A message to the graduates...

[masterninja66]

I have been at my current workplace for four and a half years, which is pretty long for a foreign teacher in Japan. For the last three years, I have been officially a member of the same "team" of teachers, meaning I've been helping supervise the same class of students from admission until graduation

Comments

Advice

[anonymous]

Experience brings wisdom, which is what has brought the changes of the past 20 years.
For all of us some of the best lessons are learned the hard way in spite of good advice having been given.
Polonius was no doubt advising from his experience, as any good father should do for his children, and what wise elders often do for impulsive youth.
Although I sometimes wondered at the time of my philosophizing to my children if any of it was sinking in, I have been rewarded many times through the years with evidence that most of it did. But some was probably learned the hard way.

Your English teacher may have been overlooking an important point; not embarrassing oneself is a worthy goal, a lesson that some resist learning.

Dark Horse

[calamityjon]

Well ... the advice Polonius gives to Laertes is all good advice, objectively speaking, but keep in mind that Polonious is a fuckin' dope; he's portrayed as either not understanding the advice he gives or having no faith in it, or at the very least giving it only because he's a man who believes in regimented social behavior it's expected of him to give all that advice. He's expected to be bursting with wise aphorisms, so he blurts out a bunch randomly in lieu of giving his son anything of real value.

Polonious is, after all, the guy who says "Brevity is the soul of wit" and then fluffs his own conclusion by having to add "And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes", who advises his son on good behavior but then spends spies after him to insure it, advises the usurper Claudius and hectors Hamlet, and gets offed behind the drapes.

So yes, out-of-context, it's all good advice. In-context, it's either nonsensical or faithless...

[anonymous]

Why bother digging a musty old bard for your message to the graduates. I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Plastics.

Vale,

Anonymous