Graduation Speech : My Class Work

Some of the goals this year is to get good grades on most of the subjects. What I will do to accomplish that is I will listen in class and study for more than one day. Something I’ve done right I want to continue doing is to read a lot of books and writing excellent essays. I also want to do better in Social Studies. I will do this by studying history facts every week.

Although, there are times in my two years here in RHAM Middle School where things did get hard, but I still worked hard and tried my best and did everything to be best ability. I made sure I worked hard in all my subjects and I made sure I kept all my grades up even during sports. There are many things that I have accomplished in my middle school year, and there are many things that I am proud of. One of my accomplishments were having fantastic grades in all my subjects this year. In my seventh grade year I didn’t have really good grades, I guess because it was my first grade in middle school it was just stressful and nerve racking. My main goal this year was to try a lot harder than I did last year, stay focused on my school work inside school and out, and make sure to keep up my grades and have no C’s during any quarter

I started writing my first real essay in the Eighth grade, and I never knew why I was given such an awful task. I am a terrible English/Writing scholar and I never could comprehend the concept of writing. I put a lot of work and heart into my first essay, but that still didn’t get me the grade that I wanted. Needless to say I got a “D” on the essay. I was extremely disappointed in the grade I made and I wanted to reject writing all together, but that is not the kind of scholar I am, so I began my journey during my Eighth grade year to become a better writer. I had many academic goals that year, but my main goal was to excel on the English state writing test at the end of the year. The test would determine if I moved on to ninth grade English or if I would get placed in a pre-high school English program. To achieve my goals I knew that I was going to have to work hard not only on developing the papers I write, but also making sure they are grammatically correct, interesting, and that each story or essay gets the main point across as well.

As result of creating and implementing this artifact, I realized that the most effective lesson plans are those which initiate with the final assessment in mind. So, I applied a pre-test at the very beginning of my lessons with every different group I would be teaching to measure a starting point or the amount of pre-existing knowledge on the topics to be taught. Based on this, I planned the instruction to deliver and how to differentiate it.

During our lives, most of us have hated getting up early. Whether we as humans enjoy mornings or not, we’re always looking forward to that unforgettable day. That special is high school graduation for me. Graduation is a ceremony that recognizes students that have excelled through school. Graduation was one of the best days of my life, perhaps even better than the day that I started college. There is no other day like graduation where there comes this feeling of success, achievement, and excitement.

I agonized over writing this speech for a long time, because I felt like nothing I could say would make a difference, first because I don't know if what I could say would be good advice, and second because I don't know if advice about things like being true to yourself and setting goals and all that is actually helpful. How can I give advice that I can't even follow in my own life? And even if you are mesmerized for my two minutes, you would walk out of here and your life wouldn't be any different. Or maybe you'd be inspired for a day, and then forget. But still, the speech had to be written.

Christopher Columbus, reflecting on his voyage which led him to the discovery of America, said, "Following the light of the sun, we left the Old World." I am sure that after four years of high school, we have all formed our own opinion of Christopher Columbus - especially if you had Mrs. Powers - but whether you view him as a genocidal rogue or the first American Hero, I find his quote fitting for where we stand today.

My freshman year things took a turn for the worse, but these obstacles made me who I am today. On June 13th, 2012 my parents got a divorce. My dad was an alcoholic, bipolar, and abusive. While he was in rehab, my mother and I were allowed to stay in his house while we saved up for a place of our own. During the summer, I babysat and once school started I cleaned houses. However, March came and my dad graduated rehab. The house was set to foreclose in thirty days and my mom and I found an apartment, but her income alone was not enough. I withdrew from school my freshman year in March after I got my cast off (I broke my tibia tumbling February 1st) and planned to complete my courses through E2020 in the summer so I could help my immediate problem. I never knew to ask if the courses were NCAA approved. I was lead to believe they were accredited because the school was offering it. During the rest of March, April, and May I worked various odd jobs, such as cleaning and teaching tumbling/gymnastics, to help bring in income. I began the E2020 classes on campus in June 2013 and worked an evening shift at the local Sonic.

Good evening and welcome to the commencement ceremonies of the class of 2006. It has been a long journey, somewhere around 18 years, but we've finally reached the piece de resistance of our high school years.

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.

During high school a person typically meets a variety of new people. During my high school experience, I had the chance to meet a guy by the name Justin Okel. I first met Justin in middle school where we remained acquaintances for the next many years. I never really knew him. I had always thought he was the average kid in a happy middle class family. He never really gave anyone a reason not to believe that either. It wasn 't until midway through high school that I realized I didn 't even know him or his family at all. Over the past couple years I have been able to develop a great relationship with him as I began to know the real side of him that no one else really knew until recently. Justin suffered extremely harsh circumstances during the years leading up to graduation. He was mentally abused, put on probation, and kicked out of his house; forced to graduate high school, and start College completely on his own. I had the opportunity to get in touch with him so he could share some of his story.

When I started this semester I expected college to be like highschool but harder. I was wrong there are many things that I did not expect, and though I did alright this semester I plan on improving a great deal next semester. Next semester I plan on improving how much work I put into academics, how I plan on spending my money, and how I plan on improving my personal life.

Do you believe that you have accomplished something truly noteworthy in my class this year? * (Yes)

English class seemed to be the most dreadful to take within school. Writing essays for most of my grade in a class is not what I was looking forward too. When I entered college I knew that it would be one of many challenging classes I would have to take. Starting from the lowest English class to moving on up, the writing assignments became longer and more thought out. The time came when I got into this class that I knew more work was going to have to be put into essays and thus brought out what I had not seen before in my work progress.