Valedictorian: We’re rolling with the punches, adapting

By Jean Perry, Special to the Neighb News

The “drive-through” graduation ceremony preceded by an unprece­dented school semester of online learning from home was certainly unconventional, but as Fairhaven Class of 2020 Valedictorian Olivia Maciel pointed out in her prepared speech: “We’re probably the only graduating class in recent history that’s going to have a story to tell like this.”

Typical high school years are challenging times, which Maciel acknowledged are fraught with pressure to acquire academic achievement and social success, and the inherent loneliness of one’s inner struggle to feel “good enough.”

But the “suffering” high school induces, said Maciel, is what prepares one to become the person they are destined to be. Suffering in the form of, as Maciel recalled, “sitting through painfully long presentations on The Odyssey helped us improve our public speaking. Our first week of finals helped to prepare us for multiple three-hour AP sittings.

“You didn’t make the cut for varsity? You learned from it. You practiced harder. And maybe you landed a varsity position the next year,” said Maciel. “The times we experienced suffering gave us a chance to look into ourselves and see where we could improve.”

Maciel urged her classmates to reflect on any negative experience from the last four years. For Maciel, it was a three-day suspension during her junior year that, at the time, felt like the end of the world.

“As far as I was concerned, my high school days were over,” said Maciel, worried at the time that her college applications would be rejected and scholarships denied “because I had wiped clean my last three years of mild success with this one, albeit huge, mistake.” But looking back, said Maciel, “It motivated me to be better and to start moving past some things I thought I could never move on from.

 “…And here I am today,” she said, adding, “All of us have felt that way … but look at who you are now. You made it here. You’re thriving despite all of the past expectations that … maybe you were not good enough. But you were.”

As Maciel sees it, “High school made us all suffer because there were so many avenues and so much time for that suffering to occur.” And she  listed the myriad blocks of time that comprise the five-day school week that runs on a seven-day school schedule — at least until Covid-19 came.

“We’re the first graduating class to transition the end of their senior year entirely onto some beaten up Chrome­books with a graduation made possible by petroleum,” said Maciel. “Really, this sucks for all of us and I would hate to pretend like it doesn’t.

“We’re missing the things we all thought we were going to have by now — the elaborate prom, the normal graduation, … the last few warm, summery days in the halls of our beloved school, gone.”

But even while missing out, Maciel said the graduates have also gained a lot.

“We’ve learned how to learn online, even … with the endless [Google Classroom] notifications on our phones and the botched [Google Hangout] meetings and the lack of motivation to do much of the work at all. We’re learning how to manage our time … and [make] our empty hours more worthwhile…. We’re figuring out how to let our peers, friends, and family feel our company even if we’re at least six feet away….

“We’re rolling with the punches, adapting to a less-than-perfect reality,” Maciel continued, “and we’re still here celebrating today. We’re apart for now, but the class of 2020 is bonded forever through this shared suffering and how much we’ve grown, learned, and changed from it, too.”

Also in her speech, Maciel thanked her parents, Leeann and Tony, for “putting up” with her for seventeen-and-a-half years, her “non-biological mother” and “all around coolest teacher” Amanda Pedersen, her closest friends, and all the school staff “doing their best with the weird world we’re living in right now.”

 

Read Maciel’s entire written remarks are included below:

Good afternoon. I am honored today to speak to the class of 2020, their families, friends, relatives, teachers, and anyone else I might have missed outside of those categories. Though this is far from the conventional graduation we expected to have today, I would like to say how incredibly proud I am of my classmates for having made it this far, especially under these circumstances.  

To begin with, I just want to get the cliche “thank you” bits out of the way. First, I want to thank Leeann and Tony, also known as my mom and dad, for putting up with me for the last seventeen and a half years. I’m still a little bitter that my birthday made me one of the last seniors to start driving, but even considering the current circumstances, I’m glad it wasn’t any later. We’re probably the only graduating class in recent history that’s going to have a story to tell like this. As an extension of thanking my mom, I’d also like to thank any and all respiratory therapists that are listening today. As my mom has pointed out to me almost daily, you deserve far more recognition than the media has given you during these times, and I’m sorry everyone confuses you for nurses. I would also like to thank my non-biological mother, Amanda Pedersen, for being arguably the kindest, most patient, and all around coolest teacher I have ever had. When people ask me what I want to be when I grow up, my answer is usually you, a strong woman who happens to own a few cockroaches as pets. Thank you for inspiring me all four of these years, and for nurturing my interest not only in the sciences, but also in helping my peers. On the train of family, I’d like to thank the Bonanno family for letting me basically live in their home for the last year and a half, and always welcoming me and my oversized backpack with open arms, and a packet of Saltine crackers. I would also like to thank my closest friends- Kyle Imbeau, Kate Ferland, Evan Pina, Chase Pinette, Kacey Ryan, Max Mederios, my cousin Lauren Pelletier, and all of the people who let me borrow their pencils and pens over the last four years. Really, I couldn’t have done all this without proper writing utensils. I would like to thank Mr. Carr as well, for not only reading through this speech, but also all of my college essays, scholarship essays, AP Comp essays, and my incessant emails about Quentin Tarantino’s movies. While I will not miss the weird bird skeleton statue in your classroom, I will miss all of the movies you showed us, and the absolute travesty that was period 3 student help. Lastly, I would like to thank the Fairhaven High School faculty and administrators for doing their best with the weird world we’re living in right now.  

