MIT-SCIENCE-Lectures-11124paper1(1)

When I was sent off to school, away from the niceties and familiarity of home, I had my first taste of the "real world", the "real world" being a place away from the protective cover of my parents and having to survive according to my own means. The lessons being in school taught me, such as how to deal with an authority who is not my parent and how to be a socialized member of a community, were invaluable in shaping my behaviors as I mature and grow closer to entering the "real world". However, the most important lesson I learned in school was that life is not always fair.
Life being unfair does not mean that the people affected will always be "dealt a bad hand". Life could be unfairly advantageous, giving them more than they deserve or expect, but the harsher side does exist, and life can cheat people and cut short what is owed them. As I went through the school system, I saw many examples of the negative side of life's unfairness. In 3rd grade, my class got into trouble because two kids were running around during lunch time, just as the teacher walked into the room. I didn't see the kids misbehaving because I was engrossed in a game of Connect Four. Not wanting to be punished for something I had no part of, I told my story to the teacher. Needless to say, she didn't believe me, and that became my earliest memory of realizing that truth depends on who believes you, whether it is fair or not. Similar experiences occurred throughout elementary school, and I learned to deal with them just as everyone else does, but never had I witnessed life's unfairness as harshly as I did in 7th grade when our school experienced its first suicide.
I didn't personally know the 8th grader, I only knew that his name was Joe. He was friends with the popular kids and his pretty girlfriend had recently broken up with him. I don't know the details of how he got a gun, but he had one that fatal night. While he was on the telephone with his girlfriend, trying to win her back, he was threatening suicide and playing with his gun. While in mid-sentence, he unintentionally shot himself in the head. His parents went to his room and found his blood splattered around the room and their son dead. I don't know for sure if the suicide was unintentional, but his friends and his ex-girlfriend all claim he was not suicidal and the fact that he was in the middle of a conversation on the phone, also point to the theory he did not want to kill himself when he did. Whether or not it was truly intentional does not make a difference because I believe it was unintentional, and that event taught me again that life can be unjust. Joe did not want to die, but because of an unfortunate mistake, his life was taken from him. Being part of the school system, I was exposed to more of the realities of the world and the unjust circumstances people within this community experienced.
Although life hands out many bad experiences, I did encounter ways in which life treats people undeservingly well at times. I saw that life's unfairness could sometimes benefit me. My senior year I played in the school orchestra. Since I was a senior, my orchestra director decided I should have a solo at the annual Festivals of Music competition. I was totally undeserving of this honor and responsibility. Whenever I practiced at home, my dad would complain of a headache and make me go into the basement. My brother constantly threatened to turn my violin into fodder for our fireplace. Playing the violin was clearly not my forte, and other more junior members of the orchestra could have played the solo just as well if not better than I did. After the competition, I bought a recording of the concert, and while listening, cringed with each incorrect note I had so proudly played. Although I was undeserving of the solo, life had
shown me some generosity, and unfairly allowed me to represent our orchestra at the competition.
I could have learned the lesson that life is unfair another way at another place, but because school was the first institution that overtook my life, it was the means by which I learned my first life lessons and learned how to deal with them. This lesson is the most important to me because it taught me an aspect of the "real world" that I would have to deal with for the rest of my life. It was also one of the harshest lessons I had to first learn and has shaped how I view my experiences today. I learned that I must take life with a grain of salt because things may not always go my way. However, sometimes life does goes unfairly in my favor, so I try to remember to be thankful when that happens.。