I find myself reflecting a lot lately on the true meaning and value of friendship and who my "real" friends are. As a teacher, I teach my students the value of friendship and how to interact with each other in a positive manner. We recently had a big discussion during homeroom about peer pressure and standing firm on what you truly believe and how it is important to not follow the crowd simply because you want to be accepted by that ever important crowd.
I followed up the discussion with an activity with the iPad app Haiku Deck where the students needed to create a six word memoir about teenage relationships. They could share something about the true meaning of a friend, how it feels to be bullied, or the fine line of peer pressure and how to deal with it. As a result, they have come up with quite a few good ones, here are three examples:
1. Friendship - Will it always stay with you?
2. Stop Bullying - Don't be a standby, stop bullying. (This one has a picture of a picture of two boys sitting behind a grate and a third boy kicking a soccer ball at it)
3. Friends - The ones you can rely on.
These short little messages made me realize that a lesson on friendship is not just something to be learned as an adolescent. It is a lesson we need to carry with us for our entire lives as we navigate through the various people we meet and learn the valuable lesson of trust and the importance of a true friend. We learn that a true friend does not judge, or hold expectations that may never be realized because they are their own expectations or they are unreasonable.
About a decade ago, someone shared with me the poem "Reason, Season, Lifetime"; a poem that identifies the meaning of relationships with others and answers the question regarding why some people seem to be in one's life forever, regardless of situation or circumstance, and why others seem to fade off into history, thought of with fond and distant memories; others end quite abruptly, leaving one to question what ever happened and never really knowing.
I could not imagine growing up now in the world of social media. As much as it has its benefits, it must be frightening to feel like friendship is based on how many followers you have on Twitter or friends you have on Facebook. Those posts that come out now and then from some of my "friends" asking me to complete the test of a true friend before she decides if she will delete me from her friend list on Facebook make me laugh. I can't imagine how a fragile teen would feel getting a message like that, or worse, being deleted as someone's friend because, overnight, they have decided not to be his or her friend anymore.
Its funny, the whole reason why I got on Facebook, six years ago, was because I found out, through my lifelong friend I have known since kindergarten, that my grade 8 graduating class was all on Facebook. I had gone to school with most of those people for nine years. Some of them for another three years into high school. Those were people I thought would always be in my life but we grew up and each of our lives took us in different directions. Was it ever amazing to catch up with those people and some of us have reestablished our friendship and met up with each other whenever possible.
I guess as we mature we discover that the bullies we knew in elementary school and then in high school are the same people we later meet when we are adults. Lessons like the ones I have recently given my students give them the coping skills for how to deal with those bullies presently and, I suppose, well into the future when they are adults and meet their childhood bully all over again. In the end, we realize that no matter how old that bully is, the bully is just insecure and I hope my students develop the skills to deal with that bully and perhaps have empathy toward him or her.
