Valedictorian Speech

Many Roads, Many Choices

We are the one hundred and first class to graduate from Lenoir City High School. That means that one hundred others valedictorians’ have struggled as I have to come up with a speech and say something new, fresh, and interesting. Over the past few months, the class of 2009 has been overwhelmed with decisions to make. How many graduation announcements to buy? Where to go to college? Can I get a job somewhere? What to wear to prom? Should I wear clothes under my graduation gown?

As a class, we are leaving behind the safety as security we have always known. Many of us has lived and gone to school with each other since kindergarten while others joined us throughout our school years. For the last twelve years, our routine from August to May has always been the same. Wake up, go to School, Extra-Curricular Activities, Homework. This phase of our lives is now over.

Many us are leaving our friends behind. Although our friendships may be physically separated due to college or job choices, hopefully, we’ll be able to maintain our friendships. And even if our friendships drift apart, we will always have the memories we had made in high school – the sports we played, the games we watched, the tricks we pulled, and the trouble we should have gotten caught for…..

Robert Frost’s most famous poem starts with “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both”. The poem is about making choices, and some choices are easy and some are hard. Each of us must evaluate the paths available and select our own path, even if it means taking the road less traveled. Or, for some of us, where no path exists, we will forge ahead, and make our own road.

Up until this point, we’ve had many to help guide us in making the right choices, our parents and families, teachers, coaches, religions leaders, and more. But, we can no longer expect our parents to be there to guide us at every turn. We are now fully responsible for our actions. Our decisions are our own.

We start this next phase of our lives with a clean slate. The decisions after this moment will play a direct role in defining who we are and the world around us. What we must remember is that we can define our future through decisions we make over the next few years. Very often our paths will diverge; we will be faced with two paths. Sometimes our decisions will lead us in ways we never imagined. We must move on and live our lives. Despite how we try to control our world, we can never predict the exact results of our actions. In the end, all that really matter is that we work hard and trust ourselves. In the immortal worlds of Winston Churchill “Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential.”

Scholarship

As most people know scholarships are a great way to pay for college. I understand it is there money to giveaway but if your going to give out a scholarship at least have a better essay question than:

Why are you applying for this scholarship?
Why do you want to receive this scholarship?
What is your principle motivation for applying for this scholarship?

I hate these questions. They are dumb, and all have the same answer for everyone. People applying for scholarships WANT THE MONEY. Why else would people spend time applying for the scholarship.

Long Awaited Trebuchet

After have one stressful week, two major test and three projects due in one week. I survived. My groups trebuchet worked perfectly. It out threw all the boy’s trebuchets by a huge amount. Our max range was 70 feet and the project only required it to throw 22 feet.
Here are a couple of pics.

School, School, and More School

Well, I have been very busy the last couple of weeks. I have had to finish several scholarship applications. Call all my parents of the youth soccer team I am coaching, build a trebuchet for physics class and attempt to finish my homework every night.

I finally had time to pick my blog giveaway winner. The winner is KrazyFashion. I will be mailing her her prize tommarrow.

Check back soon, becasue I will be posting pictures of my trebuchet soon.

I'm Done

Well, the last two days have been kind of hectic I have had two projects to do for school. They were both very research intensive. My paper for physics took me about 4 hours. I am not sure why though. For those who are intrested my paper was on the Steppe Eagle and the Airbus 380. Though I am not sure how it relates to physics, but it was intresting. My other assignment was a brochure on Lupus for Biology II. I like that assignment more because I got to be creative with the design.

Let see, if you remember the other day I said my school had messed up my class rank. I am a straight A student (I have never made a B in high school) and before the fall semester I was tied with one other person for number 1. So when I went from tied for number 1 to number 9 and my grades didn't drop (though my oppent made two B's). Well, they made a mistake and they finally fixed it so right now as long as I don't screw up I will be valevictorian (note to self learn to spell Valevictorian).

Note - your first comment on this post counts as an entry in my blog giveaway. Click here for more details.

