SL Students Attend Positive Choice Assembly
Presenter Marty Breeze
by Dana Epley
September 09, 2009
Silver Lake students and staff members were invited to attend the Positive Choice Assembly on Wednesday, September 9th, 2009 at Blue Hill High School. The assembly was put on by the Blue Hill Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and the presenter was Marty Breeze. Mr. Breeze used both music and inspiring accounts of his own life to encourage the students to set goals for themselves and do the things needed to achieve those goals - rather than to wait for your life to make a plan for you.
In his one-hour long presentation, Mr. Breeze asked that each of the students return to school with a "plan" for what they want to have accomplished in six years - a time when all of the students who were at the assembly would be graduated from high school. From that plan, he asked that each of them write down five steps to achieve this plan/goal that they would need to start working on now. The example that he used was to become a basketball player post-high school. He used the steps of shooting 500 free throws, dribbling daily with your "off" hand, jumping rope, practicing lay ups, and hitting the weight room.
Mr. Breeze used his own personal account of visiting Haitti, where children didn't have the money for food, clothing, or an education, and where the unemployment rate at the time of his visit was 80%. He emphasized over and over how thankful all of us should be to live in the United States of America, where we often take healthcare, jobs, and food for granted. All of us are given the resources in America to make something of ourselves, and if choose not to, it is not the fault of those around us - but our own fault. Start working - and start sooner, rather than later.
Mr. Breeze even challenged the teachers in the audience to be there for the students - and not just in the classroom - but in terms of supporting the students when they felt that they had no one else to turn to. Each of the teachers in the crowd who wanted to be accountable for this were asked to stand in support of this statement. Students were also asked for a show of hands if they knew where they wanted to see themselves in six years - few students were aware, or willing to stand up and say, what they wanted to be doing with their lives in six years.
When he wasn't speaking of his own personal accounts, Mr. Breeze used rock and roll music to entertain the crowd. In between music and games, Mr. Breeze's message was clear: Work hard, respect your teachers/parents and those in the generations before you, set goals and don't wait for your fate to be decided for you.
The students and staff from Silver Lake enjoyed the performance, and would like to say a big THANK YOU to Blue Hill Schools for asking them to take part in this event.
