There is one single moment that I remember from the first day I walked into that classroom. It has to do with the seating chart. Mr. Gallagher had assigned us specific desks according to the alphabet. These desks are aligned in long columns and rows, facing the part of the classroom that is dubbed the front. As the teacher goes down the list of names and their respective places, I started to get slightly anxious. This anxiety was in fact extremely slight, but significant. I had desired to sit somewhere in the middle of the organized cluster of desks so I could focus enough and still be able to experience everything that happened within this large group of students. It’s always been something I enjoy. I like being the center. Sure I don’t speak aloud very much because of my shyness, but I like to be within the crowd. This of course sparked my detest of sitting in the front row.
To my observance the students continued filling up the seats. Mr. Gallagher came to the seat located in the very front to the right of the one directly in the center. Had I known what this desk would do for me is something remarkable. It would be my friend as I journeyed into the knowledge of past events. If I knew how appreciative I would be of this then my feelings of dismay would have been of eagerness. I had no idea the world that I would soon discover.
Mr. Gallagher explains how this course will change the way we view the world. Throughout the semester he repeats this a lot to engrave it into our brains and make us really understand. We can’t comprehend the world without being able to comprehend ourselves first. One of the earlier activities we did were making charts. We would put down our names and then write down characteristics of ourselves in general. Then we did it two more times with the most positive and negative things we would describe ourselves with. This session sure does stick out for me. It forced me to look at myself and pick out characteristics. This was much harder than you would think. Every time I thought of a good aspect, the opposite would become present too. I would think about how even though I do possess that positive detail, I still hold its negative opposite and that would overshadow the first. It was difficult to write down the good things. Nevertheless, it took the same amount of effort to write down the bad things. I found that I couldn’t seem to accept myself as being a well-produced human being any more or less than being a bad one. What does that mean? Personally, I haven’t quite figured it out yet.
These selfish thoughts have begun to bother me. Why should I waste my time worrying about who I am and how to describe myself when there are so many other people in the world who have it so much worse? We don’t even need to single out those specific people. It’s everyone. Why should I be above everyone else? How could I possibly ever be superior?
It doesn’t help that we had a lesson about the individual versus the group. According to Mr. Gallagher, the individual is more important than the group. More so, individual identity is more significant than the one of the crowd. One specific story emphasizes this belief – The Bear That Wasn’t. It was about a bear who eventually was convinced he was human. It took him time to see the real truth. It meant more for him to know who he was as a single being rather than just being what the majority crafted him as. I always attempt to be my own self and not worry about what others say, but it’s complicated to distinguish the exact median level for how much I shouldn’t care. At one point in my life I noticed that I cared so much about others that I didn’t truly take care of myself. It left me in a deep, dark hole that I had to crawl myself out of. This made me come to a conclusion that as organisms who are capable of complex things, we need to care for ourselves before others. The problem is how much we should spend on ourselves and how much to save for others.
It’s of course natural tendency for humans in a drastic situation to forget about everyone else for a second or longer and focus on saving themselves. We’ve seen so many examples of this throughout class like in the film, The Grey Zone. It concentrated on an uprising at Auschwitz-Birkenau, a death camp in the Nazi era. Some of the main characters in it were discussing how even though they were helping the officers with killing the prisoners, they were doing it to try to let themselves live longer or even survive. This made me realize that if I were in that type of situation I would probably do the same thing. Is that selfish? Personally, I don’t really believe so. We need to look at it within typical everyday life. When is it appropriate to act in a self-deserving manner? I’ve always questioned this and I feel like I will forever. I’ve always fought between the two sides. How do we make ourselves important and worthy without forgetting the rest of society?
This class has definitely made me curious even more about this. That seat that I was sitting in has made me question so much. Was that the soul purpose of this class? It seems that way. Honestly, I really don’t think that I will ever discover the answers to a lot of the questions I have. What I do know is that I’ll never regret taking this course. I really do hope they have it at the college that I will be attending in the fall. Maybe then I will be able to be stuck in a front row seat again and be blown out of my mind.
