August 17, 2018
Good morning, and welcome to St. Michael Catholic High School for new student orientation!
I am your principal, Mr. Weber, and it really is a pleasure to welcome you to St. Michael this morning, for this, our 3rd year as a school and our first as a complete 9-12th grade. All of you will be able to say that to your children and grand-children one day—that you entered St. Michael in its first year as a complete high school.
I want today to be fun. But also, as you begin your careers here, I'd like to speak to you in a serious way, as young adults, because that is what you're becoming.
St. Michael wants you to become "scholars, leaders and disciples of Jesus Christ." Let me talk about what each of those means.
a.“Scholars”—That doesn’t mean we think you’re all going to get 4.0’s here and graduate with scholarships to Havard, Yale or Notre Dame. It means that you use the gifts God has given you to do your best, to work hard in your classes, to do your homework, to be the best you can be. For some of you, yes, that might mean Notre Dame—as an alum, I’d love it if some of you set your sites to go there. But for ALL of you, it means effort. Effort, how hard we work, is something completely within our control. We’re going to ask you to do, on average, 60-90 minutes of homework each night.. Can you get by with less? Probably, but your grades won’t be what they should be. We’re going to count homework and classwork somewhere between 25-40% of your grade. That’s a pretty big piece of it, almost as much as tests. If you get zeroes in HW, your grade suffers. Why do we do that? Because EFFORT matters. GRIT matters. Hard work matters.
Let me ask you to do something—Raise your hand if you have never made anything less than a B on your report card? Many of you, right! I graded every single placement test, I reviewed your grades, and in fact, you’re a smart group. You’ve had a lot of success! You should be rightfully proud of that. But now you’re in high school, those grades no long matter. Colleges aren’t going to ask you to show them your grades from CTK, or Fairhope Middle School, or St. Patrick. The only grades they care about is your high school grades, posted on what we call a transcript, which is a summary of all your grades in all your classes during your 4 years of HS.
Just before I walked down here, I had our school software print out the transcript for a random freshman. I could have picked any freshman, because it prints out the same thing. It's a completely blank piece of paper. If you’ve been a terrible student with pretty low grades up until this point in your life, you have exactly the same GPA right now as your classmate who has never made anything less than a B. You have a chance to start over if you’ve been lazy, and a chance to re-prove yourself if you’ve done well. From this point forward, you’ll be putting grades on this blank paper. And mathematically, the grades you make as freshmen count exactly the same as the grades you make as juniors or seniors. You begin writing on this blank page on Monday.
—So we think if you work hard in your classes here, you will indeed be a “scholar.”
b. “leaders” —That might mean that one of you is the student body president in your senior year. It might mean you are team captains on your athletic teams as juniors or seniors, or presidents of clubs here. Or that you’re part of our student government, which we call the House Council (president, vice-president). All of those things are awesome, and we encourage you to strive for them. But what “leaders” mean for all of you—whether you hold office or not, captaincy or not, is that you are courageous. That you stand up for good things. That you lead your peers in a positive direction. That if you’re in a group and the group begins gossiping about a classmate, that you change the subject, or walk away. That you protect each other’s reputation. That if your peers are tempted to do something wrong, like drinking, or vaping, or smoking, that through your example, you discourage that.
We have a lot of cowards in our world today, and I’m not talking primarily about people your age. I’m talking about people in my generation. Adults. Too often we say, “that’s his life, not mine, I should mind my own business ” and then wash our hands of responsibility for each other, like Pontius Pilate, saying that Jesus’ death was on someone else’s hands, not his. But what good people do is we take responsibility for each other. We care about our friends, we care about our classmates. We care about our school. The world needs leaders. Be courageous enough to lead.
c. “disciples of Jesus Christ”— Use these years in high school to draw closer to Christ. High school years can be stressful, sometimes full of hurt—the betrayal of a close friend, a bad grade, being interested in someone but that someone not interested in you. Returning students have heard me say this before, but the high school years can be tough at times. Lonely. Adults are fond of saying “These are the best years of your life.” These ARE great years, but they’re not the best years. Often, they’re tough. Draw closer to Jesus. He’ll heal that hurt. He’ll give you courage. He’ll help you with the decisions you need to make about college, about friends, about situations in your family. Bring him your stress, thank him for your successes, share your joy and pain with him. Pray for each other. Pray for things that you’re worried about. If you do, God will give you great joy and happiness. That’s what he wants for all of us!
So scholars, leaders and disciples—that’s what we want for you. That’s what we pray you’ll become. Have the courage to embrace that for yourself, too.
A few other tips:
Two students, which do you think is happier? Student #1 beats everyone to the parking lot each day. He’s traveling down Higbee Road at 3:12, first to get home. Student #2 plays on the football team, goes to practice until 5:30 or 6. Come September 15, who is happier? (ask. Ask why). If you’re an athlete, great—try out for teams. If you’re a musician, fantastic, throw yourself into our band or choral program. If you like to Debate, join the Debate team. Don’t be the guy who runs out the door at 3:10 at dismissal each day to go home. If you do, HS will be incredibly boring. You won’t have friends. Join stuff. It’s the best way to make friends. (We’ll have a club day when you can sign up for things soon).
Get sleep. When we were kids we never wanted to take naps. Hated to sleep in. Surest proof you’re a teenager is when sleep begins to sound really cool. 8-10 hours. If you’re waking up at 6 in the morning, you’d need to go to bed by 10. Can you get by with less? Yep, but you won’t be 100%. This is a medical fact, not an opinion. Best thing you can do for a test is get good sleep. And remember that we have body clocks, too. Our bodies like routines, and get all screwed up when we break routines. If you go to bed at 3 a.m. on Friday night and Saturday night wake up at noon each day, you’re going to have a hard time going to sleep at 10 and waking up at 6 on Monday. It’ll take you a day or two to readjust back.
Vary it up. Don’t just do one thing over and over. If you love soccer, great, play soccer, but don’t play JUST soccer. Play some other sports. Get good at music, go for A’s in classes, do different things. Renaissance man, doing many different type things. Makes life fun. Gives us some balance. Keeps things from being stale.
Bring your fears, hopes, anxieties to God. Pray to him. Go to Church. Pray at school masses. Use our chapel.
Last point: President Kennedy once said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. “ I’ve emphasized that you are all here in this first year as a complete 9-12 school. In a real way, then, you are part of the founding of this school. I know it’s natural to be thinking about just yourselves when you start something brand new, but I hope you’ll also be thinking about the impact you can have on this place over the course of your 4 years here—or if you’re a transfer, during the years you are with us. How can YOU make this place better? What can YOU add to the school that makes people say, “Wow, that’s an excellent school”?
Because make no mistake, now that you’re Cardinals, now that you wear the uniform, or put on a team jersey, outsiders will judge the quality of this school by your actions—their only window into this school might be through you. What will they see? How will your actions represent the rest of us? What will people think about us? What kind of school will we be? Believe it or not, you’ll have more to say about that than I will. I’ll be interested to see what kind of school you’ll make it.
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