Biggest Accomplishment In School May Be Growing Up

Depending on how you look at it, ours is either the first class of the millennium, or the last. Whatever your view, our class has been made to carry the expectation of a generation.

We have been called lazy slackers who let the voices of a century die with us.

But we stepped up and dared to do more, in spite of the condescension. Amid the irrational and the absurd that make up so much of Central Valley High School, we found a little solidarity.

Within three years we did more than many thought we were capable of.

We grew up.

We were forced to deal with pressures foreign to any previous generation, like school massacres and seemingly uncontrollable suicide rates.

We spent so much time trying to be the person we thought everyone wanted us to be that we ended up still questioning who we really are.

Yet somehow, with a little help from the sarcasm of the Simpsons and Everclear’s biting lyrics, we managed to survive.

When we look back at high school we remember things like crowded halls.

We remember homework and late-night cramming.

We remember the extraordinary courtesy (so common among teenage motorists) showed in the single-opening student parking lot each morning and afternoon.

We remember that smart underclassmen who always ruined the curve in math.

We remember the oppression of our parents and the unrelenting cruelty of our peers.

We remember the slams and the struggles, the tears and the sweat.

And we wish we could do it all over again.

Because as much as we hate to admit it, we had fun. We grew in ways none of us was expecting.

Dances were always fun. This was especially true sophomore year, when 95 percent of the evening was spent just trying not to look dumb. As could be expected, we all failed miserably since it was bound to happen anyway. But we got better, and by the time Senior Prom rolled around we could actually fake coolness for an entire night.

We laughed and cried our way through three years of paradoxes.

We were bitter and cynical, so they gave us pep assemblies.

We needed extra help with assignments, so they gave us TAP, filled with extra mind-numbing busywork.

We have 20-minute attention spans, so they gave us 85-minute class periods.

We laugh at the absurdity of it. And we cry to know that this is only the beginning.

The things we will remember most aren’t the hours of studying algebra 4 or all the cycles of mitosis. It’s the band trips. It’s the backstage drama shenanigans or the FBLA conferences. It’s the AP study sessions, during which no one ever cracked open a book, or the history projects we worked on with our best friends.

Odd that our fondest memories of high school weren’t really of school.

Closed campus may have made us prisoners, but it wasn’t the building that made our memories. It was the people.

We all have our hilarious stories that only we will remember. But we all shared them with someone close to us. These are the people we will never forget. These are the memories that last a lifetime.

We will walk away from CV as different people than when we walked in. Memories and life lessons have changed us.

We will keep them close to our hearts as we have kept the echoes of a millennium past.

Luckily, this is only the beginning. We still have plenty of time to forget, so we can yell at our grandkids about what lazy slackers they are.