Salutations and greetings to my fellow 8th grade graduates: my name is Finn and - just like you - I will never stop learning. Even from my first moment of Planck time, I was learning. (In case you don’t know, Planck time is, according to Wikipedia, “the length of time at which no smaller meaningful length can be validly measured due to the indeterminacy expressed in Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Theoretically, this is the shortest time measurement that is possible. Planck time is roughly 10 to the negative 43 seconds.” Or 0.000000000000 - ok you get the idea - 43 zeros and then a '1' seconds.) The point is, right from birth, we all started learning, whether it was what things felt like, smelled like, or looked like. You might think that now that we're graduating middle school, we're done learning. But we'll keep going. Throughout high school, college, our entire adult lives and even when we retire, we will still be learning. Learning is lifelong and happens all the time.
For me, a great example was an experience I had in early elementary school. In first grade, I was learning, but I wasn’t learning the right things. I was working hard on reading during extra sessions with my teacher after school, but Instead of learning how to read, I was learning to memorize small books and pages and repeat them to my teacher the next day. This did nothing for me but exercise and improve my memory. So as I got farther through the year and was given more difficult books to read, of course, I could not. That all changed when I went to Touchstone Learning for second grade. At Touchstone Learning, I met an incredible teacher who was experienced in tutoring kids with dyslexia and other learning differences and teaching them how to read. There were new rules for writing and spelling, new ways of saying letters, and so much more. She and other teachers who joined later taught me how to read, write, multiply, and divide. They taught me history, science, and other essential life lessons. So when I started at Charles Armstrong for middle school, I thought I had learned all there was about reading, writing, and school in general. But from my first class, I realized I was wrong. In the past three years I have improved my writing and reading fluency, have learned how to manage my time on large projects, how to work successfully in groups, and what it's like to be at a bigger school, with lots of teachers, expectations, and responsibilities.
In conclusion, I hope you always remember that everyone is constantly learning. Even great minds like Isaac Newton, Galileo, and Albert Einstein were always learning. I hope that every one of you now has new knowledge in your brains (like the meaning of Planck time) and that you all use it wisely. I hope you continue to flourish and grow in high school and beyond as you move forward in your education and life.
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