Abby Phelan, Class of 2025 Treasurer
Good afternoon everyone. My name is Abby Phelan and I have served as the Class of 2025 class treasurer for the past four years. Today I have the privilege of announcing the Class of 2025 faculty graduation speaker. This person has made an impact on countless students’ lives both in her classroom and beyond.
This teacher is characterized by her overwhelming kindness and positive energy that she brings to school everyday. She makes her students feel excited to learn, regardless of what the topic might be. Beyond her classroom, this teacher serves as advisor to Student Government and the Forum (the Wilton High School newspaper). Whether you see her walking through the hallways or sitting in her classroom, students and teachers know her door is always open to make meaningful connections about their lives both inside and outside of school.
I was so fortunate to have this teacher in my sophomore year, and one thing I will never forget about her class is the sense of community she built where every student truly felt valued. I am excited and honored to welcome Dr. Harvey to the stage.
Dr. Kristina Harvey
Class of 2025, thank you so much for the honor of sharing this moment with you. What a four years we have had. We started off with masks and screens, and we are ending with a cellphone-free school and an influx of artificial intelligence. Rest assured that I’m not going to use this moment to share my opinion on AI in the English classroom, I can hear a collective sigh of relief from over there.
Rather, I want to focus on what true, authentic intelligence is, and how you, the Class of 2025, embody that, and why you should never press a button or click on a link when you have the chance to think for yourself or to lean into the uncertainty of a new experience, or to seize the opportunity to talk to another person in person.
I have spent four years watching you grow and change and think and do silly things and cry and laugh and all those other subtle, intangible, transient, messy moments of humanness. True intelligence lives in that chaos. It is built through resilience and curiosity and spontaneity and kindness and humor and gratitude. The spontaneous interactions that we have all shared during the past four years cannot be replicated or fabricated in a chat bot. I don’t even know if that’s correct grammar, but you guys know better than I do. There is an unscripted quality to true intelligence.
The most important part of real intelligence is living inside the chaotic, discordant noise of critical discourse, of working things out, of disagreeing but still listening, of coming to a common ground, of struggling together rather than hiding behind a ghostly blue light.
There are many elements that define our humanness, but I’m going to focus on two. I had seven, but I’m going to focus on two that define this class that cannot be found in the realm of artificial intelligence. They are resilience and kindness. Let’s start with resilience and end with kindness, because that’s always the way to end anyway.
So resilience: you came in on the heels of a pandemic lockdown with half your faces masked and your spirits dampened. Eventually, you remembered how to lean into the chaotic complexity of life. People quite often turn to AI to answer the complicated questions, to ease the anxiety that comes with not knowing something. Sure, uncertainty is uncomfortable, but that is where creativity lies, where critical thinking grows, where imagination takes flight.
To be resilient is to be a critical reader of the world. Lean in, ask questions, struggle for the answer. That’s okay. True intelligence is a mix of your heart, your successes, your failures, your learned experiences and the endless surprises of life. We didn’t know this [rain] was going to happen, and we all showed up. That’s true intelligence.
Don’t deny yourself the ‘A-ha!’ moment that comes with struggle and work. You’re going into the world, and you will meet new people. There’s no button to push on their foreheads to get a brief synopsis of their lives. Sure, it can be nerve wracking to be vulnerable, to ask for help, to not know what is coming next, but that is part of the richness of life. This is what makes you stronger.
You need to practice. Practice asking questions, practice working things out, practice talking to people of different perspectives. My UConn class, you know who you are, constantly reminded me of the importance of critical thinking and of talking to and with people of different perspectives. Bring the heat to your conversations, sure, but listen being challenged to think develops resilience.
Don’t always go to a screen to figure something out. Some things are unexplainable, and we need to live with the uncomfortable itchiness of uncertainty. It’s not easy, but you are strong. You can do hard things. The space between two people is a powerful place of learning, often more powerful than the space between your face and a screen. Don’t sacrifice one for the other.
Kindness — let’s talk about kindness. Shall we think about it? Why do you go to concerts? Why do you spend the money and energy to stand in the heat or in the rain in a crowded stadium? Why do you go see Taylor Swift, or go to the GOV ball, or Zach Bryan or Luke Bryan — I can never keep the two apart. You’ve got to be present with others to share in the moment in that experience.
You’re excited and curious and want to be a part of something. You want to be part of a community. Kindness thrives in community. Meanness thrives in anonymity. As Skyler said, we have one precious life. Don’t waste it on cruelty. Spend it on kindness. Kindness is a powerful gift. It lifts you up and it lifts others up. It doesn’t have to be a grand gesture. It can be small, but it has to be practiced in both giving and receiving it.
Life is going to hit you hard at some point, and you will feel its sharp edges. So you need to build your resilience, which can be found in cultivating a community of kindness. At some point, you will want to reach out a hand and feel someone holding you up. So in fact, do me a favor. Take the hand of the person sitting next to you. You in the stands as well, if you feel comfortable, take everybody’s hands, hold each other’s hands, feel the connection, feel the love that brought us all here. (I knew you would love that — it’s such a Harvey move.) Think of the countless acts of kindness and selflessness that got you here.
Commencement is powerful because we all show up to bear witness and to share a moment in your lives. It’s the bonds we make in real time, face to face that matter. It’s the shared space, the shared laugh, the shared experience of loss and support. Showing up, to all of you, is an act of kindness, an act of authentic intelligence.
So look around, all of us. We are all together without our screens in the shared space to celebrate this moment, the real, extraordinary, original moment of commencing, of putting a period at the end of one chapter and turning the page to the next blank sheet. (You knew I was going to throw in an English teacher metaphor) All of it stretching out into the glorious uncertainty of the unscripted human dynamic. There’s no button to push, no keystroke, no certainty of what comes next.
We do know that we have the ability to love deeply, to think critically, to look for those spontaneous moments that no one can predict, and we can always, always choose to be kind.
Family and friends, look at these faces pointed toward the future. This is what intelligence looks like. It is with so much love that I send you out into the extraordinary unknown. You are connected. You are loved. You are strong, you are courageous. Practice kindness and come back and visit — but please don’t use AI to write me an email, please, God, or don’t show up with some 360 hologram avatar thing. I want to see you in person. I want to see your faces. Come see all of us in person. And let us know what that uncertain, exciting, unpredictable future has in store for you.
In the words of Mrs. Rinaldi, another person of true intelligence, be good, be kind, be brave. Go onward with all the love we carry for you in our hearts, Congratulations, Class of 2025.