APOLLO. The name Greeks and Romans call their sun god who is also the god of music, healing and poetry. This is also the name Americans call their spacecraft to the moon. Above all, this is the name we call ourselves - CSCLHS IV-APOLLO A Batch 1999.

Did we live up to our name? I guess we did.

Most, if not all of us either sing, play an instrument or do both. It's not because we all have the talents ( though some of us are really gifted with musical skills) but because we like music . It is our outlet for frustrations, hang-ups, happiness and yes, boredom ( formal term for "studying lessons"). We joined school organizations and planned projects 'for the welfare of the institution'. We attended Christmas ball, Math Club ball, Junior and Senior Prom, Valentines Ball, English club ball and other occasions we  deemed necessary to be celebrated (if we had our way, we could have organized Thursday Sweepers ball). We prepared homeworks, took tests, and worked on school projects. We had crushes, wrote love letters, gave gifts and shared secrets with each other. We brought pride to our Alma Mater by competing and winning in various contests. We were the 'cream of the crop' the seniors.

But we were not saints.

We learned how to drink, smoke and utter profanities. Some joined fraternities and mingled with the "bad crowd" - the people our parents wanted us to avoid. We resorted to copying and making "kodigo" during exams when other means of getting high grades fail. We were guilty of giving our teachers nicknames - names that would have caused flying erasers and books if heard by the respective teacher. We 'stamped our legacy' on bathroom wall, on doors, on tables, on chairs and on about anything with flat surface. We declared our own holidays.

When I mentioned that we were not saints, I didn't mean that we were major-league delinquents. We didn't start riots nor paint our school walls with vulgar words. We didn't physically hurt any of our teachers or any student (okay, we made some of them cry through emotional anguish. We didn't deliberately destroy school properties just for kicks. In other words, we were not criminals in the making; we were "just being teen-agers."

The men and women of Apollo A '99 have different personalities. We belonged to different cliques - Magic 10, Forever, Magic 6 and Magic 3 ( there were many 'magic 3' groups; it's for those people who don't want to be branded as loner but cannot feel comfortable with too big group). Other people just feel happy hopping from one group to another. One good thing about being part of any group is that its members seem to follow a "one for all, all for one" policy. Anybody who tries to fight with one of the group has the rest of the group to deal with. There were 44 of us  and most often than not, we had varying opinions on certain matters. This had caused petty arguments which sometimes lead to big fights where the people involved refused to talk to each other or exchanged hurtful words. But somehow, we were able to patch things up and even look back at those times realizing how silly we had been.

After graduation, we all went to separate ways. Some of us may have gone to the same school and taken the same course but it wasn't the same. Like an eagle, we soared high...to different directions, to different dreams. But we will always be bonded by one thing - the memory we shared as IV-Apollo A, the last batch...  

In IV-Apollo A '99 "magic n" means a group of n people; the term was coined by El Presidente