Amir Whitaker ME ’08, EdD ’11 was the keynote speaker at Rossier’s 2013 Master’s Commencement Ceremony.
His speech was as follows:
Greetings fellow Trojans, family, friends, and Rossier faculty. Thank you for this opportunity to deliver this keynote speech today. Just five years ago I was in the very same seat that you are in when I received my masters. I still remember the feelings of accomplishment, joy, excitement … and the thoughts of “when is this guy going to finish his speech because I’m ready to celebrate”.
So with that in mind, I will keep this speech short and simple. I know how important this day is to you and your family. It celebrates your bravery in taking your education to the level that less than 10% of our population reaches. It represents the end of a journey that I vividly remember. The night classes after a full day’s work, the literature review papers, the all-nighters, and oh and let’s not forget our friend statistics.
But today also represents the beginning of a new journey that you are about to embark on. This is your journey into the profession most important to our country and the world. And I know every profession thinks their job is the most important, but I can summarize why our profession is most important in three words that I hope you never forget. Actually, just two words and an equals sign. “EDUCATION = CHANGE”
Education is change because once someone learns something new or becomes educated, they are different. Today’s ceremony symbolizes that change for you. Education is “The Great Equalizer” and the most certain way to break the cycle of poverty. It’s why high school dropouts are 3 times as likely to be unemployed and college graduates have lower rates of stress, high blood pressure, and even cancer. So as educators, we are keepers of two most important responsibilities; improving people’s quality of life, and creating change.
To demonstrate your potential to create change, I’ll share a story about how education and different educators have helped transform me.
Today, I’m what you would consider and education addict. Look at my Netflix and you’ll see Documentaries instead of Action movies and Comedies. Look at my library and you’ll find dense texts instead of novels and fiction. Just last week, I finished my 23rd straight year of school and 11th straight year of college or higher education.
But rewind to the days of when I was just a New Jersey public school student and you’ll find a different person. You’ll find a knucklehead, or someone who rarely followed rules and listened. One of my earliest school memories comes from 1st grade where I was suspended for writing a curse word on my classwork. I came back to school a week later and spent the rest of the year trying to catch up with the rest of my class.
By 4th grade, I had to be taken out regular classes for “special classes” with “special teachers” and you all know what I’m talking about. By middle schools, I had gone to 7 different schools because of my unstable family situation. My first year of high school, I failed nearly all of my classes … even gym. My GPA was below a 1.0. I wasn’t bothered by this because I knew I wasn’t “stupid”. I just wasn’t interested in school or motivated to learn what they were teaching.
I probably had more than 50 absences that year. Some days I preferred to stay home instead of waiting outside my school for an hour because 1,500 students had to enter through our school’s metal detectors. Once in school, I fought daily with teachers frustrated with me not performing to my potential. With good reason, most of the teachers eventually gave up on me. But a few teachers refused to quit.
One of those teachers was Mr. Johnson, my Geometry Teacher. The semester I was in his class, I moved three times between the custody of different family members because both my mother and father were in prison at the time. Mr. Johnson focused on developing a strong relationship with me and other students. One time he even gave me 20 bucks to rake the leaves at his house. He was also one of the first people who force me to challenge myself. Unfortunately, this was only in Geometry class. I was still a knucklehead in most other classes where the teachers had not made that connection.
Finally, around 11th grade or my 3rd year of high school because I definitely didn’t have enough credits … I looked around and saw that more than 80 percent of my friends been kicked out of school or dropped out. And then I received a letter that I will never forget. It was addressed to the “Parent or Guardians of Amir Whitaker”. At the time, both of my parents were incarcerated, and my grandparents were busy dealing with the 10 other family members who lived in our house. So that meant the letter was to me.
I go on to read the letter, and it talks about how my constant suspensions, absences, and behavioral problem indicated that I was not taking school seriously. And as a result, I was being expelled school.
I’ll never forget how devastating this was. Combined with neither parents being around and moving from family member to family member, my school kicking me out made me feel worthless and unwanted. I felt thrown away, left for dead, and given up on.
