PORTSMOUTH — Graduation ceremonies, no matter how important, are often drawn-out affairs with little to break the ceremonial monotony. 
 
 A few friends at Portsmouth High School decided to change that. 
 
 Spearheaded by valedictorian Colin Yost, the class of roughly 235 students successfully performed a flash mob to Taylor Swift’s pop tune “Shake It Off,” shocking the audience and eventually going viral once MTV came calling. 
 
 The video had been viewed on YouTube more than 270,000 times by Tuesday afternoon. Yost and others couldn’t have been happier with how it turned out — and the national attention it is receiving. 
 
 “I never thought it would have gone that well,” said Brooke Matthews, who helped organize the flash mob with Yost and fellow seniors Georgina Head and Lauren Gagne. “We’re so proud at how well everyone came together.” 
 
 Yost cited the cohesiveness of the class and approval of the administration to rehearse the dance routine for its success. Five marching practices were used to get the timing and movements correct. 
 
 “About three weeks before graduation, I woke up at 3 a.m. to a text from Colin asking me to help with choreography for a graduation flash mob,” Head said, adding she started watching the Swift music video and mapping out a dance routine. 
 
 There was difficulty crafting a suitable routine, as all the graduates were sitting. The students decided that having different sections jump in would help with the display. 
 
 “We played around with some moves,” Head said. “We knew the front row was the class council, so we could get up and move around.” 
 
 The other important detail was hitting the music cue, which was where the administration finally came into play. 
 
 “We hadn’t planned on telling administration,” Yost said. 
 
 But as each senior would be on the auditorium floor, someone was needed to start the song. 
 
 “At first they were against it,” said Gagne. “But we told them to listen to us and we showed them our plan.” 
 
 The students presented detailed outlines of the entire performance to the administration, complete with white board diagrams and a sneak peek at the dance by Yost himself. 
 
 As Yost finished his speech — the ending words were “All you have to do, is shake it off” — he broke out into dance as looks of shock and surprise come over faces in the audience. “It was such a great moment ending the speech, hearing the music play and then dancing awkwardly,” Yost said. 
 
 While the moment was meant to be light-hearted and fun, Yost said the song and dance routine summed up exactly what he was talking about in his valedictory address: To embrace your inner nerd. 
 
 “The goal was to basically try to go viral and send a positive message, not about Portsmouth High School and the Class of 2015, but life in general,” said Yost, who will attend Princeton University this fall. “My speech leading up to the flash mob is about embracing your inner nerd and being proud of who you are. The song aligns with that.” 
 
 Yost and the other students didn’t expect much hoopla in the aftermath, but they did start to notice when Facebook videos of the event from a teacher and parent started to creep into the tens of thousands of views. 
 
 “After just a couple nights, two Facebook videos had more than 10,000 views separately, so that was shocking.” 
 
 Yost said the videos spread around a little bit more before he received an email from a writer for MTV.com asking to talk to him about the flash mob. 
 
 “I was thrilled and shocked,” Yost said. “I called them, talked for a few minutes and once that article was posted, it exploded.” 
 
 article became the top-trending story on Thebecame the top-trending story on MTV.com later Monday evening, and has been shared across Facebook more than 50,000 times. 
 
 Yost, who works as an assistant support personnel in the cardiovascular operating room at Portsmouth Regional Hospital, said it’s a memory that will stay with him forever. ||||| YouTube 
 
 The commencement speech arms race is no joke this year. It takes something pretty special to grab attention during a season when one valedictorian got a nationally televised do-over after his school banned him from coming out in his address, and everyone from President Obama to Matthew McConaughey, Bill Nye, Ed Helms and Stephen Colbert have been lighting up stages. 
 
 So, Colin Yost knew he needed to up his game. The valedictorian at Portsmouth High School in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, pulled off one for the ages on Friday, when he ended his inspirational speech by saying, "all you have to do it shake it off." 
 
 He then stepped back and began shaking it as Taylor Swift's hit came on over the gym's loudspeakers. 
 
 "I've always wanted to do a flash mob and I thought graduation would be the perfect place because our class is very cohesive and doesn't really have a lot of cliques," Yost told MTV News on Monday morning, while taking a break from his job as an assistant in a cardiovascular operating room at a Portsmouth hospital. 
 
