Senior Assembly: Class of 2025

On Thursday, May 22, seniors, their parents, and the rest of the Burroughs community gathered in Haertter Hall for the annual Senior Assembly. Speakers included senior class president Hanna Scheessele '25 and Mark Nicholas (History). Mr. Abbott closed the assembly by sharing fond memories of the Class of 2025, both his own and those of other faculty members.

After assembly, seniors and their parents gathered for a short reception hosted by the Alumni Association. 

Hanna's and Mr. Nicholas's remarks are below.

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Hanna Scheessele's Remarks

Good morning, faculty, staff, students, parents, Mr. Abbott, and especially the Class of 2025.

My name is Hanna Scheessele and I'm truly grateful to stand in front of you at this podium one last time and speak to you today.

What a privilege I have to be able to address such a special group of people, the people who make up John Burroughs School. A school that is filled with wonderful traditions, exceptional education, record-breaking athletics programs, and, most importantly, a strong and supportive community.

The question, though, is how this came to be. How did Burroughs become the school that it is known as today? The thing is, it didn't just happen on a random Tuesday, nor can it be traced back to any one person. Rather, this school is made of the sum of all the people who have walked these halls and the moments that they have created together. Every single person in this room is part of making Burroughs the place that it is today. 

These people sitting behind me on this stage are a large part of that. They have made their mark on this school in more ways than one. I mean, who knows where this school would be if there hadn't been the iconic Dhruva versus Sean rap battle at Bio Drey Land, or if there hadn't been a failed bouncy house attempt in the Quad a few weeks ago.

As this school continues to grow and more and more students attend, it may seem as though our time here is only one little blip on the Burroughs timeline. While numerically this may be true, the impact we have on this school is far greater than we can imagine. We each bring our own unique selves to make Burroughs what it is, which is more than a school. It is the accumulation of some of the smartest, most thoughtful, resilient, competitive, and compassionate people that I have ever known. 

Each and every one of us is as much a part of this community as the next. However, it is never just our academic and extracurricular accomplishments that make an impact. How we choose to show up every single day matters. We are all individually responsible for the culture that is created here collectively. Every choice that you make has an effect. While some actions are larger than others, they all play an equally crucial role. 

You don't need to win a state championship, start a new branch of Montgomery Plan, or be a world-class musician to have made a mark on this school. While all of these things are remarkable, I've come to realize that it's the smaller unnoticed things that are just as, if not more, impactful.

A couple of weeks ago, while doom scrolling through TikTok, the platform where our generation gets most of its “very credible” information about the world, I came across a video that discussed a theory that perfectly captures this concept: The Butterfly Effect. The idea that small changes in a complex system can have large, unpredictable consequences over time. No matter how insignificant you think your actions are, they're making an impact in some way or another. How you choose to show up matters, because you and your influence on this school matter more than what can be put into words. Yet the key word here is choose. Every single day, you show up and you decide how you want to shape and change the school.

Now, this can be for the better or for the worse because, as we know, there are positive and negative actions and consequences. Burroughs is the school that it is because of the people who choose to hold doors for those behind them. The people who choose to help classmates out with AP Physics WebAssigns, even when they have a huge workload themselves. The people who choose to smile and say thank you to teachers for the day's lessons as they leave the classroom. The friend at lunch who chooses to offer the last chocolate chip cookie when you're having a tough day. These are all choices that you make.

And while it would be great if all of us could make the kind choice that makes this school stronger, you can also choose to tear others in this community down. You can choose to exclude someone from your lunch table. You can choose to make fun of others for how they act or dress. You can choose to spread rumors about classmates. 

Now, I'm not saying that you have to be best friends with everyone because that would be a lot, but what I am saying is that how you show up and treat others is a daily choice. And it is a choice that shapes the school and what we want to be a part of and the school that we want to leave behind.

The people up on the stage have made many choices, big and small, during their time at Burroughs. Elsa chose to use her voice and perform an original song during assembly. Twenty-three different students chose to put in the work over the years to be able to play their respective sports, not only here, but also in college. Doty chose to greet us with a “What's up y'all?” in assembly once a month, alongside Mawdo and Gavin Wickenhauser, as they educated our community about world religions. Jacqueline and Emma chose to use their artistic talents and inspiration to create a meaningful Tableau for the Holiday Program. Theo and Stephen chose to use their voices and offer especially thoughtful sound offs on accessibility and reproductive rights. This class has cheered on classmates during performances, helped others with late night study sessions, and encouraged and picked up teammates when they made mistakes during games. And all of us chose to connect as a class and be together during Senior Sunrise and Senior Sunset.

