Dr. Moore Speaks at Class of 2025 Stuyvesant Graduation

Hello!

If you think that selecting the kooky ukulele-playing English teacher who has taught Poetry Workshop at Stuyvesant for the past 25 years means that you’re about to hear a speech about depth, empathy, and magic with a smattering of Whitman and Dickinson references thrown in … you are right. And if you are the kind of intense, rigorous student or parent who wants to know exactly when the speaker is two thirds of the way through her speech, just listen for when I attempt to pronounce the phrase “lazy bug” in Mandarin Chinese.

* * *

In 2021, you entered this building in masks. You were small and scared and every breath fogged your glasses. I, myself, was returning from medical leave, and I felt small and scared. During the pandemic, with two young kids and no daycare and no in-person school, I had been diagnosed with cancer. I’d had surgery a month before returning to Stuy, and I’d continued to do chemo every three weeks that entire school year. 

That fall, I read about the dancer Nami Yamamoto, who made a sequence of improvisational videos titled “powerless creature keeps going.” Powerless creature keeps going. That’s a phrase all of Stuyvesant, especially pandemic-Stuyvesant, can relate to. You go deep. You lock in. You thug it out.

Depth is what got you into Stuy and what gets you on the train by 6:00 a.m. That grind is what it takes to actually do the reading and to question the source material the corporate-backed AI summary shoves in front of you. Reading deeply is what allows you to have complex, evidence-supported, seminar-style discussions in class. A belief in the value of depth, of research and educational opportunity is what inspired your parents to send you to a nearly 4,000-person school full of people with opposing views during a pandemic.

* * *

Nearly 4,000 young people from all over New York, from all over the world,

collaborating all day every day. How is that possible?

Because of your empathy, your willingness to share and honor each other’s stories.

Whenever people find out I teach Poetry at Stuyvesant, they ask me what you write about. You write… About being raised in rural China by your grandparents and moving to New York and meeting your own parents at the airport. About growing up in Sudan and Ecuador and Tibet and learning English while studying for the SHSAT and making it into Stuy. About watching how hard your parents work. About doing your homework in the back of restaurants. 

           You write about October 7th, about your heartbreak on that day and every day after. About the Russian invasion of Ukraine, about your heartbreak on that day and every day after. About Gaza, about the heartbreak you feel knowing so many children younger than you are hungry and terrified. About how it feels to have someone you love or connect to across an ocean.

          You write about becoming friends with your older sibling right before they left for college. About your single parents and how much they’ve done for you, and how happy you are when it’s just the two of you dancing to Taylor Swift in the kitchen. About having two dads. About your fencing team, running around the reservoir, long afternoons at football practice, and how much you love Staten Island. About eating hot pot with your bros after a game and discord calls and ping-pong and putting your ear buds in to listen to your favorite music as you walk down Chambers. About picnics in the park with all your cousins and apartment parties where your aunties play Celia Cruz. About what it feels like to be told you are “gifted” yet feel like you don’t measure up. About how you were once robbed by older kids as a middle schooler, and how ashamed and scared you felt. About the flooding in your basement apartment.

* * *

You don’t write about being undocumented. You used to, at least in my experience, but now you can’t. You are getting your education and keeping your heads down and protecting your families. And your teachers know this so we reach for the books and poems that reflect this core American story. And we keep making space for the stories you are ready to tell. About how once in Bangladesh when you were three you followed the wrong cow home and your family has never let you forget it. About the tiny bed you once shared with your mom and grandma. About how people don’t understand you are both Korean and Jewish. About karaoke nights and Chinese New Year and Marine Park at night and how much you love LeBron James. I have read so many poems about how much you love LeBron James!

* * *

When Emily Dickinson wrote nearly two thousand of the greatest American poems ever written and placed them in a drawer, her motivation was entirely internal. No teacher gave her an assignment, and nobody even comprehended the extent of her radicalism. All she had was her own original voice and a willingness to see what she could do with it. Keep trusting your own voices, even in this digitizing world. AI will never tell you that your work is “finished” or good enough, and no machine can tell you what you want to say.

      As poets, your quirks, your accents, your mistakes, your conjuring of funny family phrases like how your mom calls you “lazy bug” – [Dr. Moore makes a sad attempt to pronounce this phrase in Mandarin!]- in Chinese every morning are what make your poems better, what make them yours.

* * *

      Like Whitman and Dickinson, you are living in times of national upheaval, and there are

moments when nothing—not depth, not empathy, not magic—feels like it will help.

      As a gay woman, I lived my first thirty-five years in this country without the legal protections of full American citizenship. This did not make me any less human, just as attacks on international students, transgender kids, and the current wave of theatrically cruel deportations meant to strike fear in the hearts of immigrants, don’t make any of those people—people who are in all of our complex, vulnerable, diasporic American families - any less beloved or ambitious or capable or necessary.

      I did everything I could to fight my cancer, and I am in remission now, and I am so grateful, but not all of my friends who fought just as hard survived. The world can be random and cruel.

But this is also why I wanted to return to Stuy as soon as I could. Why I’ve done my best

teaching in the wake of my disease. Because of what we do together, every day, in our school. Because of what every single good, low-paid, hard-working daycare provider and public school teacher who loved you from the moment you stepped into their classroom knows: that we are better off knowing you, that our city is built out of your stories, that you have something to teach America.

      And you did it!

      Here and now, there is no person or politician who can take your education away from you. The poems you memorized for my class, the ideas you explored in your essays, your numeracy and scientific thinking and painstaking coding and the music you sang and the side tables you built and the the transit board you created and the prayers you prayed during eighth period and the basketball plays you ran and the friends you made—they are all inside of you.

* * *

      And Stuy magic is also yours. What is Stuy magic?

      Stuy magic is the intricate Minutes presentation breaking down every line of the Drake Kendrick Lamar feud. It’s the quality that leads random kids in the hallways to join your Shakespeare performance groups. It’s when someone puts GeoGuesser on the SmartBoard and everyone goes bananas. It’s the notes you write to your classmates on Sharing Day.

       It’s the moment early in my Stuy career, when I taught twenty-six students in a classroom with thirty-four desks. Of course, you all tried to sit in the back, which felt far away and made you hard to hear. So, in an effort to force you back up front, I placed “Reserved” signs on the back eight desks. You wouldn’t dare to break the rules, but you did ask a lot of questions as you

settled into the front row. 

      “Who are these reserved for?”

      “Um, a panel of … international …educational …dignitaries.”

      “For real?”

      “I mean you see the signs.”

* * *

      One month later my Assistant Principal appeared in my doorway followed by a well-dressed

crowd. “You can say no, but I have a large, unexpected group of school leaders here from

Denmark who’d like to watch some classes. Would you be okay if they sat in?” My students and I looked at each other with huge eyes.

“Of course,” I said. “We’ve been expecting you.”

      The world might not know it yet, but it’s expecting you. It needs your depth, your empathy, and your magic. Congratulations class of 2025.