Adventurer's Journal

Journal #6 The Magical Light Realm: Cover Story

After 6 days of adventures, I am finally up to the last level.

To clear the final world entitled "The Magical Light Realm", the instructions were to select a proverb from a list and create a blog entry for it.

I wound up choosing the following proverb "You can't judge a book by its cover" because there were several times in my life where this particular proverb came into play and it has really rung true for me.

I tend to talk about this proverb a lot when I am giving advice about meeting people. There have been several times in my life where the first impression that I have had of people have been totally wrong. Sometimes it has worked in a negative way for me where someone I expected to be really nice turned out to be unpleasant. However most of the time it was the opposite and people I hadn't expected to get along with actually turned out to be very nice.

The biggest example I like to use is my 7th grade English teacher. My first year of Junior high school proved to be a period of struggle for me. My entire environment had changed and the friends I had in elementary school had gone to different schools from me. I felt pretty lonely. Added onto that there was a huge jump in the amount of homework and the speed of which we were expected to learn that I couldn't keep up with.

When the term started, my school hadn't hired a full time English teacher yet. Kind of like the Defense against the Dark Arts professor from Harry Potter, we would wind up getting a different substitute teacher every week. Some were better than others. Eventually they did find a person to take on the role full time. That person was Mr. Jones. I did not have a favorable impression of Mr. Jones when he was first introduced. He talked with a raspy voice like he had been smoking regularly and had annoying habit of ending sentences with a shout. He also looked really disheveled. His clothes were sloppy; They were wrinkled and stained and he had chalk all over his fingers. He didn't seem like the type of teacher who could hold my attention for long. I didn't think I needed to worry though because the turnover of English teachers had been pretty high. I figured that he would be out before the week was up. That turned out to not be the case. He hung in there for one week and another two weeks after that. This wasn't good for me because I had already made up my mind that I didn't like the guy. However that changed within my first month there. The term was not going well for me. The first round of tests had come in and I was not doing good. Adding to my struggles in English was the fact that I had lost my textbook. The increase in workload had impacted the weight of my backpack and tore a hole in it. Sometime earlier in the month my text book had fallen out of it. During one of our homeroom sessions Mr. Jones stopped by to say that he had found a textbook and said it could be picked from his classroom. During my free period, I went over to go claim it. As it turned out the textbook wasn't mine. Each book had its own number assigned to it and when we checked we discovered that the number of the book assigned to me was different. I was disappointed but Mr. Jones was quick to realize what happened.

"Wait does that mean you lost a textbook as well?" he asked me.

I nodded embarrassed.

He reached into his cabinet and handed me another copy of the book.

"Here," he said. "The school charges for lost copies but they don't need to know about it. I'll cover the cost."

It was an unexpected moment of kindness and I was grateful to him for it. With that act he had won me over. From then on I made the effort to listen to him in class and once I got used to his voice and style, I found out that he was a really good teacher. He wound up becoming my favorite teacher in the school.

Another big example I had was one the group projects I was working on. There were another student in my class that had given me a bad impression named Hailey. I had worked with Hailey on an earlier project the first week of school and she had come off as come off as bossy which was the opposite of my laid back personality. The assignment was that we were asked to do was to pick a famous person to talk about. Hailey immediately took charge insisting we choose Robert Kennedy as the focus. My prior knowledge of Robert Kennedy was very limited so I was not very enthusiastic of devoting the presentation to him. I wanted to pick one of the more familiar people on the list like Martin Luther King or George Washington. Since this wasn't a research assignment and we had only 10 minutes to arrange the presentation it meant that I wouldn't be able to contribute much to the assignment nor could other members on the team who also had limited Robert Kennedy knowledge. Hailey would be the only one who was able to talk about him. The brief interaction left a bad impression and I made a note that I probably should avoid working with her in the future. As it worked out though we were assigned to be partners on a term project. It was this project that I really got to know her and realize that she was a good partner to work with. She was very vocal with her opinions but I had missed that she was also kindhearted and willing to listen to my opinions and work together with me. I just needed to be a little bit more vocal on my end. We both had our strengths and were able to learn a lot from each other. Hailey was good at speaking and presenting and organization. I was better at planning and analysis. Together we wound up doing really well on our project together and she became one of my best friends.

It is important to understand that the first impressions you have of someone can be way off. Give people a chance and they may surprise you.

Word Count 1089 Words