Graduation Speech : Cape 350 / 500 Essay

In previous years, at my high school, we were given the opportunity to be present in an elementary school classroom. For an hour each day, a group of us would ride to the elementary school to help out teachers that needed an extra hand in regards to maintaining their classroom, and allowing them focus more on their lessons instead of housekeeping responsibilities. Being surrounded by elementary age students for these few years really helped me develop deep love and passion for teaching young children. Life set me on a different career path as I attended Georgia Tech last year in pursue of a Business Degree. Throughout the year, as I sat in my business classes, doing my best to pay attention, but I could just tell that my heart was not into all that the business world had to offer. All along, I knew that my heart belonged in the classroom, and after careful consideration, I decided to transfer to the University of North Georgia at Dahlonega. Education 2130, was the first education class I had the opportunity to take, and it required 20 hours of field experience. My first collegiate field experience was nothing short of enlightening, and allowed me to immerse and expand my knowledge in the education world.

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests, faculty, staff, graduates of the Class of 2012, families and friends.

Welcome fellow graduates and honored guests to the sixtieth anniversary of commencement for Stoll Community College. For those graduating, this day marks the culmination of a period of courage, commitment, and accomplishment. For these reasons, I am greatly honored to be chosen as student speaker for this outstanding class of graduates and I hope that my words will give a measure of justice to the significant event that has brought all of you here tonight. Hopefully, we will laugh a little, perhaps cry, and give some much-deserved praise.

Welcome students, parents and faculty. Well, this Senior Breakfast brings us one step closer to the event we've been anxiously awaiting. We've worked long and hard to get to this point. And yet, it seems like so little time has passed since we were middle schoolers, excited to move on with our lives and enter high school.

I did not get to know many of you. So, I cannot be certain of how you feel, but, as for me, this year has been, by far, the most enjoyable and eye opening one of my high school career. Enjoyable because of the new, interesting friends I've made and of the fun times I've had, and eye opening because of my being forced to look towards the future. Not just day dreaming and imagining about the rest of my life, but finally having to sit down and make some definite decisions concerning it. For me and many of you, colleges have had to be applied for and decided on and scholarships filled out. Some of you have been looking into vocational schools or the military, while others will be going straight into the work force. Whatever your case may be,

The third E is for Essential. Imagine a world where everyone built himself into someone who was essential to his family, neighborhood, or a group of otherwise lonely people. Martin Luther King was a hero because he was essential to a suffering nation. He had another piece of advice that, when heeded, will make us all essential members of any group. He said "Everyone can be great because everyone can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to have your subject and your verb agree. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love." If you do nothing else, serve others with love and grace, and you will be an essential part of our world.

After four years, we are finally gathered on the steps of what we thought we'd never come to. We are graduating, finally shedding the familiar and embarking on a world of "what's-next?"

Students in honors classes often have many stereotypes that follow them around. The students are labeled as the ‘smart’ kids, they are assumed to know how to do assignments with ease, teased (usually in a kind matter) about having to achieve that 100% on a test, and it is assumed that the classes are quite boring since the students must be focused on their studies. Being in the class with an honors class proved some of said stereotypes false and others true. If this class had any representation of the rest of 10th grade honors classes, then it can be said that honors students help themselves learn by creating an environment that helps them become excited to be in class.

When I was in high school I had one goal, I would graduate top of my class and go to the University of Florida for pre-medicine, then onto their medical school. I never considered that I would want anything else, so I went to a specialty high school that would allow me to specialize in Biomedical sciences(STEM) and never even thought about the possibility of a life other than the one I had so precisely planned out for myself. When my nephews were born my sophomore year all of my priorities changed. I cared more about hearing their first words than attending my BioMed classes, and more about going to mommy and me days, than spending a day in the clinic working on beat up football players. I became so entranced with their little growing personalities that I shoved my goals to a back burner. By the time graduation rolled around I wasn 't failing by any means but my dreams of being valedictorian were long gone, and I felt like I needed to find a whole new life plan instead of trying to get back to the old one.

Over the last few years of high school I feel like I changed in a positive way because in the beginning of my freshmen year of high school, I didn’t really think of how much my grades would affect my chances of graduating and going to college. I didn’t think I would make it this far and it didn’t matter to me because dropping out and getting a GED seemed like an easy way out for me at the time. But I realized that life could be hard out there. If you can just finish school, work on getting your diploma and maybe go to college and the real world and all you’ll have is GED that gets you little job opportunities when study for what you’d want to do for a career. Every time I felt discouraged, I told my teachers “Hey, I don’t think I can do this. I give up”. They made sure I got my work turned in on time to my class, because those teachers cared about my education, and at the end of the day when school is over and I’m going home, I think about all the homework I have to do and tests I have to study for.

I was able to obtain and review my school FCAT scores and components from the 2013-2014 school year. We have yet to receive our FSA breakdowns. The scores we received from the FSA was just 10th grade pass or fail. Reviewing the 2013-2014 FCAT scores and components reading produced the lowest scores for this particular school year. I must say that even though reading produced the lowest scores for that school year with an overall reading readiness component score of 85. This was 9-point increase from the previous year, which was a 76. This shows that our students are college ready and prepared to take both the SAT and the ACT test.

It has been said that the best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up. But as I reminisce about our years together at Lafayette, I realize it takes so much more to attain your dreams. Struggles, victories, joys, sorrows, understandings, confusions, these conscious experiences have paved the way for us to be here tonight, leading us to the realization of our dreams.

To begin my educational journey I wouldn’t really think it was a lot until further I got into school with a lot of things. Elementary was easy for me, I only got one F. I have been upset about it but never knew about it because my mom never showed me my grades until I was older. Which it didn’t really matter to me at that time when I saw them then because it had already passed. Junior High I started to slack off I didn’t want to do anything, of course I had to if I didn’t I would fail my classes and not move on to the next grade. Then High school started I would say I did alright, but I definitely could’ve done better.

Hayes glanced at the poster of the newly opened school. The school had been closed all summer to make way for new renovations to the classrooms in order to make them more technologically advanced for the newcomers. There were some buildings that were still under construction, but most of the main buildings had been finished to reopen to the students.

High school is a very memorable time of every person’s life. The older we get, the more we realize that we are who we are because of that special place and special people around us who are not a part of our lives anymore. We and our classmates have had a unique set of shared experiences with each other and these shared memories often binds us forever. This motivated me to organize a high school reunion for all my old class and relive o experiences once again by just getting together, laughing and sharing those memories.