Poetry as time capsule

Here's a poem for all my advanced degree-holding brothers and sisters:

He never was a silly little boy
Who whispered in the class or threw spit balls,
Or pulled the hair of silly little girls,
Or disobeyed in any way the laws
That made the school a place of decent order
Where books were read and sums were proven true
And paper maps that showed the land and water
Were held up as the real wide world to you.
Always, he kept his eyes upon his books:
And now he has grown to be a man
He is surprised that everywhere he looks
Life rolls in waves he cannot understand
And all the human world is vast and strange --
And quite beyond his Ph.D.'s small range.

That's Langston Hughes' poem "Ph.D." I jotted it down the summer after I graduated with my bachelor's degree, as I was looking for things to share with the students I was teaching in summer school as part of the five-week training institute for Teach For America. I thought it might have meaning to me someday. And now it does.