Acorn Award Speech

                                      Acorn Speech

Thank you. I wish to thank the Trustees of the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education for making this event possible. Also, I wish to thank Dr. Michael McCall for KCTCS’s participation in this program.  It is an honor to address such an august body. However, I really owe this award and other awards that I have received to students such as Mr. Robert Sutton who is sitting at my table; I owe it to former students such as Karen Kaye who could not be here today because she is teaching at Indiana University Southeast in New Albany, and to the many students that I have taught in my twenty-eight years of teaching at Jefferson. Our people are the true wealth of our uncommon commonwealth. Also, I owe this award to my mother who was my first teacher and my father who bought me books and encouraged me from first grade through graduate school. And last but not least, I owe this award to my excellent colleagues such as Dr. Anne Kearney who nominated me and team taught with me, and to Dr. Tony Newberry would asked me to take over teaching the African American History class when he left to become the academic dean of Southeast Community College.

Body: Standing here today and receiving this award is a dream come true. Yet I would be remiss if I did not say that this dream and so many other dreams that have come true for me have all been made possible by my receiving a good education. This is a journey that begun many years ago on the front porch of a shotgun house in Louisville’s Clifton neighborhood. I was about six years old and my mother pulled switch from a large maple tree in the front yard and handed me a book. She said: “Now David Lee, you are going to learn to read.” Her no nonsense approach must have worked for I have been reading ever since. While I did not have affluence, I had something that was more valuable: I had two hard working and loving parents who were determined that my life would be better than theirs and that I would have the education that was denied them in the Jim Crow South. Moreover they inculcated in me a love both of books and a love of learning. When my father got paid on Fridays, he would stop at the old W.K. Stewart Bookstore on Fourth Street in downtown Louisville and either buys me a book or a map. As an only child crippled by asthma, I spent countless happy hours reading books, playing with maps and building model ships and airplanes. It is strange but I never knew we were poor until I went to college and met genuinely rich kids. For me, personally, education has been the key that has opened so many doors and taken me to places beyond my wildest dreams. My dreams are not over and I hope to cross another item off my bucket list next summer by going to Paris. I am reminded of the words of one of my favorite poets Langston Hughes: “Hold fast to dreams, for life without dreams is like a broken winged bird that cannot fly.”

As a teacher I am proud of the many talented and dedicated people that I work with daily. Our goal as  community college teachers is to help students to make their dreams come true. Our goal is to help them to achieve their career goals. Some will become nurses, some will become X-ray technicians, some will transfer to four year institutions, and a few will even come back and teach for with us. Yet even as I speak our state needs more college educated people and more people with technical training. There are no throw away people. It is less expensive to educate a man than it is to incarcerate him. We need for all of our citizens to reach their potential. We need jobs with dignity that pay a living wage.

 

  Far too many of our young people in both urban ghettos and rural ghettos have their talents wasted. Far too many our young people are like the the lines in Thomas Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard: “ Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.” It is our goal to ensure that everyone in this great Commonwealth has the opportunity of become a productive, gainfully employed, taxpaying citizen. This is our hope, this is our mission.

Thank you ladies and gentlemen.