This is the speech delivered by the High School Principal during the HS general assembly last August 24, 2005.

      Good morning.

      As you’ve experienced, life in school is usually a cycle of relaxed beginnings which slowly progress into harried days of stressful cramming and frenzied meeting of deadlines. These turbulent times only turn into relieved sighs once the quarterly test days are over and the cycle begins anew with the start of a new quarter.

      While it is healthy for you to relax and let go of the stress that came with the quarter end requirements and the exam week, it is also not healthy for you to totally let go of the first quarter and start the second quarter as though it were the beginning of the school year. The first quarter, whether it was an enjoyable or an awful experience for you, brought with it many lessons to be learned – and I’m not referring to textbook lessons alone. The first quarter included lessons with titles like:

• CSI (Chers’ Secret Idiosyncrasies) - the unique mannerisms, favorite expressions, expectations, limits of your different subject teachers – and this is an important lesson because you learned to adapt and therefore thrive under the different personalities of your teachers;

• Survivor – the basic skills and strategies you realized you needed to learn in order to pass the different subjects;

• The Great Raid – you discovered the danger of bringing contrabands as the ODS conducted their searches;

• Kid Notorious – where you came up with creative and usually naughty ways to entertain yourselves inside the classroom with or without the teacher…and many others.

      Seriously, the 1st quarter revealed many things about you, too. It checked whether you had study habits in place and whether they were enough to assure you passable if not good grades. The first quarter threw you academic pressures which tested your ability to cope with the demands of the year level and checked your reactions to them. The first quarter more or less set the parameters of what you can and cannot do for the succeeding quarters. The grades you’ll see in your report cards next week will tell you how well you measured up to the expectations of the school and will serve to either affirm your hard work or encourage you to do better.

      As we start the second quarter, I advise you not to take things too lightly even in these early days. Rather, I advise you to view this start of the quarter as the start of another countdown – the countdown to the 2nd quarter end. But this time, you’ll be a wiser student (because of all your formal and informal lessons from the 1st quarter) who’ll make the most out of the forthcoming days of the new quarter.

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