Student Spectrums

Irum Sarfaraz is a published writer with a Masters in English Literature. She teachers high school ELA and ELC.

Life is Unfair

Nowhere else in the world is life more unfair than in a freshman and sophomore high school class. Ahh! The inexplicable unfairness of life! 

The venomous cruelty of the literature teacher who expects everyone to jump right out of their proverbial boxes and explore vast horizons of creative expression, the Amazonian jungle-like denseness of never-before-heard words and phrases, and dark, thick themes deeper than the Mariana Trench. How can young minds traverse these unfamiliar territories? There’s more fun in surfing the warm, blue oceans of the social media world, texting with emojis, entirely negating the importance of alphabets, let alone properly spelled words. 

Why wouldn’t ELA be unfair and the ELA teacher a worse villain than the Joker, Thanos, and Whiplash rolled into one? 

Shakespeare needs to be buried once and for all, Dickinson’s poetic collection should be put back into her drawer where she had hidden it, her sister blacklisted for having discovered it and making her famous, and Paolo Coelho’s lessons should be disregarded as being completely degenerate in an AI-powered world where ChatGPT is far better equipped to tell us how to live our lives, manage our relationships, and understand the complexities of existence. 

Shakespeare who? Whitman what? Ben Johnson whatever? Austin, Bronte, Woolf, and Tolstoy, more whatever! 

Sadly, however, thanks to the infinite mental capacities of high school teachers to counter declarations like ‘Life is not fair’, ‘You are mean,’ ‘Why are you even here?’, ‘How does your family tolerate you?’, ‘Would you go away if we all pool money and give it to you?’, ‘Can we bribe you for grades, and you just allow us to socialize during class time?’ ‘How old are you and how much longer do you plan to live?’, ‘Was Dickinson your relative? If not, why do you like her so much?’, and ‘Why are you so fascinated by Robinson Crusoe?’ ELA is not going away anytime soon and these unfair, prejudiced, unjust, discriminatory, and unreasonable ELA teachers will continue to strive to have the Ph.D degree holders of high school view the world through the multi-faceted lens of writers and poets who never told their ELA teacher, or any high-school teacher, for that matter,  how utterly unfair life is. Because if they had, they wouldn’t be sitting on the very high pedestals of literary glory while the debaters of unfairness and fairness squabble at the base, disregarding the great potential they have to soar to infinite heights if only they quit the debate of  fair and unfair! 

Ahh! Life is indeed unfair!