As long as they've been present on the planet Earth, humans have been denoted, in large part, by two characteristics: the ability to reflect and imagine through art, and the ability to use the world around them to create and optimize, or engineer, their surroundings.
Recently, I've found myself dealing with a predicament that directly involves these two most basic characteristics of human life.
Just days before school started this year, I was informed of the dreadful news that my senior year capstone engineering course had a timing conflict with my orchestra. As a result, I've become entangled within the bureaucratic realm of public school administration, pleading for a viable solution to my dilemma. Administration told me that I would have to pick one or the other, and suck it up. But no. I wouldn't.
In my engineering class, we'd be revisiting our skills from the last three years and implementing them in order to solve problems in the world around us. These solutions would be presented to and challenged by panels of engineers. We would get the opportunity to compete in the most highly recognized engineering competitions, and earn bragging rights for winning first place.
The school's nationally recognized Symphony Orchestra - on top of learning the canonical works of western classical music, including Beethoven's Fifth Symphony - would be performing at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and the Berlin Philharmonie - two of the most highly regarded concert halls in the world.
Faced by this dilemma, I found it necessary to sort out some sort of accommodation, and I knew the administration wasn't going to do it for me. I started by contacting my peers who were affected by the dilemma, getting their input on the situation and seeing if they had any bright ideas. No luck. So, the parents stepped into play. They figured they would be able to leverage the administration to provide us a viable accommodation. But no. Reading their threads of emails, it felt to me like a group of men talking about women's reproductive rights - they were circling and pushing ideas that to me, a student, were completely and obviously inviable. I questioned whether it was the parents who weren't listening to their children, or the children who weren't providing them the proper information.
From here, I felt it was necessary to step up my game. I sent the parents a long, detailed email describing what, to me, seemed like the best plan to move forward. They acknowledged my message, but the idea seemed to move in one inbox and out the other. I was back to where I was before, the parents talking about impractical ideas right in front of me. I found some parents enthusiastically encouraging my idea, while others actively tried to move past it.
With school starting in two days, it was time to move into fourth gear. I chose to ignore the input from the other parents, and instead discussing directly with the involved teachers. A long series of phone calls later, I was left deciding between two alternate proposals, choosing which sacrifices I was willing to make and which I wasn't, weighing the options which would determine my future.
Come today, I've managed to accommodate both classes, but my primal predicament remains disgracefully prevalent for numerous students across my school district.