To all my seniors...

To all my seniors:

To all of you beautiful weirdos, I hope that you had a fantastic first day of your senior year. I hope that you helped someone who needed it, rekindled friendships with people you hadn’t seen all summer, and got a little geeky over school supplies (yes, I know that last one probably did not happen, but I can dream.).

I hope you all know how special it was to teach all of you your freshman year. You were my first class of freshman, and you are all so dear to me. You came into my class scared to death (a record I hold no small amount of pride for being able to accomplish), and stepped out of my class (never too far away from stopping in to say hello) a little more knowledgeable and polished than you came before. This was a team effort. I watched some of you really struggle, but you made it… and now you’re seniors. If I were still your teacher, I’d try to teach you small lessons as we went through your last year, but since that is not the case, I wanted to make sure you knew a few things that will help you make it through your last year in secondary education:

1.)  You absolutely do not know everything; stop strutting already. I know you. I know EXACTLY how you walked around those halls today, and you need to just cut it out. Be on time, be respectful of other people’s time… because you will absolutely never be able to predict when you are going to need someone’s help, and you want to make sure you’ve given a little help to others in the process.

2.)  Work together. I said “work” not “cheat”; you know how I feel about cheating. Help each other out. The same kids I saw working together to make sure their friends passed their AP classes late into the night at Whataburger are the same people you are now. Except you can drive… and that terrifies me.

3.)  Be nicer than you have to be. I’m telling you, and hear me now and believe me later, repairing things later is hard work. It’s much easier to do it right the first time. Be nicer than you should be, and people will ever so grateful.

4.)  Avoid being lazy. I know it’s tough, and you’re going to want to coast, but you will have full on panic attacks (I see it every year) because you assume someone is going to figure it out for you. No. No one is going to figure out for you whether you signed up for your SAT, applied to college, sent in the check for graduation fees, or remembered to take health so that you can graduate. (You still need health to graduate, right? I don’t even want to think about your concept of public health and hygiene.)

5.)  I said stop strutting, but you should absolutely be a leader. Humility is a hard lesson, and most of us learn it MANY times over. Be a humble leader by helping those who do not ask for it when they need it most and (here’s the hard part), TAKE NO CREDIT FOR IT. That’s tough, because we all want people to know our goodness, but that’s not the point of doing good. Remember that.

6.)  Read a book of your own choice. Let me just say that you will not have to know the 200 literary terms I taught you to make it in life. That’s just, like, a fact. You will however, find that there are a lot of people your age reading all over the country for pleasure. You won’t feel the backlash of it five years after college, but you will the NEXT five years after college. If you travel to New York, be careful; everyone on the east coast is a book snob because they all read on trains…even the teenagers.

So pick up a book and learn something and remember that there are so, so many kids (in this country, no less) that would kill or die for a library. I know some of them. You have a beautiful library and Mrs. Vyoral is just waiting for you to ask for her help. So take advantage of that resource and make yourself a little smarter than you have to be. You’ll be so glad you did.

7.)  Remember the little people. At the end of this year, you get to honor some educators who changed your life for the better. You did not teach yourself to read. You did not learn Algebra II on your own. Your handwriting is questionable, so that might be the only thing I’d believe that you taught yourself.

Say thank you and say it often. You don’t get to honor every teacher, but you can say thank you to most of them. Go visit your kindergarten teacher this year when you get out for early dismissal. Walk over to the middle school and say hi to a coach that taught you integrity and commitment. Stop in to say hello to your freshman World Geography teacher. Most importantly, remember that it isn’t just your teachers you have to thank for who you became at school; you have a plethora of people who work hard to make school run for you (as much as you might hate it from time to time). They are your custodians, your cafeteria workers, your campus police, and your administrators. They get very little thanks, and they absolutely deserve it.

8.) Be interesting. I know that it’s cool to shop at all the same places, and listen to all the same stuff… but please, please do not be afraid to be interesting. That does not mean you have to throw out your new clothes or “only download indie bands”. (Gross. Newsflash: that isn’t interesting; it’s predictable. It makes you just as boring as everyone else who is a slave to their wardrobe and money.) Interesting means thinking outside the box. Ask questions. Read MULTIPLE articles on something you find interesting and ask yourself why you believe/agree with something. Watch a TED talks or listen to a great podcast every now and then. Try new food that sounds questionable. Ask people their opinions about real things and then really listen. Digest ideas and then create some of your own. Those are the interesting people, the ones who aren’t afraid to be different.

Above all, show integrity, and remember: Those who make excuses are rarely excused.

I love you, I love you, I love you. Have a fantastic year and make me so proud. J