My 12th Grade Senior Chapel Speech

(I’ll try not to get into too many wandering digressions on this one, but it’s hard to be succinct about high school. Apologies in advance.)

During noon break I was hanging out in the commons areas talking to my friends when a female classmate came up to me. “Joel, can I talk to you a minute?”

“Sure,” I said, immediately wondering what in the world this could be about. Girls never wanted to talk to me.

“I’m on the chapel committee, and we were discussing who we wanted to speak at the end of the year senior chapel, and we all agreed that you would be perfect. Would you be willing to speak at the chapel?”

Yes. Sure. Of course. It would be an honor, I quickly answered.

She thanked me and went away. As soon as she had left, my friend said, “Boy, she really suckered you into that.” He launched into an imitation of the girl’s sing song voice, and the way she had been flirtatiously touching my arm during the conversation, and concluded that I could get suckered into anything if a girl asked me sweetly enough.

Which is true of course. I wanted to speak at the senior chapel because I felt it was a huge honor, but at the same time I intensely did not want to speak at senior chapel. I hate public speaking.

High school everyone is always wondering, “What do others think about me?” [LINK] and I was just as confused about this as anyone else.

I was the dictionary definition of a nerd. All through middle school I had classic thick oversized square glasses. I parted my hair on the side and plastered it down with gel to keep it in place, like a nerd out of a 1950s comic book.

By high school I had traded my glasses for contact lenses, and by Junior year I had eased off on the gel. But I was still obsessed with Star Trek [Link], comic books [Link], and ancient Roman history [Link]. I had trouble finding someone to talk to during noon break. I hung out with a group of boys, who I knew tolerated me only to make fun of me, simply because no one else welcomed me into their circle. Eventually I began taking refuge in the library and reading books during noon break.

I had absolutely no social life. And when I say that I mean absolutely none. Outside of the Church youth group, and the sports teams I was on, I had no social interaction outside of school.

This never bothered me at the time because I didn’t have any idea that life was supposed to be any different. I went home, read comic books, watched Star Trek, or worked on my story [Link], and thought it was like that for everyone. It wasn’t until my senior year, when I began to expand socially and go out more, that I realized for most people all four years of high school had been social. They talked all the time of memories from Freshman year, or the big drinking party Sophomore year. It was at this point that I began to feel regret for not being more social during my high school years.

(Some of you may remember at Calvin that I was obsessed with time management, and refused to do things like watch TV, or even attend school plays or sporting events, because I considered them anti-social. I know I drove a lot of you crazy with this, and I apologize, but I was trying to make up for loss time from high school. In retrospect, I wish that I had spent high school being more social. And during college, instead of being obsessed with socializing, I wish I had been more concerned about preparing my future. But I seem to never have a clear perspective on a stage of life until it is already passed).

And yet, all that being said, throughout my high school life, I also had the sense that many people approved of me, and enjoyed having me around. In fact, given that I fully knew I had no social skills or interesting conversation, it seemed people were often unduly nice to me. I often got the sense (and I know this sounds pretentious, but its how I really felt at the time) that people could see something in me that I couldn’t see myself. It was the only way I could make sense of all the unwarranted kindness that was shown to me.

As I advanced through high school, I began to feel like I was making inroads towards popularity and acceptance. Halfway through Junior year I started trying to hang out with the popular crowd during noon break (in part because I felt I had no where else to go) and they seemed to tolerate me. My senior year I was elected to the “Home Coming Court”. I was voted “The friendliest Person” in my class. And, out of all the graduating seniors, the chapel committee chose me to be one of 3 people to represent the senior class. And all this when I couldn’t find anyone to hang out with on Friday night. I couldn’t figure it out.

And ten years later, I still don’t really understand it. I think people must have seen me as sort of a mascot type figure. I wasn’t the kind of guy you would want to invite out on the weekend, but I was considered likeable and friendly enough that people liked to cheer for me when I was on the “Home Coming Court”. That’s the only way I can make sense of it. And even then, when I was so quiet and shy that no one in high school really knew me, I have trouble realizing how people saw any positive qualities in me at all. What was there to separate me from all the other quiet introverts who passed through high school in obscurity?

But I’ll have to leave my high school angst at that, and get back to the topic at hand.

As a sort of “mascot of the senior class”, I was one of the seniors chosen to give the final chapel. The only problem was that I had nothing to say. I spent the whole weekend in my bedroom trying to write a speech, constantly throwing my draft away and starting over, and thinking about killing myself rather than go through with it.

The idea of speaking in front of the entire high school student body terrified me to begin with, but it wouldn’t have been so bad if I at least felt like I had something intelligent to say. I was absolutely horrified of the idea of getting up in front of my whole school with nothing to say. I was beginning to understand what my friend meant when he said I got suckered into this. It was a lot of work, and even more stress.

Eventually I wrote something. I wasn’t completely happy with it, but it was the best I could come up with.

I think the most nervous I’ve ever been in my life is when I gave my oral report in 10th grade. But this was a close second. As my sister later observed, my hands were visibly shaking when I was up at the podium.

And yet, it went over incredibly well. People laughed at all my jokes. In fact they laughed generously and heartily at all my jokes. Even two or three years later, I would meet Christian High graduates at Calvin who would say, “You’re the guy who gave that senior chapel, right? That was the funniest thing I’ve ever heard in my whole life.”

The actual text of the speech is clearly not that funny. I can only think that the good reception it got was due to a combination of the jokes with the mascot like persona that people projected onto me. In other words, I don’t think people would have thought this was as funny if someone else delivered it. But that’s just my guess. I’m as much at a loss to explain this as I am to explain Homecoming Court.

