Franklin high school graduate, Michael Tubbs, came to our school with an inspirational message.  As a kid he looked up to the rapper Tupac Shakur. Commonly when a person hears rap they cringe, but Tubbs found the positive way in it. Instead of thinking that he was rapping about drugs and violence, he thoughtof it as him saying, it’s about being successful and getting ahead in life. He noticed rappers saying SWAG, according to him the acronym means, “show the world all your greatness”. One of Tubbs childhood goals was to go to college. He would find people on facebook or myspace just to ask them questions about how they got into college. He also wondered how he could get in and what would he have to do. While Tubbs was in high school a lot of his friends were dropping out, it made it hard for him to finish because people were telling him he wouldn’t be able to. He didn’t let that bother him; he wanted to be the first person in his family to go to college. He succeeded his goal when he graduated from Franklin then was accepted into Stanford University.

It would have been likely that if Tubbs never came across the poem written by Tupac, “The Rose that Grew from Concrete” he wouldn’t of succeeded his personal goal. Since the poem inspired him greatly, a rose growing from concrete no longer sounded impossible.

“Did you hear about the rose that grew
from a crack in the concrete?
Proving nature’s law is wrong it
learned to walk with out having feet.
Funny it seems, but by keeping it’s dreams,
it learned to breathe fresh air.
Long live the rose that grew from concrete
when no one else ever cared. “