Death and taxes right? For me I think there is a little bit more that we can depend on in this crazy life. For instance, even when the Dolphins were up 14-0 today i knew they would lose, and they did. I also knew that having homecoming and halloween fall on the same weekend at a college campus could bring no good, and again i was right. I don't need to get into specifics, but lets just say drama happened. Drama is nothing new, but sometimes it gets piled on to the point where you feel like you may just have to start over, new friends, new school, everything. Sophocles said "to be born is to know tragedy," and he knew a thing or two about life and drama. But where as drama is unpredictable and seems to pop up out of nowhere there are always things you can count on to counteract it. Alcohol is not one. It makes things much worse. However I've found that friendship and honesty really can take care of everything. I was faced with multiple conflicts this weekend; some of which I was in the wrong, other's I had been wronged but in each situation I went right to the source and talked it out face to face. People often forget that interpersonal relationships are best conducted in the same room;Not via text or facebook. It was amazing to me how these people all commented how much it meant that i went to them face-to-face. It was just incredible to me that they would expect anything less. The second thing I learned, or was at least reminded of, that I can count on is friends. SO i had this issue and basically someone had said some stuff about me that wasn't true to a person I care about and because of that, that person was hurt. So three things happened to fix that. 1) My roommate Travis who I've become pretty close with stayed up and talked with me about it. This was pretty easy considering him and I decided to share our bed out of pure necessity to survival. You see despite the fact that it snowed saturday, my landlord had not had our furnace lit yet, so our house was literally an igloo. So we had no choice but to share our resources of blankets, plus I have a big bed. So Travis really helped me that night by listening and helping me figure out what to do. Second, I woke up to a missed call from Trevor. And this really just made me realize that a lot of this shit doesn't matter. As I mentioned in a previous post I'm seriously blessed to have friends like I do, so if people want to write me off over lies thats fine. The third thing was that the people involved who I care about listened to me. They didn't write me off and they chose to trust me. Because of that I was honest and things are mended.
So there are some obvious classroom implications to this story. A mentor of mine once told me that a great teacher teaches the way he lives and lives the way he teaches (I may have quoted that before) and it honestly the best advice I've heard. This is exactly how I'm goin to manage my classroom. Drama and conflict are inevitable, even in schools. Whether its between me anda student, two students, or me and another teacher, it will happen. And I need to deal with it in an honest, up-front manner.
In my own life though, I've realized I have tobe careful who I trust, and I also need to be someone who can be trusted. And regardless of what happens I have my friends and family's support. Sophocles is a little bit of a downer. Personally I'd rather focus on C.S. Lewis who said (basically) friends are like art and philosophy. They have no survival value. However they give surviving value. And while I may not be able to count on things like the transition between seasons,my friends will always be there, I'm as sure of that as I am about the dolphins ability to shit away game.
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