Dear Diary, Love, Little ol' Me.

Dear Diary,



I was outside burning my notebook today and I was thinking,



My teacher encourages playing with fire.



Now, don't get me wrong, I love fire. I'm a regular pyro... But something about it seemed off to me,



Usually, teachers teach us not to play with fire. But Nelson tells us it's okay and makes our work better. How is it that something so destructive can create something so amazing and beautiful?


As soon as I realized that fire really can make things beautiful I started thinking about all the other things in the world that teachers have told us is wrong, or forbidden, but really, if used right, they can make things, our lives, more beautiful.


Maybe Nelson really is a genius and he’s just trying to get us to understand this for ourselves. Maybe he sees that our lives are full of beauty, potential, and wonder and we haven’t even seen it yet. We haven’t even grasped the fact that some things we view as bad, really are good and wonderful and amazing.

 
This is a double edged sword. What if the things that we are taught are good, really are bad and will hurt us in the long run. What if math rots the brain starting at age 7. Maybe that’s the cause of the average life span growing shorter and shorter. Moses lived to be like over a thousand years old. Maybe he avoided math, we don’t know.

 
Now let’s talk about being different. We all want to have the perfect balance between being different and fitting in. How many of us just want to be in the “in crowd” or “One of the popular girls”? I was taught in most of my English classes that I had to write a certain way and if I didn’t then I wouldn’t pass. Now, I’m not from Utah so I don’t know if it’s like that here, cause the only English class I’ve taken in this state is Nelson’s, but where I lived last year I felt like they were trying to pump out robots and make us all the same. I didn’t want to be that way and rebelled all I could. My class mates walked around with glazed eyes and wrote for the teacher, not for themselves. I would not, should not, and simply could not, become a robot for that hell they all call school. I almost failed junior year. But, being different, and being creative, really aren’t all that bad. Having things that you can’t change about you can make you who you are. Not conforming to conformities can help us grow in unique ways that we normally wouldn’t have had we done what everyone wanted us to do.

 
Now I’m not encouraging everyone to rebel against their math teacher or try to fail to make a statement, just like Nelson isn’t encouraging us to set our homes on fire. I’m simply saying that if we use the gifts and the rights that we have in a positive way, at the right time, then we can have these amazing beautiful lives, just bursting with creativity, hope, magic, wonder, and beauty. Maybe that’s what Nelson is trying to teach us when he shows us journals with burnt pages, or asks us to dress INDIE, or tells us to not hold back. Wither or not he’s teaching us that on purpose or not, I don’t know, but it’s diffidently an underlying theme I’ve found in class many times.

I don’t know, it’s just something to think about.

Love,

Lulu Ziv