I have to go to a LOT of highschool graduations for my job.
Honestly there's only about 5-6 speeches and they get around.

I don't blame the kids that speak, I know they have a lot of pressure and their speech sometimes have to take a backseat to finals, prom, college prep etc.

That's why I'll forgive the: definition of a word speech, the inside joke you think your whole graduating class will get but nobody does but you talk about it the whole time speech, the pretentious highschool literature quoting speech.

But the one I can't forgive is from faculty, every year I hear a variant of it from at least one school, I call it "We know better than you dumb kids and it's funny" speech.

It's usually something like "Get ready cause in the real world your boss doesn't care if you find yourself, if you think (hard teacher) is hard, wait until you work in a corporate setting"

Basically the bottom line is "hey all that positive stuff you learned in scho0l? It's all a fantasy, put on this hard hat and get in the mines"

It turns an opportunity to inspire graduates and help them channel that optimism these people seem to hate so much and instead turn it into a hackey, usually plagiarized and passed off as their own, try at making the parents laugh at their kids.

Todays was the worst though, it was obviously stolen and said it was his own (I've read the same thing as a stupid forward someone sent me) and then added this weird pro-military thing to the end.

Start righting good speeches and remember it's an opportunity to inspire not a chance to grind your old guy ax.

It can be done, my favorite I heard was was "all your fads are passing so don't cling to them, but who you are and the hope you bring needs to surpass your parents and show us you can do so much better in the world, don't let it fade out like your ipods will"