Are you serious?: November 2005 Archives

This one falls under "You Gotta be Kidding Me!" The other day I was having a conversation with a man who was annoyed that a daughter of a friend of his was placed in juvenile detention for fighting. According to him, she only hit the other kid because she hit her first. He didn't see how that wasn't self defense. Okay, I felt that didn't sound fair either, but you know how stories like these go . . . there's always more you didn't hear. It seemed to me that he probably didn't have all the facts.

I teach language arts - among other things - at an alternative school in a north central Indiana town of about 46,000 residents. My students are not necessarily "the bad kids", but the ones who don't fit the mold of the average student and who are "falling through the cracks" of our system. Sometimes they have attendance problems; all of them are at least of average intelligence - some very bright; all of the them are the victims of some societal problem including poverty, single parented families, drug or alcohol use, lack of supervision, teen pregnancy, or victims of a myriad of crimes.

Recently, I spent the morning revisiting old friends made through a retreat experience I had over eight years ago. We surely didn't look eight years older, but throughout the morning, it was obvious so much had changed. One thing that we did was to share with the group what had changed in our lives as a result of the retreat. I listened to the stories. Many of the women's experiences were "out of their comfort zone" forays into the limitless possibilities we all dream about, but sometimes don't realize. It was encouraging to hear from introverts who had led organizations and from women who saw themselves as "ordinary homemakers" influencing major community organizations because they had become board members. My change was at first very quiet, a tremor - almost unnoticed.