Ironic

One of the main texts almost all students in England study is Of Mice and Men by Steinbeck. Needless to say, in the past few years I've been through this text more than I would prefer. But this week, a new light had been shed on my life, ironically, as we analysed the life of isolated ranch hands during the depression.

I'm working with 3 girls from Poland, Lithuania and Tansania right now and obviously they have no background knowledge of The West or California or The Great Depression. It makes explaining the culture of the book super fun lol.

We were reading through and comparing the characters of Curly, Slim, George and Lennie. Curly very obviously has "small man syndrome" and is "handy"... he loves fighting, especially people bigger than him.

Slim, on the other hand, has a quiet natural authority. He never needs to fight, but no one ever wants to see him angry and no one knows what he's capable of...

The girls were thinking about Curly that maybe he was bullied because he was small and now he wants to have power and be a bully... in their minds, people who are bullied grow up to be bullies.

I disagreed, saying we don't really know how people will respond. You see, when I was in school, I wasn't necessarily bullied, but let's say, I didn't have a ton of friends. I was "smart" and so everyone wanted to be on group projects with me, but no one wanted to necessarily sit with me at lunch.

It didn't really bother me, per se, but when I did get openly mocked, I would use my intelligence to "bully" others, mocking their stupidness, using big words to confuse them, or sometimes, saying really nasty things in big words, but with a nice tone so they THOUGHT I was complimenting them, but wasn't really.

I confessed all this to the girls, and added, but now, look at me, my job is to work with people who have trouble learning for whatever reason--either they need to learn English or they have a learning difficulty, and I love using my creativity to find ways to help them learn. Exactly what I used to mock others for, now I help them with... in fact, it's not just something that's my job, it's something I'm passionate about--helping everyone learn, no matter what the economic climate, the resources, the socio-economic status, the learning or physical disability... everyone can and should be able and encouraged to learn.

Life's joke is on me this time... and I'm happy I learned my lesson.