If you had asked me four years ago what I thought the end of my high school career would’ve looked like, my answer would never have resembled anything like this- and that’s not even considering the whole drive-thru graduation aspect. I don’t think that would’ve even crossed my mind then. Even now, I still struggle with the idea of being good enough for this, or believing that I’m in any way worthy of having this opportunity to speak to all of you today. For the last few years, I’ve struggled with the idea that this day would come, and that I might be this person. There are so many of you who I believe deserve this just as much, if not more, than I do. So today, I am both humbled by and incredibly gracious for this opportunity.  

At this time, to make the transition to the point I wanted to make a bit less awkward for me, I wanted to do something where I asked you all to raise your hands if you’ve ever felt like you weren’t good enough. To raise your hand if you have ever thought that you weren’t worth the effort that others put into you, or if the effort that you put into what you love wasn’t worth it. Maybe you didn’t get that role you wanted in the school play, or you got cut from the team, or you failed your first ever precalc test because you didn’t realize it was going to be that difficult. Maybe it was something as simple as your ceramic Budda exploding in the kiln, or something as big as backing into another car and shredding up your trunk- sorry about that one, Kacey. Maybe it was the self doubt you feel when you wonder why your friends chose to be friends with you, or maybe you live deep in Acushnet and it was that wave of dread washing over you when you woke up 7 minutes before the bell was supposed to ring. In one way or another, we’ve probably all been there. So I’d be raising my hand right now, too.  

But in one way or another, I hope we’ve all grown from it.  

Sometime my sophomore year, I sat down and watched the movie Little Miss Sunshine . I thought I was going to watch a fun, family comedy and instead was presented with a struggling family, grief, loss, a 30 year old convincingly playing a teenager, and the troubling ethics of child beauty pageants. It’s a really good movie, and seriously, you all should watch it sometime. You will cry. But, in the midst of all of the pageantry and everything else that made me sob during the movie, I was also presented with this quote, spoken by a very gay and very depressed Steve Carell: “So, if you sleep until you’re 18- ah, think of the suffering you’re gonna miss. I mean, high school? Those are your prime suffering years!”  

Now, if I had slept until I was 18, I wouldn’t be awake to be giving this speech today- again, thanks mom and dad. But logistics aside, and as humorous and perhaps exaggerated as the quote is, I think this is a good attitude to keep in mind as we look back on our time at FHS. These were our prime suffering years. We all made mistakes, had things not go our way, or did things that just weren’t very good at all. We’ve been cut from teams, been in car accidents, gotten suspended, failed tests, and lost friends. But, we’ve grown from our suffering, too.  

Think back to who we were freshman year. We all had bad haircuts, even worse fashion sense, huge backpacks, and were basically just advanced stage 8th graders. We did things that we probably never want to mention again. But I’ll mention them here, by recounting some of that year’s trends: dabbing, the mannequin challenge, the dog filter on Snapchat, chokers, bomber jackets, One Dance by Drake, and Watch Me by Silento was still on the charts at the end of the year. Are you uncomfortable yet? Think about suffering through the Odyssey’s 24 chapters, or learning about the M-A-I-N causes of World War I, or sitting through our first ever week of finals. We stayed in the same hallway, and we kept to ourselves. And now, I want you to look at who you are now. Maybe your backpack never got any smaller, or maybe you were pretty proud of that haircut and still have it today. You might still own that dog filter, and I know plenty of you love Drake. But, really, are you the same person you were freshman year?  

Chances are, you probably aren’t.  

