I don’t know when you left your TA job, but this writing looks more like a reflection about your own status, instead of the future of those collegians in your school.

NO, it is not wordy at all. It is your monologue. You might have been too tired of all those ridiculous ceremonies, which highlighted important figures invited as guest speakers. We always know you as a blunt guy; therefore this “dramatic monologue” is quite understandable.

Rituals! Rituals! Rituals! Human beings depend on rituals to conform their lifestyles and social values. No one should blame these rituals too much. As you said, there is a touch of sense and sensibility in the commencement, which I agree without doubt.

About &quotcommencement&quot, I accidentally saw a piece of stationery on which some paragraphs were typed with a typewriter. The date can be traced back to when I worked as a TA at Feng Chia University.
But did I write this article? I am in doubt. I mean, how could I have been once so wordy? I would like to ask for your opinion.
The article is as the following:
Random Remarks on Commencement
May 16, 1989

Seven and a score of commencements have been held on this campus.
Regardless of whatever mixed feelings people may have, ecstasy or melancholy, the
“staged” departure ceremony must be once again performed on June the twenty-sixth.

I do not intend to make satiric comments; however, commencement is the time
to display sense and sensibility, coupled with sobriety or insanity. For illustration, the following anecdote may make my connotation clear: Coming back from his midsummer night madness, a graduate, with his still high spirit and exhausted body,
might emerge from the back rows in the ceremony hall. He is too tired to have deep
concentration upon the plots on the stage, although the ambience smells like what is in a medieval drama. Neither can he tell who the protagonist is—among those gorgeously attired VIP’s who are invited to give speeches. He is a little bit confused.
Then he begins recalling those boogie woogies at that graduation dancing party and bursts into laughter when he is almost on the verge of going berserk.

Actually some of the collegians “leave” campus before commencement. They
skip tough courses, they play truant from classes, and they walk out of academic asceticism. As to the aspect of their social life, these conceited epicureans, in fact, lead a forlorn life, isolated from true and amiable friendship, instructive instillation, and collective inculcation. All the phenomena reflect a fantasia of phobia for college life.

Commencement can be a monument for some other students. They run in the academic race with a good mileage and establish the mile stone high and grand. They are intelligent, broad-minded, dynamic stoics with basic virtues such as diligence, honesty, and decency. Nevertheless, the propensity of independent thinking and inquisitive spirit is attributed to their remarkable success in college life.

The flame trees are in bloom, and the departure must come, no matter how hard one holds on to what is destined to be left behind. Both easy-goers and workaholics are going to face whatever graduation means to them. Yet, it shows a good sense of magnitude if the connotation of commencement is taken into serious consideration. Certainly, it is not a full stop to one’s education, and we wish everyone who goes out with his diploma a blossomy prospect.