless actions. However, I'm not talking about that. The bottom line is that such small stimuli are the field of activity of the ability to choose. Because traffic jams, crowded store halls, long lines provide time for reflection. And if I don't make a conscious choice of how to think and where to focus my attention, I will be furious and unhappy every time I have to go shopping. After all, I was initially driven by the belief that all such situations are really “about me”. That my hunger, my fatigue, and my desire to get home as soon as possible play a central role, while the rest of the world just seems to get in my way. And who are all these people? See how most of them are disgusting, how stupid and lifeless they are, how inhuman this herd at the cash desk looks, how vile and rude those who talk loudly on their mobiles in line behave. And how deeply unfair this is to me.

Or, if my initial set-up is a little more socially oriented, I can spend time in an evening traffic jam thinking about how disgusting these huge stupid SUVs, Hummers and pickup trucks wastefully burning gasoline from their selfish 150-liter tanks, or about how patriotic or religious slogans always seem to be plastered on the bumpers of the biggest, nastiest, selfish cars driven by the most obnoxious… [responding to thunderous applause] (though this is an example of how not to think)… the most unpleasant, imprudent and rude drivers. And also about how our grandchildren will despise us because we recklessly used all the fuel, probably irretrievably ruined the climate, how we are all spoiled, stupid and selfish, how disgusting modern society consumption and other similar topics.

I think the idea is clear.

If I adopt this line of reasoning in the store or on the highway, well... Many of us do. It’s just that thinking about it is so simple and natural that you don’t need to make a conscious choice to do it. These are our "default settings". It is an involuntary way of experiencing the boring, frustrating, cramped side of adulthood that results from automatically, unconsciously placing yourself at the center of the world and prioritizing your immediate feelings and needs. But the point is that, of course, to think about similar situations can be done in completely different ways. In a traffic jam, among the many cars that stand or barely crawl in front of me, there may be a person (just in an SUV) who survived a terrible car accident. Now he is so terrified of driving that the therapist advised him to buy himself a huge, heavy jeep so that he would feel more secure. Or maybe in that Hummer that just cut me off, the father is carrying a sick or injured baby, trying to get to the hospital as soon as possible, and his actions are quite justified, he is in a hurry much more than I am and it is I who interfere with him. I can also try to take into account that all the other people in line at the checkout are very likely just as tired and irritated as myself, and some of them live more stressful, tedious and painful lives than I do.

Once again, please don't think that I'm moralizing you, or that you should think the way I say, or that anyone expects you to automatically think that way. Just because it's not that easy. It takes desire and strength, and if you're like me, sometimes you can't do it - or simply don't want to. But most of the time, if you're conscious enough to let yourself choose, you can decide to take a different look at that fat, frazzled, make-up-splattered woman in line who just yelled at her son. Maybe she's not always like this? Maybe she spent three nights without sleep by the bed of her husband dying of bone cancer? It could be that this same woman is a modestly paid clerk in the auto accounting department who just yesterday helped your wife solve a nasty, annoying bureaucratic problem by showing a bit of bureaucratic empathy. Of course, all this is unlikely, but at the same time it is not impossible. It all depends on how you are ready to look at the world, what you are ready to take into consideration. If you are involuntarily sure of the correctness own understanding reality and proceed from your natural attitudes, then you, like me, most likely will not consider those possibilities that are not annoying, the probability of which is negligible. But if you really learn to be sensitive, you will realize that there are others. It will be up to you: to perceive this scene from the crowded, hot, oppressive consumer hell not only as meaningful, but even sacred, illumined by the same power that created the stars, love, friendship, the mystical inner identity of all things.

Mysticism does not necessarily have to do with truth. The only Truth is capital letter- this is what you have to decide: how you will try to perceive the world.

It is this freedom, I argue, that is the result of real learning, learning to "adapt". You get to decide what matters and what doesn't. You choose what to worship. After all, there is another rather strange truth: in the everyday trenches of adulthood, there is actually no atheism. It does not happen that a person does not worship something. Everyone worships someone or something. The choice inherent in each of us is the choice of the object of worship. That being said, the reason to choose any god or something spiritual - Christ, Allah, Jehovah, the Wiccan Goddess, the Four Noble Truths, or an undeniable set ethical principles- lies in the fact that almost any other object of worship will eat you alive. If you put money and things above all else, if you see the meaning of your life in them, you will never have enough of them, there will never be a feeling of prosperity. That's how it's arranged. Raise to the rank of sacred your body, beauty, sex appeal- and you are guaranteed eternal dissatisfaction with yourself. And when the passage of time and age begins to remind you of itself, you will die a million times before death really overtakes you. In principle, we are already familiar with all this. This knowledge is hidden in myths, proverbs, platitudes, epigrams, parables; at the heart of every great story. The whole point is not to lose sight of it, to be aware of it in everyday life.

