Tag: social change

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The Rallying For Student’s I’ve Witnessed Working Customer Service

To all of my loyal readers out there, I’m sorry I’ve been a little MIA the last few weeks. 

I’ve been working from home for my company, Honors Graduation, a graduation outfitters store. April and May are very busy for them with graduations all over the United States going on. This year, despite graduations being canceled all over the nation, they are still as busy as ever. I wanted to share a few things I’ve been able to witness as a customer service rep for them over the last few weeks. 

Parents ordering their student’s graduation items because schools are not handing them out with graduation being canceled. 

Schools are still ordering cords, caps, tassels, and more for students to keep. They are also paying extra to have them shipped to individual students so that they don’t have to go out to the schools to pick up the items. 

Grandparents, parents, club advisors, teachers, and schools have ordered embroidered custom stoles for their graduates who can’t have graduation this year. 

Parents working hard to put on virtual graduations for their kids, with family and friends tuning in via Zoom. 

Schools setting up virtual graduations via Zoom. 

Paying extra in shipping costs because schools have been moving graduation dates around. 

Parents buying all of the graduation essentials so that their kids can take graduation pictures. 

So many custom stoles ordered to provide graduates with as much recognition as one can give at this time. 

Overall, working for this company I have seen first hand how hard everyone is working to recognize our graduates during this uncertain time. Working customer service is obviously full of unhappy customers with a problem- that is why customer service exists! But on those occasions where someone tells me their heartwarming story of their college graduate who worked so hard to achieve this goal, and how they just want to purchase a cap and gown so that she can have something to remember this by. 

When someone thanks us for being open during this crazy time so that they can still have their needs met. 

I know times are crazy and uncertain right now, but I can’t help but to slow down myself and see everyone rally together. It’s incredible. 

How have you witnessed a greater collaboration of a society? Whether on a larger scale or in a smaller, community scale? How have you shown your graduate recognition during this time?

If you are or know of a graduate that could use some encouragement during this time, check out my open letter to college graduates part one and part two.

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Let’s Preserve the Complexity of Our Icons

A phrase that stood out to me most from reading “Lies My Teacher Told Me” was:

“We seem to feel that a person like Helen Keller can be an inspiration only so long as she remains uncontroversial, one-dimensional. We don’t want complicated icons.”

This was the chapter where I also learned that Helen Keller was a socialist — and indeed, that it was so much a part of her adult life, that it’s truly shocking that most of us never learn this fact in our history books.

I own one of the “Value Tales” biographies of Helen Keller, the very theme of which is “The Value of Determination.” While I certainly want my kids to be inspired by her determination, I also want them to learn about her complex activism and beliefs, and to form their own conclusions. She wrote:

“I had once believed that we were all masters of our fate — that we could mould our lives into any form we pleased…I had overcome deafness and blindness sufficiently to be happy, and I supposed that anyone could come out victorious if he threw himself valiantly into life’s struggle. But as I went more and more about the country I learned that I had spoken with assurance on a subject I knew little about. I forgot that I owed my success partly to the advantages of my birth and environment…Now, however, I learned that the power to rise in the world is not within the reach of everyone.”

It is truly an injustice to our students to assert that people can only be inspirational if they are essentially perfect.

Unjust because it creates a false sense of unattainable achievement (“only those kinds of saint-like people make a difference”).

Unjust because it conveys that we don’t trust them with complicated truths.

Unjust because it’s the kind of rhetoric that fuels partisan politics and the idea that people are only worthwhile if their views 100% align with our own.

Let’s trust our students enough to trust them with truth. To create spaces where they can sort through difficult topics. To encourage them to form their own conclusions and realize that all people are messy, with strengths and failings. Let’s preserve the complexity of our icons.

featured image: DeathToTheStockPhoto