Whatever Works For You – Commencement Speech

I’m not gonna stand up here and pretend I know what I’m doing, let’s get that out of the way. For one, I’m barely a senior, if you didn’t know, this is only my third year here. There’s a whole mess there, I started in Libby Tozier and Carrie Ricker like some of you guys did, then went to a school in Harpswell for a bit. I looked up the school to try and find some fun facts or something to put in here, and apparently they shut down due to being “a financially fragile organization” which, having attended, doesn’t surprise me. 

Anyway, halfway through that year, my mom decided I wasn’t getting a good education there. We had a running joke where my parents would ask what I did every day after school, and I would respond “chess and frisbee.” That was funny the first couple times, then my parents started to realize that it wasn’t just a joke, I was genuinely just playing chess and frisbee most of the time and never learned anything academic. (I did learn to play ultimate frisbee, though.) 

After that mess, my mom decided to homeschool me for the rest of the year, which went about as well as you’d expect considering she had a full-time job and was not a teacher. That was where I learned to write code for the first time though. Thanks Khan Academy.

After that semester, I brought up the idea of online school, and ended up enrolling in a remote school called Maine Connections Academy. This was actually a really good school in my opinion, and it worked pretty well since they had online school figured out before COVID, so the teachers didn’t need to learn to use zoom every class. 

Eventually, after 9th grade at MCA, my parents started to realize I wasn’t doing all of my work. It may have had something to do with the fact that earlier that year I bought a gaming pc and was doing my schoolwork on that. Turns out it’s hard to pretend to care about social studies when I have Snowrunner two clicks away. My parents told me I had two options: get my *word I can’t use* together, or go back to public school. I ended up choosing public school, and decided to redo 9th grade at Oak Hill so I could be in the same grade as the very few people I still knew from Carrie Ricker. Now I don’t talk to any of them anymore for various reasons… but hey, at least I’m graduating a year early because of it. 

Long story short, I haven’t been here as long as most other seniors, and because of that I’ve mostly kept to myself the last three years. I sat in the corner of whatever senior class I happened to be in, listened to Green Day or Hinder and mostly only talked when I got called on or if I had something important to add. This is the point where a lot of speeches will go “and I regretted always being so quiet” or something along those lines, but I don’t really regret anything. I’ve always been pretty quiet except for around my close friends, and I don’t see anything wrong with that. You see all these speeches that say you should “be yourself” and “be social” but those are two different things. I’m perfectly content contributing an answer to Connections and keeping to myself the rest of the class. I tend to prefer to keep my schoolwork and my friends seperate anyway. 

My point is, you don’t need to be outgoing and social to make it through life. It’s fine to sit in the corner, as long as Mr. Young doesn’t catch you watching YouTube when you’re 6 quizzes behind on Membean.

If you’re the type of person who’s social, and knows the entire grade, great. If you’re like me and just kinda sit there, that’s great too. Just don’t pretend to be extroverted when you’re not, but if you are? Lean into it. 

I guess what I’m trying to say is just do whatever works for you, whether that means sitting in the front row, the back corner, or somewhere in between. Thank you.

“Graduation Cake Guy” by CarbonNYC [in SF!] is licensed under CC BY 2.0.