Anyway, here is the text of the speech.

The Speech
When I was asked to speak here today, I had a hard time coming up with something to say. I decided to look in my Freshman yearbook, at what people had wrote in it, to see if I could try to find some inspiration, or some sense of unity for these four years. Well, I couldn't read most of the signatures. I had given all my friends a pencil to sign the yearbook with. So my advice to Freshman is when you get your yearbook this Friday, give your friends a pen to sign it with.

That failing, I thought about other senior chapels I had attended in the past, and what was said there. A popular thing to do was to give advice to the underclassman, so I made a list of all the things I had learned over the four years I've been here, so that underclassman could benefit from my vast wisdom and experience. I put down things like: get involved in a lot of activities, be as nice as you can to everyone, don't wait till the last minute on those English papers because they always take twice as long as you think they will, work hard in whatever you do, follow your interests, think for yourself, and so on.

I looked at the list, and it was all commonsense. It was stuff everybody knew, and when I thought about it, I knew most of these things back in Middle school. Yet I sure didn't do a lot of these things as a Freshman. I guess during my time in high school I didn't learn very many new things, as much as I learned how to apply what I already knew. All those things I knew I was supposed to do, but I didn't do them. Then, as time passed, I began doing them, and practiced on them. Right now I still don't do most of these things all the time, but I'm a lot better than I was.

I remember one of the first times I entered this school. I didn't have any older brothers or sisters, so one of the first times I set foot in the building was to buy my books Freshman year. The whole place seemed unbelievably huge to me. my mom was with me. I was a little embarrassed to be seen with her, but I really didn't have another ride, and I needed someone to pay for the books. After I got my schedule, my mom suggested to me that I find out where all my class rooms were in order to make the first day a little easier. I thought the idea was pointless. Even if I did locate all my classrooms, the building was so big I'd never remember where they were.

The first day of school came, and I was greatly relieved to find out that all the rooms were numbered in order, so I could find everything easily. Gradually, the building didn't seem so large anymore. I remember I was always late to my fifth hour classroom. No matter how fast I went, I just could not get from my fourth hour, to my locker, to fifth hour. Then, about halfway through the semester, I discovered a hallway I didn't even know about. Using it, I was able to cut my trip by a quarter, and was never late since.

The time I've been here has really gone quickly. Looking back, it seems like I've spent a lot of the time confused. I was confused about what was expected of me, I was confused about math assignments, I was confused about what other people thought of me, I was confused about where to go to college, I was confused about school policies. I was confused about a lot of things, and about a lot of things I still am, but as I moved through the years, it seemed like a lot of things got clearer.

This year, I've heard a lot of things said about Christian High students from fellow students. I've heard that most people at Christian High only want to be your friend if there is something they can gain from it. If they aren't your friend, they don't really care about you, and wouldn't help you out unless there was something in it for them. I've heard that most of them don't really care about what's right or wrong, but only care about themselves. I don't know everything these people have been through, but it certainly hasn't been my experience.

There are a lot of things I'm thankful for here. I'm thankful for people who gave me rides in their cars when I needed one. I'm thankful for people who shared their lunch with me when I forgot mine. I'm thankful for people who took time to explain my homework to me when I didn't get it. I'm thankful for people who loaned me money when I needed it. I'm thankful for people who took the time to talk to me when I was feeling down. I'm thankful for people who gave me advice when I needed it, and I'm thankful for people who were just good friends. I'm going to miss a lot of you next year.

Commentary on the Speech: I think everyone is embarrassed when they look back on High School work, because they have intellectual progressed since that time. Old papers and speeches are like a snapshot into an old, now outgrown, way of thinking.

Almost all of my childhood, I was always trying to be the “teacher’s pet”. I wasn’t perfect, but that was my goal. In elementary school, I was always the kid who told on the others. In middle school, although I was too afraid to say anything, I always got mad when other kids talked bad about the teacher. The teacher was like a god to me, and their approval was the most important thing.

During the last couple years of high school, my view began to shift. Why was I always siding with the teacher, when they were so old and boring? Young people were so much more good looking, exciting and fun to be around. And besides I was one of them. I would never be accepted as an equal by the teachers. All these years I had been siding with the wrong people. I should be on the side of my classmates against the teachers, the parents, the pastors, and the other dark forces of adulthood.

And so, the last couple years of high school, I started adopting the “generational conflict” view of life. Everything young is good. Everything old is bad.

Obviously this view creates a great amount of intellectual dissonance. I was greatly attracted to generational polemics on the value of youth from the 1960s, while trying to ignore the fact that all the people who wrote these essays had now grown old themselves.

As I got to know many of my classmates better, I discovered many of them were extremely conservative, or even racist, but I did my best to ignore this as well.

The key to overcoming any intellectual dissonance is just ignore ignore ignore. Just ask any Republican (sorry, couldn’t resist that jibe).

Part of what I wanted to say during this speech was, “Hey, don’t listen to what those adults are saying. You’re all great.” I felt teachers were always berating our class for being too exclusive and too cliquey. And many of my fellow classmates had joined in this refrain. I was committed to defending my class against any accusations, so I had been debating some of my classmates on this point throughout the year. That’s why I made a point of defending this point in the speech.

This was an easy position for me to take, because I felt like I was on the verge of becoming accepted myself. In retrospect though, it was stupid, stupid, stupid. I grimace every time I think of this part of the speech. I, of all people, should have realized the pain of exclusion. Young people are not good by default. Children and high school students can be the cruelest people in the world.