Graduation Speech: Always Follow Your Dreams

I'd like to start out by saying that I am truly honored to speak here today and thank you to my class for choosing me.

From the day I first stepped into the learning world of Mrs. Jacobson's kindergarten class spotting tons of building blocks and crayons until the day I walked out of Mr. Fulton's class with memories of burning gummy bears and rubber corks stuck in his ceiling, the majority of my life has been consumed by school. I thought it would never end.

Do you know how long we've been in school? Thirteen years and 181 days for each year. That's 2,353 days or 14,118 hours or 847,080 minutes or 50,824,800 seconds. Good lord!!! That's a long time. Why would anyone do this? And half our class probably has scoliosis from teachers loading our backpacks with 75 pounds of books. That's hard to do. I think modern schooling is trying to rise a generation of Quazi Motos. But these 12 years of schooling have provided all of us with memories.

Growing up in the community of Murry we are left with a variety of good times and bad times. In intermediate school, you thought it was the end of the world if you were beat by a girl in tetherball or you'd start crying when you lost all your pogs in an intense pog tournament at one of our three recesses. The times that have left positive feelings towards my many years of schooling would have to include watching Mr. Patterson singing the Fig Newton jingle, or watching our Falcon football team destroy Lakewood this year in our Homecoming football game. Or what about the time when Coach Davis, our head basketball coach, went a whole game with his zipper being undone? But my fondest memory of Murry is remembering Mr. Johnson on my first day of freshman year. He had such a lovely full head of hair, but since the class of 2003 has came through, it has gotten a little thinner and a little grayer. These types of memories have shaped us and made us grow into the powerful young adults we are today. Now we're sitting here ready to tackle the challenges of the real world.

Graduation is not an end, but more of a rendezvous point from where we go our separate ways. The only thing that lies ahead is the future. Dreams and goals are what push us to be better and what have gotten us here.