We’ve all changed since then. We changed because we, in some way, experienced suffering. Sitting through painfully long presentations on the Odyssey helped us improve our public speaking. Our first week of finals helped to prepare us for multiple three hour AP sittings. That 40 you got on a McNeil vocabulary quiz sophomore year? You learned from it, and you prepared. And maybe you got a 70 on your next one. You didn’t make the cut for varsity? You learned from it. You practiced harder. And maybe you landed a varsity position the next year. The times we experienced suffering gave us a chance to look into ourselves, and see where we could improve. Whether it was from cringing at our freshman wardrobes, or failing your first two permit tests sophomore year, or literally just the entire collective experience of our junior year, we have all experienced suffering in some way.  

I want you all to think about something bad that happened to you during these four years. And then I want you to trace it to who you are now. Follow the path carved by that awful time, that bad memory, or that lost opportunity. What did you take from it?  

I would like to be open here, and share that awful type of memory that I have come to reflect on. I never thought I’d want to speak about this in such a public setting, and it’s a bit easier to just say it to a camera, like I am now, but I want to break the routine of silence and embarrassment I’ve had for the past year, and reassure a part of myself that things are okay now.  

My junior year, I received a three day suspension. I spent five days of my life kind of just basking in my misery- I was anxious, and couldn’t be bothered to do much more than sleep for those few days. I know a suspension isn’t necessarily the end of the world, but for me, in that moment, it was. I saw my future literally dissolving before my eyes. I wasn’t going to get into college, because nobody would take someone with a less-than-pristine discipline record. I wasn’t going to get scholarships, because I had wiped clean my last three years of mild success with this one, albeit huge, mistake. Every single good thing I had done up until that point was completely, entirely negated. As far as I was concerned, my high school days were over and I should’ve just slept until I turned 18 and gotten on with my life from then. In hindsight, it all sounds pretty dramatic, and I seriously want to apologize to anyone who had to deal with me during that week of my life. But looking back on it, I can trace the exact path that awful day carved into my life. It motivated me to be better, and to start moving past some things I thought I could never move on from. I had to focus on my present- what was I going to do today to be better than I was yesterday, and how would this positively impact my future?  

And here I am today- I owed it to my past self to do this. To not only speak about that time of my life in some capacity, but to also remind myself of how much has changed since then.   

All of us have felt that way at one point or another. But look who you are now. You made it here. You’re thriving, despite all of the past expectations that maybe, just maybe, you were not good enough. 

But you were.  

Our suffering is not the end of it all, even if we may feel like it is. Instead of dwelling on our bad times, we should use them to propel ourselves forwards, towards the good ones.  

High school made us all suffer, because there were so many avenues and so much time for that suffering to occur. 7 classes, 7 teachers, 5 days of school, 3 sports seasons, 3 lunch blocks, 2 plays, 7:37 start time, 2:07 end time, 181 days a year, for four years. It would be a miracle if any of us walked out of that without a single bad thing happening to us. Obviously, we didn’t, because right now we’re getting our diplomas fresh out of our Civics and our Camrys. But in the future, I hope we can all look back on this and realize how this suffering has shaped us. We’re the first graduating class to transition the end of their senior year entirely onto some beaten up Chromebooks, with a graduation made possible by petroleum.  

Really, this sucks, for all of us, and I would hate to pretend like it doesn’t. I made up a month’s worth of AP Chem assignments in one weekend, and then had a nightmare about not being able to submit my stats exam. We’re missing the things we all thought we were going to have by now- the elaborate prom, the normal graduation, that amusement park trip Abby mentioned in the Knipe that one time. The last few warm, summery days in the halls of our beloved school, gone.  

But, even in missing these things, we’re gaining so much more. We’ve learned how to learn online, even if getting to the end point was pretty rough, with the endless Classroom notifications on our phones and the botched Hangouts meetings, and the lack of motivation to do much of the work at all. We’re learning how to manage our time at home, and making our empty hours more worthwhile, a skill that, according to of one Mr. Davis’s psychology rants will be invaluable in college. We’re figuring out how to let our peers, friends and family feel our company, even when we’re at least 6 feet away. Usually. We’re rolling with the punches, adapting to a less-than-perfect reality, and we’re still here celebrating today.  

We’re apart for now, but the class of 2020 is bonded forever through this shared suffering, and how much we’ve grown, learned and changed from it, too. There’s probably going to be a New York Times article analyzing us in ten years or so. I hope to see one of you quoted there. 

So when you think back on your years at Fairhaven High, and you think about all the things you wanted to do better, or all of the things you wanted to do earlier, or all of the friends you should’ve made, remember that you would not be who you are today without the suffering you went through in the past.  

If you had slept until you were 18, what would you have missed? 

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