I’d Like To Get To Know You
I’ve been thinking about pride this week. It’s probably because my High School students are reading To Kill a Mockingbird and they’ve been talking about the pride theme in the book. In case you may have forgotten, the book takes place during the Depression in a small town in Alabama. Although a trial is the main focus of the book, my students have also been talking about how the poorest people in the town have a certain pride about them. That they are doing the best they can for their families, whatever that may be, and they hold themselves straight up in that pride.
My students call it pride. The more I think about it, the more I want to call it something else. I want to call it Responsibility – with a capital R. In these times, it seems like many people are blaming others for their plights. And I’ll be the first to agree that sometimes that may be the case. But even if it is the case, maybe we need to work with what we have at hand and do what we can for ourselves before we look to others.
Now, please don’t misunderstand. I’m not implying we don’t accept help when we need it; I’m not implying that we don’t extend a hand when someone is in need. I am saying that we should do what we can to solve our problems before we look to someone else. And that means our employers, our government, our families, or our friends.
More importantly, we need to model that approach with our children. Here at our school, we foster responsibility for our work, students as well as teachers. The students know what they need to do and when they need it done. As a result, they are expecting the same from the people around them. And we do our best to provide that for them.
So, I’m thinking everything might work a little bit better if we all carried ourselves with the pride of doing all that we can when we can. Just imagine. Government working a little better instead of all the backbiting. Businesses focused on their customers a little more. Schools focused on students a little more. Could it be as simple as changing the look from inside ourselves to outside?
My students also talked about something else. They talked about how we often label people (just as in To Kill A Mockingbird) as soon as we see or meet them, and that causes us to lose the opportunity to know them. Maybe it’s time we give the “knowing” part a little more effort, too?
What do you think?
