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You often hear people say that the journey is more important than the destination, that if you look towards where you’ll end up, you might miss the important things happening all around you. It's true, the journey is important. So I did a little math, and this is how far we’ve come. If we are in school for 8 hours a day, for 170 days a year, then by eighth grade, the total amount of time a kid who has been at McDonogh since kindergarten has spent in school would be twelve thousand two hundred forty hours. Twelve thousand two hundred forty hours. In this time period we could have traveled to the moon 163 times.

What have we achieved during this huge period of time? We have learned to grow. How do our hours change from year to year, place to place? In kindergarten, we spent our hours coloring, or sitting in a circle, ready to listen to a teacher read to us, or playing together on the playground. Those tricycles would never go quite fast enough.

When we made the short hop from Dudley Hall, along the path to Elderkin, the content of our time changed. Instead of pedalling like lunatics through a parking lot, we played basketball, tag, foursquare. How many people stopped playing foursquare out of frustration? How many of our hours did we spend listening to “I was king and then he cheated and I lost”?

Our classes got longer, we started taking field trips, school became more focused, but only just a little bit. Mrs. Lidston would always do something crazy for the reading challenge we completed over the summer. The woman taped herself to a wall, dressed up like a cow and hooked herself to cables to “jump over the moon” in the Horn Theatre, and even got a fire truck to use as a sprinkler behind Finney Building.

After the fun of lower school, we graduated. Completing the long trek from Elderkin Hall across the bus lot, past the senior quad, and past Allan Building to Finney and Lyle, we felt our time change yet again. We spent countless hours socializing. Every day we stood in the hallway talking and listening and watching. We spent time in advisory, sitting in class, sitting in class, sitting in class, OH and sitting in class! Hours of our lives were wasted by spending time tucking in our shirts. We have labored in class, passed, failed, just scraped by.

By the end of Middle school, you start to hear a lot of “Eh, whatever”’s. It’s time to go, time to start racking up those hours of summer time spent at the beach or at camp or, best of all, sleeping. But when we reach the end of our summer slumber, there will be a puzzling test waiting for us in the Upper School. When we take our next step in our career, we must walk back past the senior quad to reach Allan Building, all the while looking in the direction of the lower school just across the way. As we move forward, we are challenged to look back.

Through the years, we have learned to grow. In Lower School, emphasis was put on being together. This has helped to create a strong bond among all of us. Every crazy, dumb, and even annoying activity we ever did in lower school was meant to bring us together. Mrs. Lidston knew that doing things like getting a fire truck and hose to play with and organizing activities like play day would bring us closer. The 4th grade teachers knew how to get us to work together when they had us solve puzzles as a group once a week.

The 6th and 7th grade teachers knew how to get us engaged and to be with one another when we had the Mclympics and campout, each of which forced us to be a team, to participate, and to be together. The 8th grade teachers challenged us to balance our personal lives and our school lives during the Bay Trip. We were able to learn while relating to one another on a personal level. Every time we crabbed together on a boat, or dredged the bottom for oysters, or slipped and slid through the mud, we were bonding and learning at the same time.

The activities given to us by our teachers over the years have helped spur our growth in understanding of one another. For the most part, everyone in our grade can relate to one another. If I could understand Gerunds and Participles and Clauses as well as I understand my friends, I would be the luckiest kid alive. And with all the time we’ve spent together, how could we not understand each other? In a way, our class has become a single unit. That isn’t to say we aren’t different. Each one of us remains an individual. However, when we can come together we can do anything we want. All the effort our teachers have invested in us over the years has resulted in a bunch of kids who work even better in a group than by themselves.

I am personally proud of our grade, because, when things get rough, we are at our best. That isn’t something that can be said about every community. You proved that we will always be ready to stand firm in the toughest times. When tragedy struck our community last year, we supported each other, we mourned together, and we helped our Class of 2016 family to heal and get back on its feet. Our growth has carried us to to where we are now, and we owe that to the teachers of our past and present. How many hours have we spent thanking everyone who helped us reach where we are now? I’m sure I speak for all of us when I say the Class of 2016 thanks you, our teachers and families, for all of your help in our growth. No matter much time we spend on thanking you, it will never be enough.