Rob Varela / Star staff Jordan Avnet waves to his family as he files onto the football field with his Thousand Oaks High School classmates. After the ceremony Thursday, he was heading to Disneyland for an all-night celebration with other Conejo Valley Unified School District graduates.

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"Do my ears stick out under this thing?"

"Who invented these hats, anyway?"

"Can you see my bangs now?"

In Room H-2 at Thousand Oaks High School, 20 minutes before the Class of 2007 took the field to graduate, headwear had become very important. A clutch of soon-to-be graduates was checking and rechecking the angles of their mortarboards in the reflection of the classroom's television set.

In one corner, Rachel and Connie Peters were making sure that Connie's mortarboard displayed her bangs just right.

Rachel was the only graduate of the pair; Connie, her mom, works in the school library and donned cap and gown to share her daughter's big moment.

The Peters clan is a Thousand Oaks High family. Connie Peters was in the Class of 1976, her husband graduated in 1973, and Rachel's older brother graduated four years ago.

"My mom's going to sit in my row and hand me my diploma," Rachel said. "I'm sure I'm going to cry. It's just more special when it's my mom."

There were plenty of tears when Rachel and the 609 other members of the Class of 2007 said their goodbyes to the campus Thursday evening. There were also plenty of jitters as they waited for what most of the kids in Room H-2 said was the main event: grad night.

Once the ceremony was over, they would be shuttled directly to Disneyland for an all-night celebration, with the graduating classes of the other high schools in the Conejo Valley Unified School District.

Thousand Oaks High's group includes graduates who will be going on to Harvard, Stanford and all of the U.S. military's service academies, Principal Tim Carpenter said before Thursday's ceremony.

The class also included eight valedictorians, all of them with grade-point averages above 4.65.

One of them, Danielle Erb, is living proof that you can spend your high school years in front of the TV and still conquer the world.

Her entry in the graduation program ran for 15 lines of scholarships and awards.

And yet, her commencement speech was a tribute to the much-maligned idiot box and the relevance of its hit shows.

Addressing a generation that she said is defined by "vast exposure to media," Erb drew analogies between her classmates and the characters on "Grey's Anatomy," "American Idol" and "The Apprentice."

"We're the future of society," she said.

"What we aren't are the baby boomers, the flower children, or the Gen Xers."