Best 2018 Graduation Speech, by Andrea Martínez

This year's best graduation speech is by 4 ESO A student Andrea Martínez, who has not only written a nice farewell address, but she delivered it in style and graciously, with fine pronunciation, intonation and stance, and with remarkable composure and serenity.

As usual, this student is the chosen one to speak on behalf of his classmates at the 4 ESO graduation ceremony to be held at 1 pm on Thursday 21st June.

HAPPINESS and PRIDE

Welcome parents, family, guests and teachers. Thank you for being here on this important day.

Today is a day of happiness and pride. First of all, congratulations to all of you, classmates and friends, for being here today, for having spent all these years studying, having lessons and working hard to have a good future and improve your learning and your life.

  

I came to this school in 2006 in the second year of kindergarten. On my first day, that day when all of us were wearing our red sweatshirt, our blue trousers and our checkered apron. Some of us were crying because we didn’t want to say bye to our parents. And today, on our last day at this school, we will cry again because we will not want to say bye to Labor School. That day, the kindergarten first day, the day that no one remembers, is the day that has marked us. We didn't even know it yet, but on that day our student career started at Labor School.

During our first few years here, we learned the Little Einstein´s dance to make a spaceship take off and not to talk when the teacher wasn't in the classroom and a classmate used to write names on the board.

At the end of kindergarten, we had the first graduation of our lives and we started Primary Education, another day of happiness and pride. Primary will be always the best time of a student career. When you are in Primary you don´t have to study much, you don’t have many problems or worries and your life is always fun. You draw a picture every week explaining what you did on your weekend, you listen to the Christmas Lottery live, you learn verb tables, multiplication tables, tables, tables and more tables. We did mathematical competitions during the lessons, we did the 'Baker Game' in PE, we took part in an amazing athletics competition with other schools (where we won just one trophy, but it doesn´t matter). There, we also learned the importance of sharing thanks to María Aguiño's and Ana Collazo's "700 kilos Goal". Primary ended with the goodbye to some classmates and the arrival of others. But we stayed together in the same classes and in the same groups.

But you continue growing up and you move on to Secondary Education. You are now in the last part of your time at school, you will have now 8 different teachers and you will have to start working harder than before. You have been seeing those people, who seemed very serious and some a little unfriendly, for years during the breaks, and now they are your teachers. Now you take lessons in the older students' building, that white and green building. 

The first day of Secondary comes. This day is your first time entering the Secondary building with the other Secondary students and you find yourself waiting to go upstairs in this crowded hall and surrounded by people as tall as a tower. In our first few years here we started with the Galician definition pages, with the DIN A5, with Candido's scary tests written in black ink on his graph paper. We took up French, a strange language, Word, Qkad, and Sketchup exams, Cooper tests, irregular verbs tests and all the presentations in public. Here we had the flute tests that shook our pulse. And we started the Olympic teams.

During all these years, there have been times of distress; there were happy moments too and goals achieved in group. A group that wouldn't exist without you, teachers and parents. Thank you, teachers for putting up with our foolishness, for being so patient with us and for being more than teachers, friends and parents.

And parents, what can I say? We owe you a lot: all your support and unconditional effort every time you had to explain something to us over and over again, or help us organize our study time, or if you had to pay for coaching lessons or revise lessons with us. You have to know it was worth it.

This school has made a family from us, a big and strong family, both students and teachers. This family is now 13 years old; even if someone has joined in later, the link is very tight too.

Today, a day of happiness and pride, is the day when this period ends and the future starts, when our time at Labor School ends and a new period called high school starts.

Everything in life comes to an end and this speech too. And now we will make promises like… nothing is going to change, we will meet every month and we will chat most days. But life moves on and we have to move on too. This is not just an ending: this is a new beginning too. I hope you all have all the best of luck in the future. Not being together does not mean forgetting what we have lived and shared.

And there is one thing that we can promise. That when we walk past one of us down the street, we will think that this person was with us at Labor School and we will remember all the important and happy moments that we enjoyed with them in the past.

Today is a day of happiness and pride... Enjoy it! Thank you everybody and congratulations and all the best, my friends!

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