Good and Bad

Today, started out as a fairly bad day. I went out to my car and go to it to go to school and it wouldn’t start. It was 7:50 and I didn’t have time to jump start it. I had this strange feeling that I should have grab the gate key out of my car but decided not to. So I had my mother drive me to school, I got there on time but I did not get to go to Calculus tutoring. First block was fun, it is Senior Physics and there are 12 students in the class. After going over the homework we had a lecture on Newton’s third law of motion. Then, we had held a experiment on how the elevators motion can change the perceived weight of items as it moves. In order to do this we had to fit 13 people in our school elevator which is fairly old and not that big but the scale the teacher brought wouldn’t work. The teacher went back to the class room, and we decide to hide from him in the empty chemistry class room. The teacher came back and we were given away by the giggling boys well mostly one boy. We finished the experiment, class ended, and it started to snow.
A couple of scholarship deadlines are coming up and I went into the guidance officer to have my guidance counselor fill out some forms. One of the forms needed my class rank on it. She pulls of my class rank and starts to right ninth on the form, this immediately stand out to me because the previous semester I had been tied for first with one other boy. I got all A’s and he ended the semester with a B. So I wanted to know how someone managed to beat me when I have NEVER made a B in my high school career. She starts to look at it and realizes that they have to check the class rankings because they might have made a mistake. So now I can’t turn in the forms for scholarships until they strained it out.
Now for the best part of the day, as I said earlier that it started to snow all though Calculus it was snowing and it was collecting. We were all getting excited and hoping that we would get out. So when our principle got on the intercom and starts to make an announcement and we all start packing out stuff up because he dismisses school. This was good and bad. Great because of no school, but I was stuck at the school because I didn’t have a car. Thankfully my friend took me home and we baby sat her little brother. We had a great snowball fight with her little brother and his cousin.
So today was over all an ok day.

Another Snow Day

Well, I didn’t get a chance to take pictures of my car in a ditch, because my dad’s way home he drove it out of the ditch. After he got home and changed, I got snow driving lessons and I am now fairly comfortable driving up and down our driveway (it’s a mile long and all gravel). Last night I got a text message from one of my friends stating that there was no school again. I was fairly surprised. The first thing I did was get on the internet and check to see if it was true. I trust my friend but as the saying goes seeing is believing.
Here are some more snow pictures

This is an intresting stump I found.

A bluebird house surroned by snow.

The half-frozen pond.

A intresting looking tree covered in snow.

The day in the life of a teenager – Snow Day

8:00 a.m. – Wake-up
8:01 a.m. – Go back to sleep
9:00 a.m. – Watch TV and take a nap
10:45 a.m. – I decide to go for a walk outside and take pictures of the snow. The dog, Maggie, goes with me, in reality I should say that we go walking in the same place. I walk around and she just ran all over and ate snow.
12:00 p.m. – My mom and I decide to go out for lunch. We have a mile long gravel driveway and I want to drive so I could get some experience driving in the snow.
12:05 p.m. – I am driving up the big hill and my car slides into the ditch.
12:20 p.m. – I walk home to get my mom’s car so I can go pick my mother up.
12:30 p.m. – I call my father and tell him I slid my car into the ditch and he laughed at me.

Here are some pictures from my walk, I will post pictures of my car tomorrow.

This is a picture of my house - it is really a log cabin in the middle of the woods.

This is snow stuck to a tree, I thought it looked cool.

This is the 1 acre pond, it is mostly frozen over.

This is my dog Maggie, she in NOT a Dalmation she is an Enlgish Setter.

This is my chicken Annabelle on our deck. She is the sole suvivor of the animal that raided my chicken house. She on lives on the front porch and eats cat food.

School

School started back today. I had my usual amount of running around to get everything ready, but I couldn’t find my calculator (which sucks). I got to school on time (just barely). A great way semester is to have a test in physics to start the day. Calculus was as hard as ever. I still don’t understand limits and this is the second semester of calculus. Biology II is going to be everything I expected it to be. I get to have my favorite teacher and it is going to be a fun class. My last class of the day is peer tutoring. I get to help other students and get to do my own homework.

Heres a radom picture from my trip to the zoo over the summer. I love meerkats, they are so cute.