Commencement Speech

Appreciate the little things

At some point in our lives, we have all been thrown a bone or been given some slack you could say, although it may not seem like it. The thing about high school is that sometimes it could be so terrible, our minds tend to get clouded and we forget about the good things because believe it or not there, are some. Almost everyone graduating this year has made a special connection with someone in this school that impacted their life, it could be a friendship or relationship. We as students don’t realize some of the good because it’s clouded by such bad things like (Simile) English (sorry Mr.Young) or Star Testing. Thankfully at our school we have great teachers that have helped us through the year and sacrificed a lot to make us pass, because contrary to what you may think, teachers don’t want you to fail. Just take Mr. Young for example. Did you know that he actually goes home and has a family? Students wouldn’t know because we like to turn every English assignment in at the last minute then bug him about it the entire day, including myself. But i’ll assure you all teachers do things that they don’t want to, but they do it for us. 

I would like to give you guys a comparison to something I’m really passionate about, and compare it to school. If you know me, you know I love baseball. I play it year round basically. I talk about it all the time, probably too much for some people. If you don’t know, our team is having an amazing season this year, our team looks great, we have a lot to look forward to. But if you don’t know, baseball is the most mentally tough sport out there. Just a fun fact, if you get 3 hits out of 10 at-bats. It’s considered good. So this sport can be tricky. Any baseball player can attest to that. The thing about baseball is one inning you could have an amazing hit and make great plays, and then the next inning, you have 2 errors and a strikeout. Everyone has their innings, one could be good or bad, but you have to make the most of them. What’s so similar between these 2 things is some days you could feel like the worst student or athlete ever, and then the next day you’d feel like Chipper Jones or a Harvard law student, so you never know what you’re going to get. 

Now that I think back, our 4 years of high school were always way too crazy. Freshman year started out good, we were freshmen so we just had school, laughed, and lived. But then covid hit. The next thing I know I’m sitting at an old desk in my house with earbuds in listening to Mr. Anderson talked about the geography of Europe, don’t get me wrong I love anything history or geography, but god that was awful. I mean I couldn’t even play baseball without my dad because everyone was separated because of lockdowns. So Online school every day was awful. Plus my dad worked from home so I couldn’t play video games during school without him knowing I wasn’t paying attention to my class. Sophomore year was online for 3 days, in school 2 days. That also sucked. Every co-curricular involved wearing masks, and in school of course. Teachers weren’t happy, some students liked it, some didn’t, it was your preference, it was hard to learn, by February everyone was checked out. So teachers then started hating us. Maybe not hating but close enough. Finally, everything started to mellow out, by mid junior year mask mandates in school were lifted even though half the student didn’t follow them most of the time. But let’s not forget about the pipes bursting and flooding our school. Hopefully, our poor science and math teachers get their rooms back. 

The reason I say this is we didn’t get here, to graduation, from lack of effort. Our 4 years of school were the most messed up high school years that anyone has had in a long time. It was never a cakewalk, we all worked hard to be here. So in all, I wish all of you the best of luck afterward, and whatever you do, be successful.

“Graduation” by uonottingham is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.