30 Days to Empathy, A Class Sourced Novel

Big News:  

We just won the Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year Award for 2013 for Non-Traditional Literature. Click here to read the story.

The Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights recognized 30 Days to Empathy for its anti-bullying message 

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Below is the beginning of  the world's first crowd sourced, class sourced novel ever written by High School Students. We have published  30 Days to Empathy through Amazon.com and released an ebook in March 2013. 

Any teachers/parents/writing coaches/would be authors who would like to know more about this project and our similar follow up project should contact: Jay Rehak at jaycrehak@gmail.com.  

Thirty Days to Empathy

A Crowd Sourced Novel by Jay C. Rehak and  others.  

CHAPTER 1

"Why Isn't the World More Like Me?"

            I woke up with the satisfying feeling that I was one day closer to getting out of high school.  I rolled over and tore off the latest sheet of a handwritten calendar I had made to survive.  That morning I tore off the sheet that read, “31 days left of meaningless drivel.”

            Slowly, I rubbed my face and headed to the shower.  My parents were just getting up, and although I wasn’t hungry, I knew my mother would insist her only child eat something before I made my way out into the cold Chicago winter.  I grabbed a yogurt, a banana, and the lunch my mother had made for me, and headed out to the family’s 2007 Honda Civic.  I was bored beyond belief, but I had to go to school.

            Although Sojourner Truth High School didn’t post class rankings, I was at the top of my class, and I really hadn’t tried all that hard. You might reasonably ask, if everything was so easy, why I wasn’t lined up to be valedictorian in June.  Well, the answer is simple enough.  It’s because of the rigged playing field at my school.  You see, I entered ST as a freshman; by then, there were students who had attended the school for two years, in a 7^th and 8^th grade program called “the academic center.”  Since the school’s founding some thirty-five years earlier, the school included not only a four-year high school, but also a two-year intermediate school, which included the top 200 seventh and eighth graders in Chicago.  Those kids were called “Ackies” and they had all earned high school credits before I ever got there, so although my overall GPA was impeccable (I had never gotten less than an “A” in any course I took, although a gym teacher once threatened me with a “B,” not because of my athletic abilities but because of my “attitude.”) I had no chance of being valedictorian.  That “honor” was annually reserved for an “Ackie.”  It bothered me in my freshman year, for about a day, until I realized that while subjective truth might suggest that someone in the building was smarter than I was, objectively, that simply wasn’t true. I’d have to endure.                     

And so I did.  I went through the first three and one quarter years of high school doing what I had to do, taking the classes I needed to take, and preparing myself as best as I could for the day that couldn’t come soon enough: liberation from high school and what I hoped would be a more challenging experience in college.  

When I arrived at ST that morning, I immediately headed for the tech lab and printed my paper.  It was an essay on Existentialism and why Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus were on to something, although, from my point of view, it wasn’t so much as “Hell is other people” as Sartre had suggested, but more, as my thesis clearly articulated, “People create their own Hell.”

            I knew I had overwritten the assignment, but I was bored the night before, and spent more time on it than I might have otherwise.  To be completely honest, I was also trying to impress my English teacher, Ms. Julie Glass, who was one of the few teachers I’d ever had who challenged me in any significant way. She had sort of a mystical hold on me. She was an older woman, probably about fifty-five, so it wasn’t like I had some sort of puppy love teacher crush.   She was old enough to be my grandmother, and I had my own grandmother, so it wasn’t like I was looking for some parental figure that was absent in my life.  No, I just wanted to impress her because I considered her some sort of intellectual mentor, someone that, if she liked my work, somehow validated me.  Not that I needed the validation; I got that all the time.  But if she liked what I wrote, I knew it was legit; she actually read what students wrote and she pulled few punches.  If she thought you were a slacker, she told you, in her own cutting way.

            My second period math AP Calc teacher, Mr. Maskus, droned on about differential equations until he got bogged down in a problem he couldn’t answer.  He looked around the room for someone to rescue him, and when no one did, I volunteered, went up, and solved the problem.  When I returned to my seat I pulled out George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman and waited for the bell to ring.

            Third period AP French took forever, but since we’d met in the tech lab, no one bothered me as I put on a headset and listened to news from the BBC.   

