Graduation Speech: The Climb :: Graduation Speech, Commencement Address

Good evening family, friends, teachers and fellow graduates. This special night marks our achievement over the past thirteen years. Tonight we come to the top of a mountain in our lives and look ahead to the numerous more to come. It seems like just yesterday we were eighth graders in middle school, wishing we were twelfth graders in high school. (You have to remember that back then we didn't know if a freshman meant you were in twelfth grade or if a junior meant you were in ninth.) We've definitely come a long way to be where we are today. Being students at Wilson, "The School of Pride," has helped us all with our climb over Mt. Education. Learning the basics to climb Mt. Education didn't just start in high school; it began a long, long time ago. Our first experience with the climb started out in our six years of base camp, formally known as elementary school. The next stage in our climb was when we were able to climb the part of the mountain with the gentle slope. The smooth slope of the mountain took us a whole three years to accomplish. As you have probably guessed, the gentle slope was middle school. These were the steps we took to get to our third stage in our climb of reaching the peak of Mt. Education, also known as high school. It all began at freshmen orientation when we learned just how much control we would have over our educations here at Wilson. We also discovered that we not only would be choosing the classes we took, but the teachers as well. Next, from a chant that was yelled at us from the seniors in our first pep assembly, we learned that seniors do rule the school. During the pep assemblies we also learned how to show our school pride and spirit. Overall, in our first year here at CHS we encountered many faculty members and students that would help us on our journey up the mountain of education. Throughout our years of high school we have perfected our methods of climbing Mt. Education through experiencing many first times together. To start things off there was the first Friday night varsity football game at the stadium. We also had dances that were actually cool like homecomings and tolos. We even experienced many new things in the classroom such as writing research papers, taking extremely difficult tests and learning a foreign language.