Maggie Miller, 11th Grade

 “I really like to make people smile. I am part of Ambassadors club and I helped one foreign exchange student, Maria, during student orientation. She texted me later and thanked me for helping her out and how she was nervous to come to Hopkinton and felt I really helped her out. This made my day because I was so happy to help someone.”

Julia Lotvin, 12th Grade

“We write songs together all the time… One time we wrote a really silly song about this one kid and she printed out all the lyrics of a song onto a long sleeve shirt and gave it to me for Christmas- It was hands down the best gift I’ve ever gotten.”

Sarah Lotvin, 9th Grade

“Yeah I put a little comic on it too. I made her cry.”

Matthew Dempsey, 10th Grade

“In 8th Grade I made the basketball travel team and that was a really big thing for me because I worked really hard for it for a couple months and made sure I had all my skills up to date. When I made it it was the final icing on the cake.”

Sarah Williams, Art History teacher

“When I was in 10th Grade my English teacher– this had a huge impact on me, stupid woman– I had wanted to be an english teacher up until that point and this woman just crushed my spirits. I’m very creative and I love to write — I’m a little goofy — and she just gave me such bad grades because she didn’t like some of my humor. I’m getting myself worked up just thinking about it. She gave this one boy an A+ on a project that his mother helped him with the night before and all he did was cut pictures out from coloring books and the glue was still wet when he turned it in. Mine was a vocab book with like sentences and stuff, but every two lines rhymed, it had a theme, and it was gorgeous. I still got an A but the fact that he got an A+ for that piece of crap still haunts me. But, because of her, I realized I didn’t want to be an English teacher anymore. Luckily, at the same time, I was taking Latin and just my Latin teacher’s passion for Latin and all things ‘classics’- that’s what made me fall in love with it. That’s why I’m here today. It shows you how much an impact teachers can have on you. “

Sam Richardson, Hopkinton Resident, 16, Homeschooled

“I live with 11 brothers and sisters. It’s pretty cool. I am the second youngest. I have some siblings that are almost in their forties. I have a giant family. Everybody thinks we’re mormon.”