That's not fair

When I taught elementary school students, it wasn’t unusual for at least one of them to say to me, “That’s not fair.” My response was typically, “What fair means to you is that you have decided what is going to happen and it doesn’t.” Life doesn’t always deliver what we expect it to, but it always delivers what we need. For some, being fair means that everyone is treated in the same way. As a classroom teacher, we established a set of rules and the consequences for breaking them in the first hour of the school year. These were posted and committed to memory. They also applied to everyone who entered the classroom regardless of their age or status. How did that work? My students loved to catch me inadvertently breaking a rule like not pushing my chair in to avoid a safety hazard. I couldn’t tell them that the rule didn’t apply to be because I was the teacher. Later as adults they told me that the classroom ran like a well-oiled machine. It is only when we see an imbalance in the behaviors and the consequences that we say, “That’s not fair.” Is it possible to have a set of rules with accompanying consequences that everyone follows? I am not sure how that would work in today’s society. But wouldn’t it be nice if we could start with the #1 Rule being to treat everyone with respect? That was really the basis of our classroom rules and it worked in that setting. I still see my students practicing that today almost 40 years later. How do you see fairness being practiced today and what can you do to act as fairly as you can?

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