Thank you Chancellor Hathaway. It is a great honor and a pleasure to be here today to share with you some few thoughts on teaching and learning.

This semester, for the first time in a good many years, I gave my students tests–a mid-term and a final exam. While giving tests is normal for many teachers, we writing teachers prefer ten pound, fifty source, two hundred footnote research papers and fat, end-of-semester portfolios.

The class in which I gave those exams was a big one, a class that spent the first few weeks of the semester wandering the campus like some Lost Tribe of Goldilocks in search of a room. Shuffling from place to place, building to building, this room too hot, this one too big, this one way too little, we wound up, at last, in an antiquated theater style classroom with bad lights, hideous purple chairs, not even one left handed writing surface, and a single small blackboard. About halfway through the semester, somebody came in and ripped out six or seven rows of seats and left us staring at rusty spots and bolt holes in the ugly tile floor, hearing the cavernous echoes of our voices in a now mostly empty room.

Sometimes education is an adventure.

Still, it was a good semester because, sitting in that strange room, watching my students sweat through those two exams and then reading what they had written reminded me that education, even in the most routine semester is always an adventure. And that reminded me that most of what we hear and some of what we think about education doesn't tell us very much about what teachers and students really do when they gather around a subject to learn.

It is easy, for example, to believe that education is about teachers giving things to you, our students–facts, figures, deep ideas, answers to life's hard questions. In this way of thinking, teachers are the great gift givers and students are the gift receivers. But in fact, in our university, where you are often older, more experienced, and certainly more dedicated than students in other places, teachers, if they are open to it, receive as much as they give.

As teachers, we give you our best and dearest friends–Plato, Aristotle, Mahatma Ghandi, Sojourner Truth, Albert Einstein, Jacque Derrida, Abraham Lincoln, Marie Curie, Martin Luther King, Virginia Woolf. These friends of ours, in the words they have written and spoken, give their great gifts–ideas, concepts, tools with which to build whatever can be imagined. They open doors and usher you into places you never dreamed existed, places that shape, challenge, and change you. In this way, our gifts root themselves deep into your lives where they grow, multiply, and will, I promise you, bear great and surprising fruit.

As students, you return our gifts, not a tenth part, but tenfold. You have given us the magic of one thought connected to another to create something new in the world. You have given us the pleasure of seeing your experiments work to the fifth decimal point, the joy of helping you win a fellowship or a scholarship, and the satisfaction of writing a recommendation for your perfect job, which you will begin Monday morning. When you come to our offices so excited about the material we are learning together that you can't wait until class begins, when your research papers are as good as the ones that get published in our best journals, when your essays take our breath away, I tell you, we're like children on Christmas morning. And someday, years from now, when we read or hear that you have done some great thing, that you successfully defended your dissertation or that you were the first choice for that fat promotion, we'll remember that we once learned together, and in that memory, we will receive still one more small, precious package.

When such gifts pass back and forth, the lines between teachers and learners, between teachers and students get blurred. At times they disappear, and we find ourselves, teachers, students, learners, engaged not in the simple acts of reading, writing, and arithmetic, but in the complicated acts of celebrating our differences, dreaming a better world, and negotiating agreements that allow us to build strong, caring communities in and out of the classroom. Somewhere along the way, if teaching and learning work, we come to understand that the giving of such incredible gifts can happen only in the presence of love and respect. No syllabus or course description will ever mention this, but all teachers and learners know that it is the very heart of what we do together.

And here, this morning, in thisd–are I say sacred?–space, we, teachers and learners, parents and children, husbands and wives, faculty and administrators, friends, all of us have converged to give our greatest gift–the honoring of those who have earned this day. Graduates, you will soon step up to this small stage, hear your names, and take your degrees, some of you doctorates, some masters, many more associates and baccalaureates. When you take that scroll and the hand of the one who gives it, think for a moment of all you have learned and all you have taught; think of sacrifice and magic; think of those whose lives have been and will be changed by who you are, what you know, and who you will become in the years that lie ahead of you; think of the work and of the costs; think of those who played a part; and most of all, think of love and of respect, without which no gift can be given or received.

As a representative of all the teachers you have taught along your way to this moment, I congratulate you, and I thank you most sincerely for allowing us the honor of being a part of this communal celebrating, dreaming, and negotiating process we call education. May that process continue through every hour of your lives.