A few years ago, I had the privilege to meet a gentleman by the name of Dr. Kent Keith. In 1968, as a college student, he wrote ten so-called “paradoxical commandments” for student leaders that have since been quoted hundreds of times by many public speakers for their inspiration and encouragement to do the right thing in life, regardless of whether it’s the popular thing to do. This is what he wrote:

People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.
Love them anyway.

If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Do good anyway.

If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway.

The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway.

Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway.

The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds.
Think big anyway.

People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs.
Fight for a few underdogs anyway.

What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway.

People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.
Help people anyway.

Give the world the best you have and you’ll get kicked in the teeth.
Give the world the best you have anyway.

Class of 2009, as we depart from this theater today, we will begin a new chapter in our lives, and each of us will traverse down many different paths moving forward. Some of us will be going across the country or around the world to continue our education, while others of us will be going across the state or just staying local to do so. A few of us will instead join the armed forces or hit the ground running into the workforce.

But regardless of the direction that our path takes us, each one of us has the power and the opportunity to make a difference for others. We as a class have already contributed so much to our school and our community. Many of us have stepped up and donated blood through school blood drives to help save lives. Several students from this class stepped up and led the school in taking monumental steps to reduce our environmental footprint, from recycling our cans and bottles to aggressively lobbying for the installation of solar panels that will likely be installed on our campus very soon. Students from this class have helped promote awareness of the crisis in Darfur and led monumental efforts to raise money to help the people affected in that region, despite the daunting obstacle of a recession economy here at home. No adult asked us to take on these challenges and others, but we took the initiative and contributed our time and our efforts to make these happen. As you can see, Aragon has been a central part of the San Mateo community because of the qualities that we, the students of Aragon, have brought to make our school more than just a bunch of classrooms, graduation requirements, and homework.

My favorite quote comes from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and it says: “Every [person] must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of selfishness. This is the judgment. Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’” Each of us will now need to decide for ourselves what we want to do with our lives, and what we want our contribution to society to be. No one can hold our hands and give us the answers any longer. But if we each remember that we have the power, in our own unique way, to make a difference in the lives of others, then we will have truly become the change that we wish to see in the world.

Class of 2009, let us all commit ourselves to give the world the best that we have. And even if we get kicked in the teeth, let’s give the world the best we have anyway. Thank you.

I am having like major vertigo right now.

And who can blame me? Now that school is out, the homework is done (from now on, it’ll only be “dormwork,” I guess), the commitments are behind me, I’ve only really had the chance to dwell on the gravity of this week for the past few days. But today and tomorrow, May 2009, this is the time that I have been preparing for ever since I got started in school way back when.

I remember (only vaguely) twelve years ago, in my “graduation” from Kindergarten, when we were presented with a big oversized shirt that said 2009 on it. Boy, did that seem like a big number to be back then! I probably would have been only barely aware of it being the year 1997, much less the prospect of 2009 being anywhere close, but I still remember that. (As for where that shirt is, who knows?)
I remember nine and a half years ago, towards the end of 1999, when I was in the midst of third grade and everyone was talking about how it was the turn of the millennium (when they weren’t freaking out from the fake scare of a Y2K crisis), and under the direction of my third grade teacher, I made a time capsule that was to last for ten years. That time capsule still sits in the closet in my room in a special-edition Cheerios box (called “Millennios”), and I’ve never opened it. And I remember thinking about 2009 being the year that I would finish 12th grade–boy did that seem like such a big number! Only seven more months until 2010 comes and I get to crack open that time capsule.
I remember seven years ago, as my elementary school graduation approached in 2002, as I was thinking one day in the shower about the transition to middle school being near, but the transition to high school still feeling as far away as the planet Pluto (it was still a planet then) and college being in like the next galaxy. And four years ago as middle school’s graduation approached, I recalled that train of thought and considered how then it was high school that was right around the corner and college that was at the planet Pluto (it was STILL a planet then; it didn’t get demoted until August 2006!).