A few days later I went to the alternative or continuation school that I was enrolled in after being expelled. It was an awful experience. It seemed like more of a place to warehouse troubled kids before they dropout … than an actual school. The course work was years below my level, and the school had so few resources, the students had to share books. I was also in a class full of knuckleheads that no teacher could possibly control. Many of us were brilliant, but none of us had the motivation or interest to do our classwork.
When the school responded with their dropout-warehouse intervention, it depleted the little motivation that teachers like Mr. Johnson had worked hard to develop. So after two days, I decided to dropout. I couldn’t take the humiliation. I felt like the school was giving up on me, and I finally gave up on myself.
That next day, all I could think about was how being a knucklehead who refused to listen was getting me in constant trouble. It got me kicked out of school, arrested for selling drugs, and in a whole lot of mess that I’ll have to save for the autobiography.
I then had the most life changing realization. I thought, what if instead of using my knucklehead attitude to disobey rules and laws, I use it to disobey all doubts and disbeliefs? With the exception of teachers like Mr. Johnson, everyone assumed I would repeat the cycle and end up as a dropout and in jail like my parents. All hope was lost in me, even though I was only 16 years old.
But that day I decided to show some consistency in my behavior. I decided to transformed from a being knucklehead not caring about rules, to being a knucklehead not caring about doubts. And I decided to focus on the support of people like Mr. Johnson, instead of wasting energy on those who doubted me.
I went back to school the very next day and met with Mrs. Thompson, the counselor for the alternative school. I told her I had a goal to get back into normal school and graduate. She patiently walked me through everything I needed to do to get back on track. It was probably the first time I set a specific goal for myself, and outlined what I needed to do to achieve it. Mrs. Thompson also reinforced the fact that there were people out there who cared about my education.
Collectively, these things help me make a full transformation. With my new attitude, I finished high school and I enrolled in a community college. Unfortunately, I was so behind academically, I had to take full year of remedial classes before taking normal college classes. But I was determined to reach the new goal I set; transferring to a university so that I could move out of my grandparent’s house and become independent. I ended up transferring to Rutgers University, the best public university in the NJ/NY area. I was beginning to use education to change situation.
Fast-forward to 11 years later today, I’ve doubled my high school GPA, and I‘m completing my 5th college degree. None of this would have happened if Mr. Johnson and Mrs. Thompson had given up on me. It would have never happened if I didn’t embrace my knucklehead to deal with all other doubts. So the greatest advice I can give to you all today is to never give up on your students. Keep my story with you as an example of the transformation that is possible.
Also, I want each and every one of you to find and embrace your knucklehead. It can be the wings that help you soar over difficult situations and deal with all doubt. And this is important because doubt is one of the greatest barriers to success. We let doubt, hesitation, and disbelief cripple us too often. Sometimes this doubt comes from another individual doubting you. They’ll say, “you can’t do that” or “you’re not worth the resources”. But the worst doubt of all comes from yourself. You telling yourself things like “I can’t do that”, “that’s more than I can handle”. If I had a dollar for every doubt I encountered, I would be able to pay off my student loans!
But isn’t it unfortunate that the things we need most in education also bring about the most doubt? Things like creativity and innovation naturally bring doubt. We tend believe a new idea will fail quicker than we think it would succeed. No one likes uncertainty or risks.
I experienced a lot of this doubt first hand last year. I was growing frustrated with the statistics showing our educational system was not meeting the needs of many students. More than 7,000 students drop out of school everyday because they no longer have the motivation and interest to stay in school. Knuckleheads just like I was, but unfortunately, most of them never have the realization I had. And as a result, more than one million students drop out of school every year. My personal experience and research actually indicated that schools themselves were actually pushing the students out in something called the “School to Prison Pipeline”. It made sense when I looked around and saw that more people I grew up with had gone to prison than finished high school.
I’d worked in different schools where half of the students drop out. There were no efforts to save these students and no intervention to address student motivation. Instead, schools were pushing them through the pipeline so they wouldn’t lower test scores or disrupt school operations. Schools adopted the philosophy of “why should we keep them here if they are not coming to school to learn?” It’s like that horse you can lead to the water and can’t make drink. Schools will naturally save their limited resources for the students who are thirsty.
