Sophomore Chapel Speech: Growing Up

Shereka Dauphine
Sophomore Chapel Speech
Growing Up Good morning my fellow classmates! Before I begin I would just like to commend all of you for completing yet another year of high school. Hopefully you are more mature than the year before, but if not , you still have time. For my chapel Speech I wanted to discuss something really important in my life and that is developing and improving my views. You may be confused, but the reality is half of you subscribe to impersonal views of your parents or other authority figures without putting in enough thought of your own. It is important that you understand that those older than you, are not always right. Once you stop depending on others for your understanding of the world and social issues,

I realized that the world was full of imperfections and that me educating myself was the first step to making it better. I did not always agree with what my parents or classmates said, but I did not care. The incident that really made be question all that I thought and understood, took place in my eighth grade Latin class. It was towards the end of the year and we were discussing philosophy and ethics. At this point in the year I was over everything and was not too interested in hearing what my teacher had to say until he began to talk about the neutrality of nature. While it is completely true that nature is neutral and is neither good or bad, he began to speak about inequality. He claimed that there is nothing one can do about inequality . It was the typical "life is unfair, get used to it" Speech. People often say this to teenagers as a way to help them "mature", that poorly articulated rant did something else to me. Maybe it was because everyday there was a new hashtag with a dead person's name or maybe it was because no one found those 306 girls yet or maybe it was because drones kept being dropped on innocent civilians. Whatever is was my teacher's message felt like one of pure hopelessness, it made me feel like I had no choice but to suffer in the sexism and racism that would find me in my