Lauren Huser – “Just Keep Swimming”
Good morning Dr. Keen, school board members, administrators, teachers, family, and friends. Thank you all for sharing this amazing moment with us. No matter how far or how little you traveled your presence means something to at least one of us and we truly mean that. Plus, you must be one of our top five most important people because we were only allowed five tickets and you were one of them!
My mom and dad are part of my group of most important people. So after some encouragement from them, I began this speech doing what any decent student would do. I stayed up watching a movie, in my case Finding Nemo, until about midnight the night before it was due and then started to write my first draft. We’ve all been in that boat before. Finding Nemo did inspire me though because it conveys a message that underlines not only high school, but life in general; just keep swimming. Persevere. Just like Marlin pushed through a colony of jellyfish in order to save his son, we’ve all had to push through a colony of people in order to get to class on time. High school is a journey; one that can seem long and treacherous like crossing an entire ocean, but today we have arrived at our own 42 Wallaby Way, Sydney. We have officially crossed an ocean. We have persevered.
Looking closesly at Finding Nemo, I found so many characters and events that parallel our high school experience. I saw our teachers and coaches in the little turtle, Squirt. There was an unavoidable resemblence in the movie when Squirt was instructing Marlin and Dory on how to exit the EAC, East Australian Current, and Marlin turns to Dory and cluelessly says, “It’s like he’s trying to speak to me, I know it. Say the first thing again.” Yeah, I was Marlin at several points in my high school career; for example, learning how to find the area on a graph using integrals in calculus, or trying to decipher what my teacher was saying to me in Spanish, or trying to figure out the way light bends with different lenses in physics. All of our teachers have at one point pushed us off the turtle in order to challenge us so that we may get to where we need to go. They knew that we could speak an entire class period in only Spanish, that we could design our own lab experiments to determine the rate of photosynthesis in biology, or that one more long practice could be the deciding factor between winning and losing the next game. Just as Squirt knew that Marlin and Dory could find Nemo.
Nemo himself represents the four challenging years of high school. When Nemo was trying to be cool by touching the butt, I mean boat, that’s us our freshman year! We were still new to the high school life so we tried to impress our friends by doing things that now seem silly. We jammed out to Tik Tok by Kesha, Down by Jay Sean, and Party in the USA by Miley Cyrus. We were awkward and shy, wearing clothing that we’d now be glad to get rid of. Our sophomore year corresponds to Nemo being accepted into the tank’s club and crossing the ring of fire. It was the year that we were more confident and we were more included in the activities that went on around the school because we had a better feel of what high school life was really like. That year, the athletic cheers were more familiar, and we were able to go from the top of the bleachers, to the middle of the bleachers at football games. We went to movies like The Social Network, Despicable Me, and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1. Nemo swimming into the filter is like our junior year. It’s a long and challenging year. We were now considered upperclassmen, with harder classes and more responsibility. For many of us, this was the first year of driving alone without a permit. Having a car, (or going out with friends without having to be picked up by a parent) was our first taste of freedom. Junior year was also the year that AP classes became a big part of our study schedules. Many of us learned how to fail and to be ok with failing that year, as long as we were willing to work hard and to try again, just as Nemo did. Senior year is when Nemo is back at school and acts like he’s got the whole ocean figured out. It was our time to shine, to leave a lasting impression on Westfield High School, and I think we did just that. We demonstrated school pride and spirit. Our homecoming game was rained out, but we allowed the celebration to continue within the walls of the intermediate school; staying late until the game was called, and returning the next day to cheer on the ROCKS once more. We were known as the competetors, winning Powderpuff Junior year and Senior year. We showed our sense of humor at prom, having a prom queen and a prom drag queen, and we illustrated our compassion by raising money for Cystic Fibrosis at Mr.Westfield and for The American Cancer Society at Relay for Life.
My fellow classmates, at this moment, we feel as if we’ve crossed the entire ocean just to be here today. We have made friendships that will last a lifetime, because you will not only remember the challenges you had to swim through in order to reach this memorable day, but who you swam through them with. In Finding Nemo Dory is just as memorable as the entire journey itself. We have swum through challenges, not over them, with administrators, counselors, teachers, coaches, family, and friends, all acting as our guides to get us to this very place. After today we will be crossing over to other oceans, starting on other journeys, but at this moment we have made it, to P. Sherman 42 Wallaby Way, Sydney. So congratulations class of 2013. We made it!
Tolu Odimayomi – “Step by Step.”
Welcome ladies and gentlemen. Hopefully you know why we are all gathered here today. If not, the caps and gowns might be a little hint. We are here to celebrate the great accomplishments of Westfield High School’s class of 2013. Some of you may look down at these seats and see a friend or sibling. Others of you see a child or grandchild. Do you see the mature young adults that sit before you today? Or do you still see the kid in the back seat who would constantly be talking about the first thing that popped into his or her head? Or the child who could not stop touching everything during a shopping trip? Yeah that was me! However you see us today, I hope you realize that so many steps were taken for us to get where we are today. On behalf of all of my classmates I thank you for all the hard work, patience, and support that you put in to get us through childhood and to this point. I am standing before my class today because I want to encourage them with a few simple thoughts and reflections. Now classmates, I ask you to look at all the steps that brought us here. When I think back the game “Mother May I…” comes to mind.