And now, I am here. My high school graduation is upon me. In two and a half months, I fly out to begin college at American University in Washington, D.C. — a place that I didn’t even know existed two years ago. These are my thoughts as a high school graduate. A mixture of excitement, awe, and dread all rolled into one, and yet I still know that even as I write this, my traditional last day of school post that I have written every year since sophomore year, I still haven’t fully internalized the feeling that it’s all over. This weekend, I am formally closing the book on thirteen years of hard work, wonderful and unique experiences, challenges, and so much more. And a new chapter begins.

But before I get much mushier, let me digress and talk a bit about this year, my senior year. Man, this year has been such a different experience than any of my prior three years in high school. I mean, they all had their unique qualities. Freshman year was a year of transition, moving from the semi-rigor of middle school into the much more intense rigor of high school, and finding out that no, i can’t do everything. There are limits. I got over-involved that year up to my breaking point, and had to pare a number of things off my schedule heading into sophomore year. I was much more academically focused during my sophomore year, but as you can tell from my year-end round-up that year, it was a very stressful year and I had a lot of upsetting and difficult experiences that I had to live through. My junior year was a much better year–still academically intensive, but I was able to amp up my extracurricular involvement a bit more and have some great outside-the-classroom experiences as well, like Sojourn to the Past, the music department’s China Tour, and Boys State. (Those latter two actually happened in the summer right after junior year, but who’s counting.)

But this year seemed to have a very different dynamic, one that did not feel as academically focused as the past three years. Or maybe to word that more accurately, the academic focus was a bit different, and one that was quite a bit more enjoyable. For one thing, my academic graduation requirements went down significantly; literally the only classes that I had to have in order to graduate were English and Government/Economics. Beyond that, my credits were in the bag, so to speak. My classes this year were CP English 7-8 (again, I chose not to take AP English, which I think worked out just fine considering that English this year was just the right balance of work and offered more of a challenge than CP English in junior year did), Orchestra, AP Government/Honors Economics (technically each of them are semester classes, but they overlap so much between the semesters that most of us count it as a yearlong class), Biotechnology, Leadership, Law & Society (first semester), and Psychology (second semester). I was supposed to take Calculus III first semester at the College of San Mateo, but since my other classes could not work around that schedule + transportation, I made the initially difficult decision to drop that class, and I made up for it by being a seventh period teacher aide for a Geometry class instead, which went well and helped me at least keep in touch with my math.

And what I like was that by not having most of my schedule already pre-filled for me, I enjoyed my classes more, and they allowed me to branch out in some new directions. Biotechnology is probably not a field that I’m going to have a career in (never mind that I live within minutes of the birthplace of biotechnology, and heck, the author of the textbook is the Biotech teacher at San Mateo High School, right across the street from where I live) but I’ve had a lot of fun learning lab technique skills and doing things with DNA and proteins, and getting to work together in groups. I swear, if there’s one thing that I’ve taken away from Biotech, it’s made me quite a lot more comfortable working in groups of other students. I thoroughly enjoyed Law & Society, not only because it was taught by one of my favorite teachers, but as a class that expanded a short unit in AP Government into a semester class, it was interesting to get a glimpse into different kinds of law, where the principles behind law come from, how it’s enforced, what your rights are, etc. I only took Psychology under a counselor’s recommendation that it was a good alternate to Law & Society, and while I didn’t enjoy it quite as much, it was an interesting class. It wasn’t AP Psychology by any means, but it did involve studying four different perspectives on psychology: Sigmund Freud (who I now think was a bit cuckoo), Carl Jung, Behaviorists, and Humanists. It was really left to us to decide which of these we agreed with (in fact, that was one of the free response options on the final this morning), but it has altered my view of the world and people around me a bit and given me more to think about.

