고등학교 공통영어1 (미래엔 김성연) 연계 글

In our first month of high school, our teacher asked each pair of students to propose one change that would improve our school. My partner was Sohyeon, a classmate who disagreed with almost everything I said. I wanted a longer lunch break, while she wanted a quiet room for students who arrived early. Every time she explained her idea, I interrupted with reasons why it would fail. By the end of the first week, our meetings felt like a debate.

When asked by our teacher how the project was going, I answered, "Fine," but my face said otherwise. Our teacher, who had watched us argue, offered a simple rule. Before we disagreed with an idea, we had to ask one question about it and hear the whole answer.

Although annoyed by the rule at first, I tried it the next morning. Instead of saying, "That will never work," I asked Sohyeon why a quiet room mattered to her. Her answer surprised me. Sohyeon took a bus which left her village before seven, so she arrived almost an hour before the first bell. She spent that hour reviewing her notes in a noisy hallway. While listening to her, I realized that I had argued against her idea without knowing anything about the mornings behind it.

Then Sohyeon asked me why I wanted a longer lunch break. I explained that the cafeteria line was so long that some students had only ten minutes to eat. She asked how long the wait actually was, and I admitted that I had never timed it. The next day, we stood in the line together with a stopwatch. Slowly, our two ideas began to look like parts of one plan. We proposed opening the cafeteria early as a quiet room and sending each grade to lunch at a different time. Once finished, the plan fit on one page, but it had grown out of two very different school days.

On the day of our presentation, I noticed that "we" had replaced "I" in almost every sentence I spoke. Sohyeon and I still disagree about music and movies. However, I have learned that a question which comes before an argument can turn "you and I" into "we."