So last year I decided to take a risk and start a nonprofit called Project KnuckleHead to do something about this pipeline. I created programs specifically for unmotivated students heading down the wrong path. It was based off my personal experience as a troubled youth, my professional experience working in schools, and my education and research experience studying motivation here at USC.
I thought I’d be confident in starting a program with such a strong foundation, but boy was I wrong. My ideas were confronted with a mountain of doubt, which like I said, is the greatest barrier to success. People were telling me the ideas wouldn’t work. That the youth were not worth it. I was telling myself that it was more than I could handle while in law school.
To make matters worse, Project KnuckleHead was a new non-profit without a track record. So I couldn’t find any donors, grants, or foundations willing to support our cause. As a result, I had to invest thousands… all of my personal savings… all while working full-time for Project KnuckleHead without pay.
I just wanted Project KnuckleHead to replicate what made me successful … for struggling students across the country. I knew I was unmotivated as a high school student because of a lack of support, goals, exposure to positive role models, and other things. I knew the curriculum I developed for Project KnuckleHead would confront these issues. But this did nothing for all of the doubt in my head. I only focused on the possible failure, not the potential success.
So, to overcome this doubt, I had to go back to the day I was expelled from school. I tapped into my inner-knucklehead to ignore all doubts. A year later today, we have inspired with hundreds of students from more than 10 schools across the country. And 98% of the students who attend our programs say that they are more motivated to stay in school and less likely to drop out. Thus, Project KnuckleHead has created one of the first interventions to motivate at-risk students.
So never forget your knucklehead when confronted with doubt. It won’t be easy, but nothing can stand in the way of you completing your most important mission of educating people and making change.
None of us would be where we are today without the teachers that provided the foundation for all future learning to be built on. A grammar school teacher taught Shakespeare how to spell before he could add nearly 2,000 words to the English Language. A Kindergarten teacher taught Kobe Bryant how to share…he just forgets about it when he is on the basketball court.
Raise your hand if you remember a certain educator who played an important role in your life. Think about where you would be today if this person had not gone the extra mile. Imagine how it will feel one day knowing that you made the same impact on someone else.
What Educators like Mr. Johnson and Mrs. Thompson did, you won’t find in their job description or curriculum standards required by the state. But because of the importance of your job as an educator, you will have to go that extra mile.
I’d like to leave you with some general advice before I go. One, don’t focus on educating your students to overcome the odds. The most common question I get is “What helped you beat the odds? You have and incredible story!”. If someone has to beat odds, that means the system is not fair. So instead, let’s focus on changing the odds. Let’s educate and empower our students to change the odds.
Take risks. As Michael Jordan said, you miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take. The intelligence to succeed is important, but the guts to fail is more important. There are instances where I only got it right because I got it wrong the first time. Our educational system is not working millions of students. You can be a cog in the broken system, or you could be the brave soul who tries to fix the machine.
Finally, embrace the struggle. You will not become the beautiful butterfly unless you’re the caterpillar who goes into the cocoon. Your career will be difficult. But the end result will be nothing less than beautiful. Don’t give up on your students. It only takes one person. That could be you.
Whenever you need strength, just draw on two words… the two most famous words associated with USC (Fight On). So the last thing I want to leave you all with is a poem I wrote for you and all future Trojan Educators. We will say it together. So when I say a sentence, I want you to respond by saying “Fight On”.
- When your patience is tested and all hope is gone.
- Until the world is where it needs to be for generations beyond.
- Although you’ll be given less, and expected to do more.
- Give your students the wings they need to soar.
Class of 2013, I look forward to the greatness that will come from you. I look forward to changing the world together. Reach out to me anytime you want to collaborate. The timing is perfect. We are the change the world has been desperately waiting on. I hope that your Trojan education has had as much as of an impact on you as it did on me. And on the count of three, let’s get a big FIGHT ON!