I saved the best for last. There probably could not have been a more perfect year to take AP Government and Honors Economics. Who could turn down the opportunity to study government during the most historic presidential election in our lifetime? Who could turn down the opportunity to study economics during the biggest worldwide economic crisis since the 1930s? Okay, maybe the rationales behind each of those questions is a bit different, but WOW. I may still not trust economists at all, I may still be a little bit cynical about government, but man, I absorbed the material in Gov/Econ like a sponge and got to see it in action. And I love how the AP Gov/Econ teachers weaved the relevancy right into the class. We discussed and dissected the major events of the campaign during the fall, and even did our own mock campaigns in class. (I still have the campaign website I made last fall up online.) My teacher frequently postponed the normal economics curriculum to help explain key components of the economic crisis. We’re probably the first Economics class in a long time for whom “moral hazard” and “systemic risk” were key vocabulary words. This past month, after the AP Exam, we read and studied Paul Krugman’s hot new book, The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008. And they even integrated a class blog into the curriculum, so that groups of students each week would blog about current events, and then we would all be expected to comment on blog posts throughout the semester in order to earn points for credit. Throw in getting to work with my Government teacher last October in spearheading Aragon’s first-ever mock election featuring the presidential race and the twelve California propositions, getting all of the government teachers on board to offer extra credit for voting and teaching the propositions, and getting a turnout of over 35% of the school in one 30-minute lunch period to vote–wow! And then getting to go to Washington, D.C. to witness Barack Obama’s inaguration–the biggest event ever in Washington, D.C.–AND have the opportunity while I was there to visit and gain a better understanding of life at American University, the college that I will now be spending the next four years of my life at!

That’s just a gem of what this amazing school year has been like. A bunch of great big run-on sentences just like that. And that’s just the academic part of this year, I’m not even halfway done with this blog post yet!

Probably the biggest and most unexpected highlight of my senior year would be having been a part of Macbeth. I am still bewildered how that came to pass. If you had told me even five months ago that I would be part of a school play during this past semester, I would have thought you were crazy. I’ve decided to blame it on the fact that I got picked as one of the readers of the fifth period announcements this year (which has been a goal of mine since freshman year and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed getting to do them). At the beginning of this semester, I saw a thing in the announcements about Macbeth tryouts, and remembering how much I liked reading the play in sophomore English, I decided to do my lamest best witch’s impression over the announcements. Then a bunch of people started asking if I was trying out, and I got the idea that maybe trying for a part in Macbeth would be fun–without fully realizing the prospect of memorizing lines, wearing weird costumes, and (ugh) doing makeup.
But wow, through nine weeks of late-going, exhausting rehearsals, magic happened in that theater. I had the opportunity to work with colleagues and a great director, many of whom I did not know, to transform a difficult Shakespeare script into probably the best school play I’ve ever seen. I got to take part in something where I wasn’t the big fish in the small pond, but rather, the small fish in the big pond, which was quite an experience. I learned so much from observing and working with my partners in crime, discovered a new hidden talent within myself, and developed a close bond with these friends whom I probably would never have gotten to know had it not been for my participation in the play. It turned out to be a wonderfully fun experience and I don’t think that I would have traded it for anything. Who knows if I’ll ever do it again, but it was such a key part of my experience this year.

Clearly a key part of any senior year is the crazy, insane, overbearing exciting game of college applications. Fortunately, I took care of my standardized tests (SAT, ACT, Subject Tests) during junior year, so that was off my plate. Nevertheless, my fall was filled with attending numerous college information sessions, filling out the Common Application, getting letters of recommendation from teachers (and providing materials to them to do so), writing my college essay (thankfully that was an assignment for English that I got a head-start on, which was fantastic), and then a mad rush during Winter Break to finish all of the supplement essays that I blogged about in detail. But hey, I got my picture in the paper, if that’s anything to brag about…
The fun continued during spring, as I filled out the FAFSA and CSS Profile (and boy, I could rant about the FAFSA for an hour), completed a number of scholarship applications (of which I received two), and visited American University while in Washington, D.C. on January 22nd, and had the opportunity to travel by myself to Chicago, IL on April 9-11 to visit Northwestern University (and getting the logistics of that trip worked out was quite an interesting experience!). College acceptances came in during mid-late March, inconveniently during Macbeth performances, and then I spent April pondering for awhile until I made my final decision.
You can still check out my College Acceptances Corner to relive the play-by-play of the college apps fun.

