This speech was co-authored by Lauren Flynn’11.
Otto: Almost Graduates, family and friends, during this week let us take a moment to consider what a diploma really signifies. To parents, bosses and picture frames this piece of paper represents your formal education: not just four, but 15 years of academic achievement. Most of us have written a Russian novel’s worth of papers and given a soap opera season’s worth of presentations.
Flynn: But this diploma is every ounce a document of your informal education. My INFORMAL EDUCATION? you ask. I saw nothing about this in the course catalog or on my transcript. No, that is because your informal education is the growing and learning that happened far from the classroom. It could take place anywhere, but for Elise and me, key conversations, discussions and ideas developed somewhere between the cumin and canola oil, the sketchy pepper mills and moldy dish racks, in a cultural epicenter known as THE KITCHEN.
Otto: For me, the busy non-chef, cooking meant time and money: two things I am particularly stingy with. I was always looking to cut corners: revamping my housemates discarded leftovers and, when I did cook, crock-potting batches of lentils and cabbage that would last weeks. Then I received an assignment for my expository writing class: try something new.
Flynn: Unrelenting obligations are nothing new — but senior year sweats pungent urgency. Running swim practice, filling out job applications and arguing with the Registrar requires a substantial amount of premium fuel. By food standards, I’m not a “regular” kind of girl.
Otto: I decided to make cheese. I read up, and with the help of several friends and a bottle of vegetarian rennet, I made a curd and then carefully placed it outside in a bandanna to drain.
Flynn: The kitchen of 433 Alder, like the lives of the seniors that utilize it, was built upon the principles of carefully orchestrated chaos. Six p.m. was a five-ring culinary circus of housemates, partners, and a black cat sharing limited time, resources, and space. We called this acrobatic challenge EXTREME DINNER. The goals? Extirpate hunger. Avoid catastrophe.
Otto: Unfortunately, I wasn’t ready for the responsibility of cheese-making. I forgot about my cheese, and left it for a week in the pouring rain. When I retrieved the pungent mush days later, I resisted the urge to throw it away. After all, I still had to write a paper about it.
Flynn: Success in Extreme Dinner is nothing short of a physical and social miracle, but the result has been the pride and joy of my college career. During Extreme Dinner we bantered and gossiped over the sounds of clattering pans, sizzling onions, and the drone of the microwave. We jockeyed for prime stove top real estate, squabbled with overzealous tasters, and jealously eyed ingredients. Suggestions and criticisms flowed more liberally than olive oil, and were stemmed and soothed with jokes, friendly ribbing, and music. It is the culmination of EXTREME DINNER, a dance defined by tension, tempered with patience, rescued by laughter.
Otto: So instead of tossing my cheese I returned to the books, this round’s topic: sour dairy. Sour milk is really just buttermilk, and milk is really just cheese. I decided to use my sour cheese for … a facial? An acne treatment? Some part of a trashy April Fool’s joke? NO … At 11:30 p.m., on a Thursday night, much to the surprise and delight of my housemates, I pulled out of the oven a piping hot batch of perfectly edible buttermilk cinnamon rolls.
Flynn: Extreme Dinner is about working together. It’s about accomplishing individual goals in concert with your equally striving peers, and celebrating those accomplishments together, as a community.
Otto: The purpose of this anecdote is not only to impress you with my liberal arts ingenuity, but to emphasize the critical role of transformations in informal education. At times at Whitman I have felt like a smelly lumpy ricotta, when all I wanted to be was an aged sharp cheddar. However, when I let go of the cheese I wanted to be and embraced the cheese I was, I began to change, rise into a pan of beautiful cream cheese-covered cinnamon rolls.
Flynn: The kitchens of our college life have been the crossroads of individual development and transformation. But individual development is nothing without community. Cinnamon roles are not meant to be eaten alone.
Otto: Thus failure and disappointment are followed with an openness to new ideas. I have come to believe that success does not mean fulfilling goals. It means that when faced with disaster or challenge we will permit ourselves to change, to develop, to transform –– even if it means some uncomfortable time in the oven.
