I was THE worst math student in the history of mathematics.  I was so bad that my high school asked me not to take math my senior year.  True story – they gave me a woodshop class instead.  I guess they figured that there was still some math involved and if I didn’t do my math right, I might lose a digit or arm with the saw. 

At any rate, for two years I was blessed to have Mr. Teeple.  For two years he was cursed to have me.  He was amazing.  I was beyond subpar.  It didn’t take him long to hack into my system.  Mr. Teeple used to assign either the odds or evens.  I would do every other odd or even.  The first couple I could do, but as I progressed through the numbers they got harder.  If I saw something I thought I couldn’t do?  I would just turn the page.  Mr. T would call me on that when he checked my homework and it was considerably shorter than everyone else’s.  He didn’t quit.  One day, when I couldn’t understand what a parabola was – he drew one around my head on the wall in the back corner of the class (where I normally tried to hide).  He wasn’t going to simply let me turn the page anymore. 

It seems like when we experience tragedies we have a system as well.  We argue who is at fault.  We debate the merits of the incident, and, again, try to find fault.  Depending on who is doing the arguing, the tragedy can become politicized (sometimes appropriately, sometimes not). 

But then…we turn the page. 

It’s not like we forgot what happened.  In fact, some debates spring up frequently. 

But we turn the page and don’t act to fix the problem.  We have a responsibility to do that. Nobody is going to do it for us. Life is not a newspaper to skim through the headlines and decide in which stories we find comfort.   

I don’t have the answers regarding how to fix the problem.  I don’t think any individual does.  When I was in math class, Mr. T.  rarely gave us the answers up front – it was more about the process than the end result. 

In this case, both the process and the end result matter. 

Robert Kennedy once said, “Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live.”

It is a tragedy that a 15 year old was killed.  We can debate all the semantics we want (and, yes, some of them do need to be debated civilly), but what are we going to do to ensure that it doesn’t happen again?  What are we going to do to make sure we don’t just turn the page. 

For now…Captain out.