May 26, 2016
This year the Senior Class selected Aziz Yazdi ‘16 to give the Senior Farewell.
“Well, this is it. Graduation day. This is the day our parents have been pushing us towards for the past seventeen to nineteen years. This is the day our siblings have been eagerly awaiting so they can finally steal our stuff when we leave. This is the day that I personally have fallen asleep on for the past three years (These huge elaborate ceremonies put me to sleep better than your average anesthesiologist). I know that many of you sitting here in the cramped confines of these plastic folding chairs are mortified that the next few minutes entail a monotonous droning speech from a boring student speaker. Well, I’m not one of those speakers, and this isn’t one of those speeches. I’m not just going to spend my time up here glorifying our class and the school. I came up here to speak for the class, so I’m going to speak reality. In this class we have all had our problems. But, that’s OK! No place is without its challenges. At every turn at this school we’ve faced adversity, and we’ve become better people for it.
A great example of self improvement coming from difficult times can be found in the boys varsity soccer team our freshman year. Our class, as freshmen, made up more than seventy percent of that team that year, and after a great year of eighth grade soccer, we were excited to get started with some high school sports. We met with our coach, Mr. White, who also happens to be the speaker our class selected this year, and we drew up a plan of intense training so that our physical conditioning would be unparalleled in the Black Forest League. Unfortunately this plan backfired and left us with the highest rate of injuries the team had ever seen. Almost all of the upperclassmen, and many of the underclassmen were unable to play due to leg and hip injuries. But being the optimistic cheerful people you all know we are, we would take on schools that had all senior teams while we were at a two man disadvantage. Needless to say this left us with one of the worst season records in CSS history. We lost, quite literally, every game we played with one exception, where we tied. But this EPIC failure (and it was indeed EPIC) pushed us to become better soccer players. We started attending informal kick arounds to improve our skills on the field. Often times we’d bring a ball to lunch and just mess around with it. Some of us even joined club soccer in an attempt to further hone our abilities. This endless training paid off in dividends. This year we had the best record in almost a decade at CSS for boys soccer, and if we hadn’t been utterly destroyed our freshman year we never would’ve had the will to improve.
Speaking of experiencing pain from poor planning… AP courses…. Man… really should’ve thought those through. I remember at the end of sophomore year, when we all obtained our first AP nominations I had received nearly every nomination that a sophomore could possibly get. I remember being astounded by the possibilities, there were so many options. I also, rather regretfully, remember going to Dr. Longo and requesting that I take three APs and 90 min FST. I immediately got that look like, “Is he serious? OH GOD, he’s serious!” I was promptly sat down by our experienced teachers as they explained to me the extreme difficulty of taking 4 AP level courses simultaneously. But did I balk in the face of superior experience and reason! NO! It couldn’t possibly that hard, right? Right?!? Now there are some of you, as parents that don’t understand what I mean when I talk about the difficulty of these classes. They are the types of classes that’ll give you moments that you’ll always remember, where you’ll wake up slightly concussed at two in the morning from falling asleep mid study session and slamming your head full force into the keyboard of your computer. It goes without saying that when everyone in the class enthusiastically signed up for as many APs or AP equivalents as we could, we bit off slightly more than we could chew… 4-5 hours of sleep a night became the norm, grades dropped to all time lows, and seppuku threats reached their highest levels in almost a century. Upwards of 5 hours of homework a night was standard, and nightly complaints from parents who claim they “never see you anymore” ceaselessly bounced through our houses. But even as we struggled through our course overloads we bettered ourselves. People who never had to study, or never cared to study were suddenly working together every night to prepare for upcoming exams. We started to learn how to better manage our time and prioritize assignments. If we hadn’t subjected ourselves to the torture of APs we wouldn’t have learned the critical skills we’re going to need to survive in college.
Now, as I’m sure you all know, our class is incredibly enthusiastic when it comes to school spirit activities, but it wasn’t always that way. If you can imagine it, there was a time where the whole class couldn’t have cared less about that kind of thing. We consistently ignored forum spirit weeks, and performed lethargically in dodgeball and pep rallies. We had never won a class point cup award before. This last year after being sick and tired of our constant losses we rose up and participated, consistently winning dodgeball tournaments, and other class events. That is why, this year, when the TOTALLY UNMODIFIED AND COMPLETELY LEGITIMATE class cup points, calculated by our class’s vice president Jake, came through we won by a margin of over one hundred and twenty points.
Now, I’ve been joking around a lot, but this is it. We are just about done. This is among our final days here. So let’s get serious. Soon most of us will be going off to college. Some of us nearby, some of us far away, all of us in new territory. We’re going to be facing unfamiliar challenges: harder classes, different classmates, and new responsibilities. But just like our time at CSS I know we can face them, and be better off for it. So, as I wrap this up, I want to give some advice to those in grades below us: Never back down in the face of adversity, because the Darkest moments create the brightest lights. Thank you.”
