El Toro Graduation 2012: Seniors Wax Nostalgic, Eye Future

 was a senior year highlight for the graduating El Toro High School class, but the best is yet to come.

That was the message student and staff speakers shared with hundreds of berobed graduates and their supporters Thursday night at the Bren Events Center in Irvine.

Collecting more than 74,000 items for the food drive is a "perfect example of what defines us," said senior Joey Fuentes, one of the evening's speakers.

But the 12 years of schooling spent working toward the day's diploma "will not be the greatest of your life," he told his peers. 

Another senior speaker, Kendall Senko, agreed.

Live life to the fullest since, as a popular rap song reminds listeners, YOLO—you only live once, Senko said.

Faculty speaker Jim Shields recalled the world as it was in 1993 and 1994 when El Toro High's current graduates were just making their first appearances.

Shields, El Toro High's 2012 Teacher of the Year, reminded students that only 18 years ago, there was no Google, Facebook or YouTube.

"People and cats still behaved stupidly and unusually, but they did it in private as they should," he joked.

Looking ahead to the future, Shields advised graduates to not lose sight of the bigger picture.

"Seize the moment... Soak this in," he said. Never forget the "singular and really quite gratifying fact that you're alive."

To applause from the audience, he exhorted graduates to abandon, if only temporarily, their phones and computers in exchange for books.

Reading is a primary method of seeking "intellectual discomfort," he said, another experience he encouraged graduates to seek out.

Following your passion is also essential to a successful and happy future, advised Dolores Winchell, of the Saddleback Valley Unified School District Board of Trustees. 

She warned graduates against mistaking ability for passion, and against letting fear get in the way of pursing their interests.

During the program, senior members of El Toro's choirs took the stage and performed Time of Our Lives by Tyrone Wells, singing lyrics that echoed the mix of feelings many students were experiencing, from gratitude for the past to trepidation about the future: 

All of these years when we were here are ending/But I'll always remember/We have had the time of our lives/And now the page is turned/The stories we will write...It's hard to walk away from the best of days/But if it has to end, I'm glad you have been my friend/In the time of our lives.

El Toro's salutatorian, Rahit Mohindra, opened the evening's program with the class greeting. Valedictorian Yasmin Kakar closed it out by leading her peers in the traditional tassel turn from right to left.

Then, the majority of the newly minted El Toro High class of 2012 scurried, scooted and sashayed their way out into the world, and over to their alma mater for .