 "I was listening to 'Shake It Off' in the car and I thought that would be great for a flash mob so I talked to a few of my friends about making it happen." One friend, a stage manager, handled the music, while two others with dance experience helped choreograph the whole thing. 
 
 They put together an instructional video for the class that they shared privately on YouTube and then got the administration on board, who said they were fine with the plan as long as Yost and his 230+ classmates could actually pull it off. They even let the seniors use five scheduled graduation rehearsals to get the routine right. 
 
 "As we practiced, the energy was just building and everyone was feeling how great it was to work together and send this positive message," Yost said. 
 
 Following his funny, touching speech about embracing your inner nerd and striving for perfection in anything you're passionate about, Yost started the dance alone, which was (purposely) awkward. "My parents and a lot of other parents didn't know, so at the end of my speech half were laughing and some where like, 'oh gosh, what is he doing?'" 
 
 But then, little by little, the front row joined in, then another row and the looks of confusion and fear turned into laughter and tears from the families as pretty soon the routine turned the class of '15 into an undulating sea of maroon and white caps and gowns. 
 
 Yost, who wants to be a heart surgeon, is headed to Princeton in the fall, where he plans to major in chemical and biological engineering. 
 
 And, in case you were wondering. "No, I've never taken dance lessons." ||||| By Carl Willis 
 
 UPDATE: Paris Gray and her family met with the school's principal and the area superintendent on Tuesday. They apologized for the miscommunication and said they would not deny her giving a speech at graduation. The superintendent challenged her to "give the best speech ever." 
 
 A student says fallout over her quote in the yearbook is threatening to ruin her senior year. 
 
 Paris Gray is a senior class vice president, a member of SADD, the Beta Club, and a leader on campus at Mundy's Mill Hgih School. 
 
 Now, she could be kept from speaking at graduation next week. 
 
 "I think their reaction was beyond what it should have been because nobody understood it," said Paris Gray. 
 
 She received an in-school suspension and was kept from participating in a senior walk last Friday after yearbooks were distrubuted, all due to a quote she left near her portrait. 
 
 The message was: "When the going gets tough just remember to Barium, Carbon, Potassium, Thorium, Astatine, Arsenic, Sulfur, Uranium, Phosphorus." 
 
 Gray tells Channel 2's Carl Willis the message wasn't flagged by any editors or adults. 
 
 Friday, administrators learned that by using periodic table the elements spelled "To back that as_ up." 
 
 "My first reaction was, you are such a nerd," said Gray's mother Zarinah Woods. 
 
 "Basically, it was me just saying start all over again," said Gray. "You have to go back and start all over." 
 
 Administrators were not pleased. 
 
 Paris was kept from participating in the senior walk, and she was slated to give the inspirational speech at the graduation ceremony, but says an assistant principal told her she was out. 
 
 "It just completely destroyed me, and my mom's been telling me don't let it ruin my happiness but it's like really taking a big toll," said Gray. 
 
 The principal called shortly after the mother and daughter spoke with Willis. 
 
 A school district spokesperson says that no decision has been made and that the area superintendent and the principal would meet with Gray's mother Tuesday morning. 
 
 Irresistible Headlines
– Parents who thought they were going to have to sit through a boring graduation in a stuffy gym got anything but at Portsmouth High School on Friday. Colin Yost, the valedictorian for the New Hampshire school's senior class, decided he wanted to shake things up—and off—during his commencement speech, so after his words of inspiration, he stepped out from behind the podium and started dancing, by himself, to Taylor Swift's "Shake It Off," eliciting laughter and some "oh gosh, what is he doing?" reactions, MTV reports. Soon, however, his intentions were made clear as the rest of his graduating class (more than 230 in all) stood up and joined Colin in a choreographed celebration of the end of their high school career. While Colin's flash mob surprised the audience, it was far from spontaneous. The senior posted a video tutorial on YouTube for his classmates to study and cajoled the school's administration beforehand into letting him use five graduation rehearsals to get the moves down just right, MTV notes. "As we practiced, the energy was just building and everyone was feeling how great it was to work together and send this positive message," he tells the station. He adds that the song-and-dance show played perfectly into what he had talked about in his speech on embracing your inner nerd, the Portsmouth Herald notes. But despite the Taylor-made two-stepping's success, we probably won't be seeing Colin—who admits he's never taken a dance lesson—on So You Think You Can Dance: He's headed to Princeton to study chemical and biological engineering, per MTV. (Hopefully no one got arrested for cheering.)