With this being my last year locally involved in PTA (I promised myself that I wouldn’t cry), I really stepped it up this year, or attempted to do so to the best of my ability. As Council parliamentarian, I ran a Bylaws Workshop myself for the first time in October, finally got our council bylaws submitted, returned with a signature, and adopted for the first time in seven years, and reviewed a number of bylaws for local units. Now I’m working on training my successor (yay!). As 17th District webmaster, I’ve really done a lot to boost the usefulness and freshness of the website for 17th District PTA, and traffic to the site has hit an all-time high this year. (Can you tell? It’s powered by WordPress!) I did a lot of various things during my second year on the State PTA Board of Managers. I got to attend State PTA’s Legislative Conference in Sacramento (February 22-24) for the first time and I met and spoke with my local representatives in the state legislature. I finally got a chance to visit the State PTA office in Sacramento on April 7 in order to interview Paul Richman, the Executive Director, for an English Career Project. And, during my fifth Convention (here in the Bay Area, yay!), I co-presented a student orientation and two workshops related to the internet/communication, and helped put on two others on student involvement, and got to have parts on the Convention stage! Without a doubt, this year was my best (and busiest) Convention experience ever. 17th District PTA gave me a Continuing Service Award in February (to go with the Honorary Service Award they gave me in February 2007), that my mom presented to me! Boy, they do know how to simultaneously honor and embarrass a guy!

I unfortunately was not active much in Peace Club this year, but I did get to join the Leadership class. You may recall that I ran for Student Body President and lost. In retrospect, I’m glad that I lost, because managing that Leadership class is quite a handful. While I did make a number of contributions to that class as a Clubs Commissioner, the class is one that is more oriented towards painting signs, doing spirit days, rallies, dances, and not so much about “leadership skills.” I’m just not really into those kinds of things. So my fondest high school memories don’t really come out of my experiences in that class, but oh well. I get the feeling that student government at American University may be a bit more of my style. We’ll have to see.
However, that class did give me a way to get involved with UASB (Union of Associated Student Bodies), a district-wide board of students that meets every 3-4 weeks to exchange ideas, discuss key issues at school board meetings (my favorite), and plan activities to bring students from the different schools together. Particularly memorable was the Leadership Conference that they held on March 24th, which was completely organized and presented by the students for other students. It was a wonderfully engaging and informative day that I had the pleasure to help with and really enjoyed. I had some great times with this group this year, and I really wish that I could have been in this group in years past. (As it turns out, I could have, despite my school’s administration misinforming me that the “slots” were all filled, when in reality they were desperate for more members! But that’s a grudge that I don’t want to hold on to, so whatever.) At the last meeting two weeks ago, to thank them, I brought root beer floats for the end-of-year party meeting (which went fast) before I ran out to hit my high school’s academic awards night. At the school board meeting the next night, they surprised me by presenting me with their Student of the Month Award for May 2009, and shared some wonderful words for me that were really touching. Yet another senior year highlight that I have thoroughly enjoyed getting to be a part of.

That has been my senior year. It has gone by so fast, but the wealth of experiences that I have gone through and the personal growth that it has guided me through has trumped my other three high school years in leaps and bounds, and man, I can’t believe that it’s already over. It’s been a year with a lot on my mind–not a day has gone by this year that I haven’t been thinking about college choices, about what my future will be like, and this graduation week has only intensified those thoughts. Lots of people have recently started asking me about my summer plans, and my thoughts are like, “Summer? Huh?” because I’ve got so much else on my mind! But like I have in the past few years, here are a few goals that I can put down for this summer:

• Replace Webmacster87.info — Yep, this blog and this domain have served me well for the last four years (and a few months before that as well), but similar to how I’m moving on to a new college life, it’s time for my personal site to move on as well. I’ve already been working quite a bit (mainly as graduation distraction) on a new site, which I’ve dubbed “The Smorgasbord of Douglas Bell” for no reason other than I like the word “smorgasbord.” It will be a new, more personal site, which will have a blog among other components, and will keep track of me as I embark down my college life. And yes, I’ll try to update it more often–after all, I’ve got a bunch of teachers and peers who want to keep track of me when I’m in D.C. The web address will be www.DouglasBell.us, and my target launch date is June 1st. (Yeah, not much of a “summer goal,” but I’m going to put it down anyway.) Webmacster87.info will continue to remain online at its current space as an archive.
• Get a Job — Boy, I picked a bad economical time to actually start looking for employment. Nevertheless, I’m going to give it a shot. It will be nice to earn some pocket change to get me going in college, right?
• Learn to Drive — That’s right, I’m finally catching up to where I should be at age 16! Truth is, my family and I considered doing this last summer, but CA law says that until you’re 17 1/2, learners have to have professional driver education and training, which costs a lot of money. (Remember the old days when driver ed was part of high school? I don’t.) Once you’re over 17 1/2, you can get your learners permit without all of that education–just take a written test–provided you don’t take your driving test until you’re 18. Sounds good to me. Not that I’m anxious to drive (my bike and public transit continue to be just fine for me), but it’s probably a skill I should learn while my brain is still in the learning-comes-easily capacity.
• Clean My Room, Again — This is an annual theme. Even though I have cleaned up my room at least twice in the past year, it keeps on getting messy. So let’s make that a goal again this summer. Better yet, when August comes around, I’m going to have to pack! Yikes!
• Re-invigorate phpBB Weekly — My one and only still-surviving podcast, phpBB Weekly, has been limping around a bit lately. I’m hoping this summer to start making some changes to help strengthen it again and getting it alive and kicking again. At least until I go off to a timezone three hours closer to UTC and have to figure out how to rearrange my schedule accordingly. More on this to be discussed on this Saturday’s episode (May 30th), if I’m awake enough.
• The Full-Bodied AU Transition — Yikes, I’m going away to college in two and a half months! That means Welcome Week registration, registering for classes, sorting out travel details, packing (already mentioned), finding out who my roommate will be and getting in touch with him, and who knows what else. I sure don’t! Yet. But yep, all of that will surely be a big part of this summer. Oh, and throw in honing up on my basic living skills, like doing laundry, personal finances, all that jazz. Boy, it’s going to be a fun summer.</sarcasm>

Transitional summers are always a bit weird and awkward. I sure remember summer of 2005 as being a bit of a weird/awkward transition as I prepped for going from middle school to high school.

Nevertheless, here’s to the fond memories of a great senior year, of four years in high school, and of thirteen years of education that have landed me on that stage tomorrow afternoon. And here’s to my future, wherever it may lead me.

As I said prior to my first day of school this year, today is the first day of the rest of my life, and I’m ready to go out and make the most of it.

After four years of high school–nearly 150 weeks of it–this next week will be my last of high school, and boy am I in the thick of this graduation thing. The graduation gown is in a bag in my room (yes, it will get ironed this week), I got the yearbook last Monday, the final school newspaper with the big map showing where all the seniors are going last Thursday, tickets are ordered and plans for who gets to come and who doesn’t all made, etc. Finals started Friday afternoon, and continue this week on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Graduation is Friday at 1 PM, with 1 PM rehearsals (only 45 minutes after school ends) on Tuesday and Wednesday. Goodbyes are being exchanged already, autographs are being exchanged, mixed feelings of dread and excitement are swelling. All of this backed up by general nervous feelings that delve into the subconscious of all of us in the family, not being clearly noticeable, yet affecting us in various ways.

Yep, it’s a graduating senior’s life.

In reality, I haven’t quite gotten into the full realization of graduation yet. Maybe it’s because I still haven’t quite gotten away from the continuous feeling of busyness that lingers around me during every school year. But with less than five days to go until that big graduation ceremony, that likely could change as this week progresses. Until then…