Teaching

In all the thinking I've been doing about the last decade there is one incident, which occured near its beginning, that keeps coming to mind. When I was 15 I got into an argument with two boys in my English class after they shouted out some truly awful remarks about a kid a few years below us, who was disabled. I was removed from the class by the teacher, who proceeded to give me a little talk. She told me that I needed to learn not to take things so personally. There are, she said, some things in this world which we just can't change, so there's no point in upsetting yourself over them. Apparently I would make life a lot easier on myself if I just took a step back. I was given a detention for disrupting the class, while the boys in question weren't even reprimanded. I'd previously had a lot of respect for this teacher, but that day I lost every scrap of it. I couldn't believe that I was being told to sit back and watch bigotry and cruelty take place without even speaking out, let alone trying to stop it. I'm proud to say that I never stopped taking things like that personally. Watching the news still quite often makes me cry at the things that people are prepared to do to other people, and I will always argue with someone who makes a remark of that type. Perhaps I do make my life a little harder by reacting to things so strongly, but I'd rather that than be the kind of person who just doesn't care. That teacher could have done a lot of damage that day, but luckily all she did was make me despise her.