            Fourth period lunch came and went quickly, as I went around the corner from school and picked up a Starbucks on Taylor Street to keep me awake through the rest of the day.

I got to fifth period, a minute after the bell rang, and Ms. Glass gave me a look of disappointment but did not write me a tardy.  I think she thought she was doing me a favor by not writing me, but the truth was, I didn’t mind detention.  At ST, it meant giving up your lunch and sitting quietly in the library.  Not a tragedy for me.  But Ms. Glass never wrote me up.  She liked me too much, I suppose, and I think she wanted to be liked.  So for her, to give me a detention was to risk her best student suddenly not liking her. If she only knew.

I took my seat behind Nia, a girl I had a crush on. She seemed to be happy all the time so I knew, as much as I liked her, we’d probably never get along.  My discontentment ran too deep and she probably had a boyfriend anyway.

I handed my paper in with a hidden smugness that still oozed out of me.  Students around me knew I considered my writing to be above theirs.  I suppose I had a very standoffish attitude towards my fellow students, which I now regret, but at the time seemed appropriate.  After most of us handed in our papers (3 students didn’t) I waited patiently in the hopes that Ms. Glass might have something to teach that I didn’t already know.  She was my last best chance of the day, as I’d heard my 6^th period AP Chem teacher was absent, and my 7^th period AP Statistics class was essentially a blow off.

“Today we’re going to review ‘sympathy’ versus ‘empathy’ and all that implies,” Ms. Glass began. I sighed.

 “Oh, please” I thought.  “Do we really have to go over this?”

“Now some of you might be thinking, ‘do we really have to go over this?’ ” she said, looking straight at me. I nodded in acknowledgement of her perspicacity. She continued, “We need to review this because a number of you still seem confused by the difference between “sympathy” and “empathy,” and too many of you want to use the words interchangeably.  So, can anyone give me a working definition of both?”

Not much of a response from the class, but I knew everyone knew the difference.  I didn’t want to get involved even though no one was answering.  I’d bail Ms. Glass out if the silence kept up for more than a minute, but my hope was someone would jump in and answer the softball question so I could save my one class response of the day for later in the class. (For years I’d  played an internal game called “Teacher Rescue” where I promised myself I’d only save the classroom discussion from the sound of crickets once per class.  After that, the teacher was on his/her own.)

Finally, an answer came from the front of the room, and I was chagrinned when the speaker clumsily misidentified both.  “Empathy’s when you feel bad for someone and sympathy’s when you’ve felt their pain.” 
            “You’re on the right track, but not quite.” Ms. Glass responded patiently.  How did she do it?  How did she put up with people not knowing the obvious?  More students answered and muttered, none quite on point until finally, from a classmate I didn’t know existed, “I think it’s the other way around.  Sympathy is when we feel badly for others but we haven’t experienced their pain.  Empathy is when we have experienced someone’s pain and consider ourselves very much in touch with that individual’s pain.  In other words, sympathy has some distance between the person feeling the pain and experiencing the pain, while empathy narrows that distance and makes us understand someone else’s pain almost as he or she must experience it.  It’s the difference between feeling an arm’s length sadness for someone and feeling a deep sense of oneness with another person’s pain.”

“Wow,” I thought.  “Where did that come from?”  A bit late to be learning kid’s names but I suddenly wanted class to end so I could go over and introduce myself.  But I never got the chance.  Just before the bell rang, Ms. Glass asked me to stop by her desk after class.  I forgot about my classmate and readied myself for what I assumed would be some pleasant chat with an intellectual equal.   When the bell rang I took my time leaving my desk, watching a little sadly as Nia left the room.  I wouldn’t see her again until tomorrow. I waited for everyone to leave and then headed to the front of the room.

“Jake?”

“Yes, Ms. Glass.”

“I understand you’re leaving Sojourner Truth a semester early.”

“Yes, I think it’s time.”

“What about your AP tests?”

“I’ll come back and take them in May.  Doesn’t really matter anyway, because most Ivy League schools don’t accept them for credit anyway.”

“Oh, then you’re set for college.”

“Well, not exactly.  All my applications are in.  I’m just waiting to see what colleges accept me, and which one is the best fit for me.”