While we may be moving on to flap our wings elsewhere and create change wherever we go next, I leave with a smile knowing that the Class of 2025 positively contributed to what Burroughs is today. We are leaving here having created a school that people look forward to attending every day — or at least most days. This culture doesn't end with us, though. The culture that is John Burroughs is changing daily and is all based on the work that you put into it. You have a choice in what you want your school to look like, because your decisions big or small, matter. And if you believe like I do that there are no small actions, then every day offers you a new opportunity to contribute and shape our community and any community of which we are a part. You make the choice each day to shape and change the world into what you want it to be. At Burroughs, that's a place where we can all share our talents and ideas, our beliefs and perspectives, and where everyone else can, too. 

And so I leave you with these two questions that we should never stop asking ourselves: What choices will you make today, and what will their impact be?

Thank you so much, and congrats to the Class of 2025.

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Mark Nicholas's Remarks

Everything that begins, ends. I'm concerned that as your time here ends, although you can do difficult math problems, conjugate verbs in different languages, understand the workings of cells and atoms, create and defend a thesis, explain the meaning of a puzzling sonnet, paint and draw, sculpt, act, play music, and win games, you're so lacking in judgment that you chose a man to address you whose public speaking skills have all the grace of two men named Spike and Bubba moving heavy furniture down a narrow hallway in the dark. Knowing that, I will follow Franklin Roosevelt's advice on giving speeches: Be sincere, be brief, be seated. I promise you I'll follow two out of three of those rules.

I have taught 46 of you once, 10 of you twice, and Courtney Wu three times. At graduation, Mr. Abbott should slip combat pay in with your diploma, Courtney. The rest of you, forever in my mind, the fortunate 68, have escaped my history lessons — until now. So Courtney, here's your 330th history lesson with me. But for most of you, the first and last. However, although this sounds like an oxymoron to many of you, this might be an interesting history lesson, as it will be short and it will be about you. All that's required is some engagement with others in this room, memory, and some imagination.

Look into the audience and find some teachers, coaches, administrators, and staff members who have worked with you. Consider the years they spent learning their subjects and developing their teaching and coaching skills. But remember that good teaching, as the Quaker educator Parker Palmer reminds us, cannot be reduced to technique. It grows out of who you are. Some of your history has been shaped by the kind of people they are. On your way out, offer a thank you to those who have made a difference in your lives.

Lift your eyes to the balcony. Can you picture yourself in those back rows? Who knows how many inches shorter and how many pounds lighter, and thinking this moment was light years away. See if you can find your little siblings up there. Smile and say goodbye to them, too, as you depart.

However, you also have to picture the balcony empty for the last part of your 7th grade year and the entirety of your time in 8th grade. Then, you discovered that some historical forces defy human control, that pandemics alter history, and that Zoom is an odd word for classes that seem to move with all the speed of a glacier.

Consider the inductive and deductive methods and empiricism set forth 400 years ago by Sir Francis Bacon and René Descartes, and how those methods guided the people who created the vaccines that once again filled the seats right here, mask on and COVID moved to a back burner. People to whom we never give a second thought so often make our lives better.

Drop your eyes to this level and find where you sat as a freshman. I think what mattered most that year was the addition of 16 new students to this class. For you Stone Age veterans of two years at that time, try to imagine this stage right now without them. I can't. The fact that within two months of their arrival, an omniscient observer watching the class for a week could not tell you who was new and who had been here for two years says good things about all of you.

Find the sophomores, where two new students arrive. Consider the blows our cross country and track teams and plays would've suffered had they not joined you, as well as the contributions they brought to your classes. Recall that when you sat where the 10th graders now are looking at you, most of you took the only test that mattered that year: Your driver’s test. Remember the sense of freedom you gained the first time you slid behind the wheel and hit the road with no one else in the car, and add another lesson history teaches us. Freedom and responsibility live joined at the hip. We forget that lesson at our and others’ peril.