For those of you not familiar with the game these are the basic rules behind it: a group of kids have the goal to make it to a certain spot. They try to do this by asking their “mother” if they may take ex amount of steps forward. The one chosen to be the “mother” then gets to grant or deny a child a step forward. Our lives seemed a lot like this game when we were younger. We had to ask the adults in our lives permission to do something and then wait for an answer. I can remember having to ask for my parent’s permission before I could do anything, like go to a football game or hang out with friends. At the time it didn’t seem like having so many restrictions was the best thing, but those rules are what kept use on a straight path. Because, let’s admit it, without them we would have gone a little crazy. While there were times when it was best for us to stay put, we can’t forget that there were moments when we were able to step forward. Some of the things we encountered were challenges, like those middle school finals that were worth ten percent of our grade (tough right?); transitioning from forty five minute classes to seventy minute classes; and learning how to balance school, and practice, and work, and rehearsal, and clubs. Trust us when we say it wasn’t always easy (to audience). We tried our best to pull it off though.
There have been challenges to overcome during the past thirteen years, but there have been other experiences that where extremely memorable. You might remember the crazy icepocalypse of 2011, packing the auditorium for TNL, the crazy haircuts courtesy of the men’s soccer and swim teams, winning best homecoming float sophomore year and powder-puff junior year. These are only some of the moments leading up to this moment we’ve shared together as a class, and we’ve had the support of those who care about us through them all. That little game of “Mother May I” looks like it turned out pretty well, doesn’t it?
Somewhere in between then and now, however, the name of the game changed to “red light, green light” instead. What do I mean by this? It’s now on our own shoulders to decide when to stay and when to go. Remember, though, that we don’t have to go at this alone. Look beside you, in front of you, all around you. We can always be confident in knowing that we will have someone to turn to and lean on as we head into the future. Yes, we may not have any idea what we’re getting ourselves into, and we might end up falling flat on our faces sometimes. That’s okay, though, because with all the skills we’ve acquired from our teachers, parents, and loved ones, we’ll be able to get back up and like the great Walt Disney said, keep moving forward.
So far life has been a culmination of all the steps we have taken up until this point and now we have the opportunity to take steps down a new path. Class of 2013, we have been together these past four years; we have walked down the same hallways, carved our footprints into the Brand New carpet, and left our marks on this school and each other. I am proud to have been a part of that. As I look toward the future, I imagine a game of Red Rover. We must never be afraid to run at the wall because as they say, when God closes a door, somewhere he opens a window. There will always be an opening, a window into your future. I hope the view from all of your windows is exactly what you want them to be. Thank you class of 2013 and good luck in all that you do.
Senior Class President Steven Johnson – “Last Words.”
“True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.”
That’s from Kurt Vonnegut, and I’m gonna quote him again in this speech, because like most bookish Hoosier freshmen I can’t get enough of him.
Emotions today, I think, are mixed. Some of us are anxious, some are restless—but mostly we’re ready. Whatever you think about Westfield—that it ends too late in the year, that the building has the temperature consistency of a Hot Pocket—there are facts about it we can’t dismiss:
We’re leaving a top-4% nationally-ranked high school, in one of the richest cities of one of the richest counties of one of the richest countries in the world. And we’re doing it as probably the most successful class to come out of Westfield. This isn’t to say we won’t have trouble—you’ll still have your heart broken, you’ll still feel the angst of an empty bank account, and some of us will actually put our lives on the line to ensure that our kids get these same opportunities—but we are uniquely positioned to affect the world in a way that very, very few people get the chance to.
You’re magnificent, intelligent individuals, and you’ve won the genetic lottery. Don’t let that slip away.
You’re going to have the opportunity, wherever you go, of molding yourself into an entirely different person if you really want to. And “we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” Like I pretend to be sarcastic and self-absorbed because I think it’s a funny persona to people who know me—then I realized that’s probably what most sarcastic and self-absorbed people say. With that in mind, you have every option in front of you now—you can agitate your Republican parents by becoming an artist on food stamps, or disappoint your Democratic parents and become an investment banker. You can become a lover, a fighter, a renegade, a thinker, a doer. Or you could be bigger than any of those things.
And compared to all that, high school may seem like a joke long worn out. But you’ll suddenly come to a point (hopefully now) where you realize that all those books you read, those theorems and formulae you memorized in the past twelve years, weren’t just learned for their own sake—every instant you learned changed the structure of your brain in its own way, and those marginal changes make you who you are today. Your mind is a window for every conscious moment you ever experience—each word you read, friendship you make, and person you love opens that window wider, cleans up the glass. The chunk of matter in your skull that sorts out Sartre and Pythagoras is the same matter that loves, the same that laughs, the same that tells you when you’ve found someone you should never let go of. You can only appreciate what you have when you know what else is out there—and what’s out there is seven billion times bigger than everything you experience.
So: wherever you’re going—college, the military, or the workforce—you’re there to learn. Because life is all about learning. And learning is all about empathy, and empathy is all about relationships. Every relationship you build can be beautiful. To repurpose Mr. Vonnegut’s words, that’s a terrifying power. So remember what he said in jest, but do it seriously:
Terrify me.
Thank you.