Death, Birth, and the Class of 2024

Andrew M.H. Alexander

Senior Dinner, The Nueva School

Friday, June 7th, 2024

A couple of you asked for shoutouts, so here you go:

Adam, Noor, Sam, Sid, Brynn, Isabella, Jaxon, Nicholas, Sebastian, Sofia

… do your self-evals.

September 9th, 2020.

You all remember that day.

That’s the day you woke up, and the sky wasn’t blue.

Your third week at the upper school, six months into a global pandemic, eight weeks before an election—and outside was orange.

For each of your previous fourteen years, the sun had been a reliable partner. Full spectrum, full illumination, proving the law of induction again and again.

But not that day.

That day, the sky was on fire.

Had you left the laser cutter running, or was the world ending?

Some years ago, a Southern writer in another millenarian age wrote of the mind-virus comorbid with the coming of the apocalypse. “There are no longer problems of the spirit,” he wrote. “There is only the question: When will I be blown up?”

Perhaps that’s how you felt, entering high school.

Your first year was on Zoom.

Do you remember? Or have you repressed those memories?

Cameras on, cameras off. Breakout rooms. Shaky drawings on digital whiteboards. Simultaneous chat streams. Seeing your teachers nearly get run over as they constructed chalk polygons with giant compasses in the middle of the street.

The math booster! An entire year of math, already compressed into a semester, compressed further into just six weeks.

Nueva travel week… via Zoom.

Can’t be inside, because of covid. Can’t be outside, because of wildfires. Born into a contradiction.

As time passed the fires subsided. Your knowledge grew, and so did your radius of travel. Virtual classes became hybrid classes. Spread across this very quad a lattice of hula hoops replaced your desk chair at home. Or perhaps your couch. Or perhaps your bed.

One mask minimum (that’s just the cover); two masks, even better.

You walked following arrows in the hallway, respecting borders made of masking tape, sticking to one side as if were the DMZ.

At first, trained technicians stuck q-tips up your nose. And then, over time, you stuck the q-tips up your nose.

Life began to regrow.

In 10th grade you traveled to Hawaii—your first time all together as a class.

You spent late nights with the Tormach. In the middle of robotics tournaments you watched gears break.

You discussed the intersectionality of cannibalism during seminars on the philosophy of consciousness.

You struggled with syntax errors in LaTeX and type errors in Rust. (Who knew a single parenthesis could cause such pain?)

Christmas morning, 7:30 am: Canvas comments. Senior sleepover, 1 am: pulling out the belt sander for emergency architectural refinishing.

You played chess games to spectators as rowdy as European soccer fans.

You ran a weekly journal club and presented on others’ research. You performed, and published, your own.

You published chapbooks of poetry. No New Yorker acceptances yet but it’s only a matter of time. (Get Lachlan’s signature in your yearbook!)

Last year you diffused throughout the US, and traveled to Minneapolis, Taos, Montana, Alaska, New York, and DC.

This year, you diffused further. You traveled to Italy, Ireland, Japan, Taiwan, Costa Rica, Bonaire, and Buenos Aires.

You phonebanked for public transit. You stared at the blinking lights of the Caltrain control center, hypnotized.

You took oral exams in algebraic topology.

You organized clubs devoted to the truth and beauty of the sandwich.

You produced, directed, and starred in Shakespeare plays. Hamlet, all black, the uncertain protagonist not making it to the end

You learned and forgot and learned and forgot and learned again the definition of a vector space.

You simulated California’s electric grid in a slew of spreadsheets. You bargained and bartered to avoid brownouts and make a buck

Starting your junior year, your first year fully on-campus fully un-masked, you used ChatGPT, and then Llama and Claude. You used them sometimes in ways that were licit, sometimes in ways that were illicit, but mostly in ways that were… uncertain.

I hope that during your time here, you’ve experienced what Faulkner calls “the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths … love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.”

In Barak and Mark’s classes, you’ve learned that some physicists speculate the universe is an endless series of expansions and contractions. Big Bang and Big Bust and Big Bang again and Big Bust again, over and over, perpetually.

In your history classes, you’ve re-enacted the Constitutional Convention, and the Civil War, and Reconstruction, and the New Deal. You’ve learned about the fundamental messiness of democracy and the messiness of our American project, and how easy it would have been for us to be different.

In your environmental studies classes, you’ve learned that the destructive power of a wildfire is only half its purpose. Forest fires burn, but they also cleanse. Up in Big Basin, near where you spent your senior year retreat, right now amidst the blackened earth, teal-green redwood shoots are springing up. Not despite the fire that raged the summer before your freshman year. But because of it.

Traveling through Yellowstone last year, our guide pointed out a hot spring where decades ago, a certain enzyme was discovered. That enzyme, she said, has subsequently become the basis for all crime scene forensics, all DNA testing, all modern molecular biology. (And even certain covid tests.) I turned around, to the dozen of you in the van, and asked, “How many of you have done a PCR?” Each of you raised your hand.

Those polymerase chain reactions you’ve done, up on the third floor, have involved cycles of hot and cold, hot and cold, hot and cold. The DNA doubles, and then doubles again, and again, and again.

Two to the x.

Exponential growth.

Until all reactant is consumed.

Four years ago, the exponential growth we spoke of was that of the novel coronavirus.

Now it is that of novel language models.

Now another election approaches.

When Kelly Poon asked me to give this talk, she said, “It can be about whatever you want. But make it normal? No poetry.”

Sebastian Rocha, when I ended our last class by cutting to black: “What? That’s it? No words of wisdom?!?”

So here’s two lines of T.S. Eliot.

“Not fare well,

“But fare forward, voyagers.”