Can it really only be 365 days since your junior year ended, sitting so close to the Class of 2024 as you listened to Mr. McKeown that you could get a sense of this present moment? It took a leap of faith to imagine the 7th grade you in the balcony sitting here now. Those juniors watching you can't say it's the end of their time here, but they can see it on the horizon.

Finally, move your gaze to what are already your old seats. Find your parents, who, as I experienced twice when our children graduated, might be overcome with conflicting emotions by how soon you took these spots on stage.

My favorite crazy Prussian philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, wrote that everyone thinks the principal thing to the tree is the fruit. But actually, the principal thing to the tree is the seed. I prefer to see a continuum that defies comparison. With bonds best articulated by author Richard Russo when he wrote, your parents love you, not because they have to, but because they can't help it. You stole your hearts the minute you were born, and you won't give them back. I see that as one of history's and nature's perfect arrangements — maybe the best one.

Ten years ago, on a January day so monochromatically gray and still it was as if an ash-covered blanket had been dropped over campus, a senior with whom I shared a free period entered our room 10 minutes before class started, sat, and stared out the window. She was quiet in a way that bespoke reflection, so I honored her silence and left her to her thoughts, which she shared when, a few minutes later, she asked me, how can you teach history year after year and not become a pessimist? It's so full of violence.

I'm glad I didn't immediately answer, as she was doing something that many of you have done that is important in the lives of the teachers in this room: Force us to examine assumptions and think about what we do beyond the day-to-day classroom interactions that fill our lives. Certainly, violence permeates history. The Enlightenment thinker Voltaire wrote that it is a long list of unnecessary cruelties, and he noted that people who believe absurdities will commit atrocities. But I had not thought long enough about what it means to teach year after year about the wars, violent revolution, and intolerance that besmirch our past.

I could have told her that for every Hitler, you're going to be countered by a Martin Luther King, every Stalin by a Gandhi or Mother Teresa, or emphasize what Mr. Rogers once said when a girl asked him why people do bad things to one another. He replied that, for every one person who commits a violent act, there are dozens who rush to help those harmed by it.

My student made me wonder not only if I had become pessimistic due to my work but, more importantly, had that pessimism shaped my teaching so that it became the enduring message my students received. I hope not, for societies beset by pessimism lack creativity and, thus, the vitality to evolve into something better than they are.

The students I have taught, in this class and every other one for 48 years, do not fill me with pessimism. You fill me with hope.

Weeks later, I finally answered that senior. I told her that in all the stories that make up history, your story, mine, everyone's in the room today or everyone whoever will be in this room, there's really only one story. It is the story of the light that finds a home in most people's souls and the shadows that take root in some others. 

History plays out largely as a struggle between those opposing forces of good and evil. And when you stare at a grey January landscape as that senior did a decade ago, or the one it can sometimes mirror in your soul, or you examine the horrors the world can spit at you every day, you may conclude that the shadows in the few exert more force than the light in the many. That there is more shadow than light in human history.

But, a man writing 2,000 years ago, a man named John who thought about some of the same things that senior contemplated 10 years ago, claimed this: The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

I think of the light in the marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, facing the shadows cast by a violent Jim Crow South. Of the light in Hugh Thompson, a helicopter pilot in Vietnam who saved Vietnamese women and children from the shadows cast by his own country's rampaging troops slaughtering everyone they saw at My Lai in 1968. 

Of the light shining in Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian farmer executed by the darkest shadows called Nazi Germany for refusing to fight for his homeland once they took over. Of the light in Harriet Tubman, leading 13 missions to rescue 70 slaves from a shadow called American slavery, whose stain we still haven't completely escaped. 

Of the light animating Mendel Beilis, a Jewish handyman in pre-revolutionary Kyiv enduring years of solitary confinement after being accused of an absurd crime by an antisemitic shadow known as the Russian autocracy of Czar Nicholas II and refusing to break under pressure that would've crushed most people.

I have no advice for any of you, but I have something I want for all of you. That whatever your source of illumination, you choose to be light shining in the darkness and that you shine as brightly as you can, for as long as you can, so the shadows, surely always there, fail. Thank you.