“I see.  So you don’t think another semester in high school might provide you some modicum of learning?”

“No, I’m good.  No offense, Ms. Glass.  I’ve enjoyed being in your class this semester.  I’m just done. Done with tardy slips, asking to go to the bathroom, pointless fire drills, small talk at lunch.  I’m just done.”

“I noticed today in class you didn’t speak at all.  Especially during the discussion about sympathy and empathy.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t think you needed me.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I thought the discussion went well enough.  No need for my input when it’s going well.
            “Ah, I see.  You only answer questions in class when no one else does.  You sort of feel sorry for me?”

“Something like that.”

“I appreciate the sympathy.”

“Well, I don’t mean to come across as arrogant.”

“I know.  You try your best to hide it.  Still…”

“You don’t have a lot of respect for your classmates, do you?”

“Sure I do.”

“Jake?”

“Okay, well, maybe I don’t.  I mean, I’m not into the same things they are.  I’m not much of a partier, I like dating and all, but it’s not the be all and end all of my existence.  I don’t really obsess about the Bears or who’s running for prom queen.  I’m just interested in other things, that’s all.”

“Really? What kind of things?”

“Well, things that are important. “

“Like what?”

“Oh, I don’t want to sound too philosophic, you might think I’m pretentious.”

“It’s always a risk,” she said, gently nodding.  “Still, I’d like to know what you think is important.”

Somehow I believed she really was interested, and so I blurted out, almost involuntarily.  “Elements of the human condition.”

“Really?  That sounds deep.  What ‘elements of the human condition’ are you interested in?”

“Everything.  That’s what I hope to study when I get to Princeton or Harvard or wherever I decide to go.”

“You sound pretty confident that you’ll get into one of those places.”

“If I don’t get into either one of those, I’ll go somewhere else, and it’ll be their loss.  But wherever I go, I hope to dig a little deeper into the nature of what it is that makes us human and why, as a species, we seem to be such morons.”

“And you think leaving high school early will help you learn that?”

“Not sure. But I can tell you one thing. Staying here isn’t going to get me anywhere.  I’ve learned everything I can from this place.”

“I’m not sure I agree, and I’m actually a bit disappointed in your certainty.” 

I wish she hadn’t done that.  Said she was disappointed in me.  That’s not why I stopped by her desk at the end of class.  The word ‘disappointed’ bothered me.  Especially coming from her.

“Well, I guess I’m not 100% certain about anything.  Let’s call it 99.9 percent certain that I’m done here.”

“Okay, good to know.  Can I get a chance at that one-tenth of a percent?”

“What do you mean?  What are you talking about?”

“I’m wondering if you’ll let me suggest to you the one-tenth of one percent learning that Sojourner Truth can still teach you.  Can I suggest that to you?”

“Sure.  What is it?”

“Empathy.”

“Empathy? What do you mean?  I mean, I know what it means.”

“Yes, I know you know what it means, but do you feel it?  Have you internalized it?  It’s one thing to know the book definition, but do you understand in your bones, the meaning of empathy?”

“Yeah, sure, I know.”

“You’re sure.”

“Ninety-nine point nine percent.”

“But you’ll let me have a crack at the one-tenth of one percent?”

“Go for it.”

“Thank you. I appreciate you giving me the chance to reach you on this. Look at me. Tonight I want you to go home and think about being empathetic.  And every night, until you leave this school, I want you to think about it.  Will you do that for me?”

“Sure, when I have the time. If it means that much to you. I mean, I can’t promise you that I’ll spend that much time on it, but when I get the chance, sure, I’ll think about it.”

“That’s all I ask.  Thanks, Jake.  You’d better get to your next class.”

I was going to tell her that I had a sub for my next class, but realized it would only prolong the conversation.  I was spooked by the intensity of her stare when she was talking to me.  It was as if she were hypnotizing me into thinking about a part of the human condition I hadn’t fully considered. I got out of there as fast as I could and vowed I wouldn’t dwell on it.  But it was sort of like when people say “Don’t think about elephants” and then all you can think about is elephants. I was annoyed all day, my brain gnawing on what seemed to me to be a bit of an insult and definitely a challenge. That night, just before I went to sleep, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.  What the hell was she talking about, “Empathy”?