Progressively playing the game of life rather than
Passively being played by the game
By Sun Ying/Sunny Sun
School Principle Chen, Center principle Mr. Wilkin, Mr. Xiao, Ms. Cheng, our beautiful andhandsome head teachers and professors, family and friends of the graduates, ladies andgentlemen of Class of 2016, good afternoon! The opportunity to give the speech as arepresentative of the whole class 2016, I am honored and grateful. But I am more eager to play a role as a "peer reviewer" today, sharing the happiness of three-year life and waiting the future life blossoms. Today my topic is "Progressively playing the game of life rather than passively being played by the game."
The first thing I really want to talk about today is companionship and cooperation. I remembered the days when we were urged to say English in the AP building and strictly supervised by Mr. Min though later Dojo points system has invented. At that time, we sent signals to each other, warning that Mr. Min was standing in the corner of the first floor. Soon, we changed our language mode to English. But now, we became smarter, always speaking English on the third floor to get more dojo points. In the class, we also cooperated together—we did roller coaster model inMr.Stevens class; we were struggled by sounds made by declining dojo points when Mr.Brown took advantage most in dealing with "Zixiao"; fortunately, we have Mr.Lira’s super interesting PhysicsC class, especially bad jokes; we complained a lot about writing essays on humanities courses. We patiently listened essay comments from Mr. Francis. We suddenly woke up when were asked to read and answer questions in Mr.Kalnin’s class though our "Qigong" was not as good as he imagined. We were annoyed of writing myriad of essays of mysterious topics in Mr.Derdyne’s class. Even sometimes, we suffered from preparing and devising Statistics posters in Ms. Mutei’s class. Additionally, what largely a part of my classmates worried about was Mr.Stefanini’s Calculus class though I like Math the most. But we are always together in complaining, studying and working; we are oftenbeing super fans of someone’s concert, harmoniously fighting on the sports field and blissfully celebrating Christmas as well as the most precious one, together eating pizzas. Thinking beyond high school life, perhaps we need to reorganize our own "colony"in order to incessantly expand the scope of our "empires".
Secondly, being clear of our directions. Carl Ranson Rogers said that, "A good life is a process not a state of being. It is a direction rather than destination." Here, I would like to use "Hearthstone legend", which is our classmates’ favorite computer game as an analogy. When you are really motivated to get keys with highest level in order to possess more times of lives in the game, what’s your motivation to win? What are your tangible rewards after winning the game? Possibly we all never thought of these questions before. In the future, we are still looking forward to getting many opportunities, but we have to find ourselves along the path and keep trying and trying until we find something which capture ourselves’ internal devotion and eagerness. Although life is a linear process, meaning that we must have to get over thousands of difficulties, like solving matrixeson the giant draft paper, we should figure out the guidance direction all the time, playing and entertaining the game of life.
Lastly, lean in which is the title of Sheryl Sandburg’s memoir. Throughout three years living in AP, we grow from "green hands" to skillful carpenters. We have Mr.Xiao always stood like an Avant-guard in front of the AP building; we also have Ms.Wen, Dr.ChenandMs.Hong to supervise our life in all aspects. We have Mr.Wilkin’s infinite "deals". We also have counselors to listen to our opinions and help our college application. Even facing with the EDdisaster, Della still led the whole counselingteam with perfect aplomb from one-to-one relocating schools to revising our essays. No matter how late it was, they were still in the office, arranging our profiles. No matter how important the festival was,they still kept tracking our application information online. As what Confucius said in Analects, "Teachers reason students with heart and touch students by truth."But in the future, in order to lean in, we have to use ourselves. We will soon struggle with freshman life, with internship opportunities even making relationships. All of things just like a jungle gym without any ladder for help. However, never give up. We will soon have new professors;new advisors and also we can listen from others’ constructed feedbacks. The only thing we need to do is to be modest, more thinking and to lean in.
Today is a day of celebration, we celebrated our companionship, hard work and past efforts; today is a day of gratitude, we are gratitude to people who nurture and help us along the road, especially our parents; today is a day of reflection, though we may burst our tears, we still have to know our direction and be sure of what kind of difference we want to make to ourselves, to surroundings and to the world.
Thank you!
