Eagle seniors will leave tough act to follow
What can I say about my peers and our senior year at Lakeside? Without actually experiencing Lakeside High School, one can never truly understand what it means to be a Lakeside graduate. The school was designed to look like an eagle from an aerial view, though until this year I never realized that it’s supposed to look like its tail feathers are spread, not just that it’s bottom-heavy.
This show of school pride through architecture is indicative of what Lakeside’s atmosphere was intended to be. And while our basketball crowd may be the quietest in the state on most nights, I’d like to think that each of us has a little, as corny as it sounds, Eagle Pride. This may be a bit of a stretch, but I mean Eagle Pride to be not so much about cheering on athletics, but about striving to be the best person that one can. I believe that Lakeside teaches this quality, and that the graduating class of 2005 exemplifies it.
It’s natural to have a certain degree of class pride, but it’s not biased to say that many great things lie ahead of us. I remember being afraid of upperclassmen as a freshman, particularly the athletic senior guys. Now as a senior, I see that the social atmosphere has changed. My classmates didn’t instill fear in the hearts of underclassmen, in fact they helped start the IGNITE program to assist freshmen in adjusting to high school life. Some of our biggest and toughest athletes have hearts of gold and will be the first to help anyone in need.
Besides being genuinely warmhearted, the class of 2005 is also multitalented. There’s nothing that says that athletes can’t be smart, or that “band nerds” can’t be popular. I truly feel that the class defies stereotypes, and that everyone is allowed to showcase his or her various talents. While only the future may tell what we do with our interests, I know that we have the ability to achieve our dreams. We will be the ones to change the world, as we’ve already done without our microcosm at Lakeside High School.
Most people expect their senior year to be a time of slacking off, pulling pranks and enjoying free rein over the school. We didn’t expect to face the tragedies of the year, but who could have actually planned for it? We were forced to ask ourselves questions that we’d never had to ask before, and we grew from it. Our senior year wasn’t what we’d dreamed it would be, but we overcame it, continued with our studies, applied to colleges and began to enjoy the last of our time at Lakeside.
Although we’ll never forget what happened, we decided as a whole to stop regretting and truly live. Life happens in the moment and waits for us in the future. The importance of living in the present is something that we all understand now and will probably govern the way that many of us live.
Otherwise life has returned to normal. Students are back to dragging their guitars all over the school, and singing at the top of their lungs on occasion, fancying themselves to be modern-day troubadours. As the warmer weather hits (which for many of us Washington residents is anything above 55 degrees), students have gone back to challenging the dress code. I’m proud to note, however, that the average senior girl’s shorts/skirt length is at least 3 inches longer than the average for the other classes. Though as far as senior pranks go, I am not aware of any plans. It must be kept into consideration, however, that despite the small school size, I never know about any plans of that nature (my closest involvement to a prank involved a group of pep band members attempting to stick gum on a friend’s car during a basketball game, though it was too cold so the gum kept falling off until we eventually gave up.)
To sum up the rest of the school year, I’d say that we finished our business at Lakeside. We’d already done all that we could manage in order to improve the condition of our school and have passed the torch down to future senior classes. Although they may never achieve our high standards, we think they’ll do a good enough job.