Happy Graduation to All, and to All a Good Life

First of all, I would like to thank all of the teachers, faculty, and family for coming to celebrate our journey into the next level of our lives. And I thank them for the 3 years of education I was able to achieve from this school. I say 3 years because our first year was spent hiding behind windows and protecting our faces behind masks. Or joining a Zoom call at 7:30 that I would wake up at 10 am and still be in.

Many of us graduates would probably agree that out of the 12 grades we fought through, grade 9 was the worst of them. But I think we should instead be using the pandemic as a reason why we are a stronger graduating class.

The fact that we were able to essentially miss an entire year of school as a class and still have this many graduates standing before us should show the resilience and strength we’ve acquired by this unforeseen event. It should stand to show that there will be times in our future where something unexpected happens and we’ll feel like our life is crumbling down, yet we find a way to move past it and make something of ourselves.

Not to say this didn’t make our schoolwork more challenging, I’m sure it burned a hole in Mr. Young’s heart every time we forgot to add a page number to our MLA format or make sure our formal writing doesn’t have contradictions. Or every time Mr. TB would almost lose it because we didn’t understand basic arithmetic. But nonetheless, they did their very best job to make sure we had the best education possible leaving Oak Hill.

The point of high school is to teach us how to be prepared to handle the real world once we become the age of majority. I guess you could say Covid was the most real-world event that we could’ve experienced in high school. Although now that I am the age of majority, I wish I could go back and tell my 3rd-grade self to enjoy it as long as it lasts because the older you get, the harder life is going to get. But it’s funny how we can never perceive how well we truly have it until we experience something worse. I’m sure another 10 years from now I will be thinking back to my 18-year-old self and wondering why he was so worried about nominal matters.

But in the end it doesn’t overly matter what happened in our high school years, what matters now is that we take what we learned and apply it to our future. This piece of paper will serve as a reason to everyone else we meet in our lives that we too have just as equal of an opportunity as anyone else. So to myself and the rest of the class of 2024, I wish us all the best of the greatness that is yet to come, thank you.

“The Graduates” by Game of EPL5 & LUMIX G20/F1.7 is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.