Member-only story
My Proposal (As a Teacher) to Fix Democracy
The adults need a time-out
Last week, in the geography class that I co-teach with someone in a very different phase of life, my counterpart was trying to explain to the students the purpose of an HOA.
She told them the story of a dispute between her and a neighbor. The neighbor had failed to trim their tree, and it had grown over her property line, damaging their common fence. She’d wished at the time that her neighborhood had an HOA, so that some bored, middle-aged person could have negotiated a ceasefire between parties.
One of the students, listening to this story and getting frustrated, grasped the essence of the situation pretty quickly. He raised his hand.
“Who cares?!” He said when called on. “Just move the fence!”
“It’s not that simple,” my co-teacher assured him.
“Fine” he replied “why don’t you just tear the fence and the tree down, and put in a trampoline?”
I laughed, and gave him a high-five.
That’s the world I want to live in.
That student very quickly arrived at the correct solution: who cares? Shut up and be friends! Build a trampoline!
