Listen to Your Teachers Suggestions

Connor Soukup

“The rate at which a person can mature is directly proportional to the embarrassment he can tolerate.”

-Douglas Engelbart

     Sometimes you need to take an opportunity when it faces you. I’ve found that more often than not that they end up well. And if they don’t end up as well as you wanted you might not know the real effect that the experience actually has on you. And no matter how bad it may seem in the moment, it may not have actually been a bad stretch in the path of life. Earlier this year I was faced with the option of joining the upper school musical. For many years I had wanted to do the school play. But never got to it. And probably wouldn’t have done this one either if Mr. Fitzsimmons hadn’t told me one day that I should. As my advisor who probably knew me better than any other teacher. I knew that if this experience went bad I had someone to blame besides myself. But after the musical ended I found that I didn’t need someone to blame and rather to thank. I wasn’t very good at acting, singing or dancing and myself doing the musical proved that to me. But that’s not the only good thing that came out of it. I also found that I had matured by the decision of joining the musical. I was put in the most hysterically embarrassing musical. Not what I expected. The two plays where beauty and the beast, a mellow sort of moody theme. And than once upon a mattress, a comedic reflection of a famous fairy tale. I obviously wasn’t happy.  But this added to the impact of the experience. The maturity that I got from the experience helps me focus often on how bad things could be. And it’s comforting. The people I look up to most at fenn are the teachers, and blindly following their suggestions might sounds reckless. But the two only types of decisions in life are the reckless and the thought over. But sometimes by the time you think over your decision, you're already old and gray.