Good evening everyone! Parents, teachers and students… and also Hi Gleb! Long time no see! If you have ever been around us during the last two years, you may recognise this long-running joke. As Gleb and I are in basically every class, we made the joke of pretending we haven’t seen each other in a long time. However, now that we have finally reached graduation day, it really is going to be a long time till we see each other again.

Ben and I both had very different experiences. He joined during year 9, while I’ve been here since year 7, and to anyone from HLY, I’ve been there since the start too. When we came to visit the school in year 6, who would have thought that we’d end up being the 10th graduating class and doing all the exams that come with it. I certainly didn’t. Then again, I was a tad more innocent back then.

Anyways, back to the topic. Hello fellow M24 graduates on May 24th, as we celebrate being the 10th graduating class of ICHK. Lots of coincidences you may be able to tell but then again, is life not filled with coincidence? What was the coincidence that all of us ended up in a year? All of us from different schools, different backgrounds, different interests. What are the odds of all of us deciding to make a somewhat smart decision of doing the IB diploma and graduating together? All of these are just interesting food for thought in general, which I wanted to bring your attention to.

Now, what the IB has taught us through the 18-months of CAS and EE is that we have to actively reflect on our experiences. Hence, as habits die hard, I’ll be doing the same. Hopefully this would allow me to tick all the learning objectives.

To the many of you who have been going through the “ICHK experience” since year 7, you may recall starting the year in the PA room, sitting in rows with people which would eventually become the form groups you were likely stuck with till now. 

On that first day, or sometime around it, I don’t know … it’s been around 6 years, Mr Newton, I think, introduced us to the supposed “Rules” of ICHK. There were only three rules, as I remember, that “more rules leads to more people breaking rules”. This idea already gave me the impression that ICHK was something different. A school with different ideas and methods to other schools. In a place especially like HK, the lack of massive facilities, exam oriented education and being locked up in AC rooms made ICHK feel incredibly different. Especially with the location, ICHK had already been built up to be the “different” school.

 Over the years, this specific detail came to be something I appreciated and loved from the school. The unique experiences and smaller scale created a more intimate feel in our community, and gave the school a lot more character and life. Walking around school, you probably could tell which year or which group of people they are from easily and no one is a complete stranger. I may be reading too much into this, I mean hey, we have gotten pretty good at finding implicit meaning in texts, but talking to a few friends, ICHK’s more unique experiences is something that gave our secondary school years more life.

Some of you may still recall ICHK before the weird virus with the same name as a beer company came into our lives. For some, it was the lunch times playing video games in the ICT room, or media room as it used to be called. For others, it may have been enjoying the time with friends in random classrooms. In general, we were all in our more innocent times, where the reality of life has not hit us yet.

Compared to now, after going through two rounds of exams, hours in front of the computer either doing zoom calls or mass typing essays at the hope for that additional point, we all probably lost around several years of our lifespan. However, we all have definitely matured more, and developed as human beings. We were able to evolve from the “Parent-Child” conversation to the “Adult-Adult” conversations and were given near full freedom at school. Of course, we have a lot more time to mature, as most people’s brains fully mature after around 25 years old, the source is trust me, but secondary school is definitely the stage of life where we all matured the most. Or at least I hope.

Still, as much as this seems like the end of a journey, adulthood really feels like the start of you actually being you, and who you will end up being as you settle in. However, it is also the end of us as a group growing and developing together. One thing I feel that we took for granted are the small moments in the day. Moments like randomly calling your friends for help with homework, or sitting in a circle in the IB common room playing horrid would you rathers. These are moments that we won’t be able to experience together again in the same way. And I'm glad for ICHK being able to give us so many of those small moments. Thank you.

I’ll pass it off to Ben now, as he is very eloquent with his words..

Thanks Karim.

Mr Hall taught us that in our essays, we should start by telling the audience clearly what you’re about to say, then you say what you want to say, then you end by telling people what you just said. So - what I’m about to say is a speech talking about my personal experience in ICHK with a few observations and anecdotes. The anecdotes are important because we must always support our points with evidence. In keeping with this academic setting, feel free to analyse our speeches as we go along. For example, you may have noticed that I used alliteration when I said ‘Feel free’. What that implies is up to you to figure out.

As Karim said, I only joined ICHK midway in year 9. The Cantonese phrase for a new student is 插班生, like a student who has slotted themselves into the class. Interestingly, the word 插 is usually used in negative situations, like interrupting (插嘴) or cutting in line (插隊). And in a way, I do think I did kind of cut in line in front of other people so I could get an opportunity like this to come to an international school. And I'm immensely grateful. Of course I did have some trepidation, some doubts… Would I fit in, would I truly grow as a learner? But those fears were in vain!… as the year that I arrived was 2019. Instead of having to traverse the jungles of serious social interaction, I was able to make great acquaintance with the foreheads of my peers, even when our teachers may have… pressed us to tilt our webcams down just a few more degrees.

My earliest memory of anything IB related was a conversation where there were some people talking in serious tones about what the future would bring with taking that course. I diligently contributed to this conversation by asking the important question of, “Hey guys, what’s IB?” Now, I still ask myself that question, albeit in a different tone.

One of the things that all of us have collectively learned to do is to talk extensively about particular topics in an academic voice, otherwise known as waffling, or yapping. For instance, I know someone who loved finding and using long words, especially the word ‘pontificate’. I know not the contexts in which you can use that word, but he certainly used it in more ways than expected. This idea of long-winded responses was also clear to me when I wanted to make a manga recommendation to someone, but thought to clarify first what he thought of the romance genre before giving it. He then proceeded to reply with paragraphs upon paragraphs of an in-depth analysis into the genre of romance, its effects on the reader and even cited a source. He probably would have continued had I not stopped him to say that his analysis was unnecessary for the situation. So to our International Baccalaureate overlords, we thank you for bequeathing upon us this plethora of utilitarian skills. 

So, what you've heard just now are a collection of anecdotes and little observations of how my few years at this school have been. As I close, I'll talk a little about some contrived point just to keep more in line with our attitude to speeches. In psychology, we learned something called schema theory. This theory talks about how as we go through life, we create these preconceived notions, these heuristics, about how things in the world work. If you learn how one smartphone works, you go into new smartphones with the same expectations. As you grow, you assimilate new knowledge and your views go through these little changes to accommodate for them. Now, I currently have this schema of how my life works. I go to school and take my classes and see my friends according to a set schedule, and do that every weekday for seven hours a day. That's just what I've been used to across 13 years and three schools. Now, we're all going to spread across the world, and we’re all going to have to change our schemas and expectations of everything. And that's great. We get to broaden our horizons, learn more new things. (List out some of the different paths that people are going to take) But even so, I can't help but think that I'd like to spend just a little more time with you guys. Thank you for being there. Love you guys.