Worship strength and you will get a feeling of weakness and restlessness, you will need more and more power to drown out your own fear. Worship the intellect, the idea of ​​yourself as wise man, and you will wait until you feel stupid, a liar who is about to be exposed. But the cunning of worshiping such things is not that it is vicious or sinful, but that it is unconscious. This is a natural property. This is the kind of “religion” that you involuntarily go into, day after day, gradually seeing and evaluating things more and more selectively, while not even fully noticing what is happening.

And the so-called real world will not in the least hinder your existence in this initial position, because the so-called real world, the world of people, money and power, joyfully sings under its breath, floundering in a whirlpool of fear, anger, disappointment, acquisitiveness and selfishness. Our modern culture adapted these forces so that they led to unprecedented abundance, comfort and personal freedom. The freedom of everyone to be the ruler of a tiny kingdom the size of a skull in the center of an uninhabited universe. This freedom has many benefits. But, of course, there are several types of freedom, and you will hear a little about the most valuable of them in big world where everyone wants, achieves and flaunts themselves. The freedom that is really important has to do with attention, awareness, training, and the ability to really care for other people and give back. Again and again, in the smallest unattractive situations, countless once a day.

This is freedom. It is to be educated and understand how to think. Alternative? Unconsciousness, the "default" property, "mouse fuss", the constant gnawing feeling of losing something infinite.

I understand that this conversation is hardly so cheerful and carefree, and does not inspire in the way that a parting speech should be. But it is about the same, in my opinion, Truth (with a capital letter), only without nice little rhetorical outfits. You are, of course, free to think about it in your own way. I'm just asking you not to dismiss this as a finger-shaking edification from Dr. Laura Schlesinger (American radio host, writer, public figure). All this has nothing to do with morality, religion, dogmas and other serious questions about what awaits you in life after death.

This Truth is about life before death.

About the real value of real learning, which is practically not related to knowledge, but is directly related to consciousness; with the consciousness of what is real, what is essential, though already so successfully hidden right in front of our eyes that we have to repeat to ourselves over and over again:

"This is water".

"This is water".

It is unimaginably difficult to remain conscious and alive in the adult world from day to day. Which confirms another great banality: live a century - learn a century. And yours further education starts right now.

I wish you more than just good luck.

Hooray, it's done! Finally, we received the coveted diplomas, for the sake of which for many years we courageously denied ourselves beer and parties, well, except that sometimes, no more than five times a week, we allowed ourselves to relax a little ... Thanks to the teachers who pretended that do not notice our weary - from yesterday - eyes. True, not all: Ivan Ivanovich, for example, even noticed what was not there. And he steadily punished - "... for everything in which he was and was not guilty ...". But today we want to thank him!

Yes, exactly - and especially - you, Ivan Ivanovich! You know, it was only thanks to you that we managed to overcome everything - and finally become certified specialists. Or rather, despite all your efforts to kick us out of the university, we, having gathered all our will into a fist, with our teeth, gnawed at the granite of science until it bled. Oh, how you did not want to share your knowledge with us! Your lectures have always been confused and vaguely incomprehensible. You did everything to make us hate your subject, and in general - teaching, as such.

Yes, not everyone survived this battle for their fate - we suffered combat losses, many were not destined to get a diploma, to hold this cherished document in their hands. The untimely departed students, thanks to your unceasing labors, joined the ranks of the valiant armed forces, someone, having managed to get away from the army, rushed into business ... It is especially insulting for those who, with your concerns, went to the troops from the fifth year. However, they will soon return and tell you themselves how it is to get a machine gun instead of a diploma. And - perhaps - they will show what they were taught in the army, get ready!

But we - those whom you never managed to expel from the university - are grateful to you for helping us become what we have become. After you, we are not afraid of any life conflicts, we will meet any satrap-leader with a smile thanks to the hardening received in the fight against you. Yes, and our love for knowledge, and especially for your subject, we owe to your tongue-tied tongue: we still wanted to understand what, after all, you are broadcasting to us from the pulpit. And, you know, despite all your attempts, what we read about your subject in textbooks, reference books and the Internet interested us - and we began to learn from self-study books.

Look at our record books, remember - with what gnashing of teeth you set us a test! And what a pleasure it was for all of us to get a good grade from you, a misanthrope and the worst hater of students. In order to give you an item, we even refused beer and parties! You will not feel it, but whoever knows what it is about will understand what it cost us! I hope that our good grades will hasten your untimely demise… Although, how would current applicants be able to study without you? After all, only with the help of your indomitable foolishness they will be able, like us, to cultivate the ability to go towards the goal in spite of obstacles! So - live long, dear Ivan Ivanovich, prepare new unbending fighters for our long-suffering science!

And we promise you that we will definitely not forget someone, but you!

A group of your former students.

Posted by Andrey Karlov