Introductory 1:Adversity is a common thing amongst the human-race. Almost everyone has had a problem once or twice in their life. For example, not everyone can agree on everything. Arguments amongst people aren’t rare, and almost every person has been a part of one. Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird had this exact adversity in her life. When she first went to school, she found different kinds of classmates with different views and opinions. She even butted heads with her teacher when she told Scout to stop reading.
But, little did she know, that through these problems she had throughout her life were actually shaping her and helping her mature as a person. Most people see adversities as a bad thing, but humans need to have adversity to successfully come-of-age. Adversity is needed in order to come-of-age because adversity makes a person more resilient, teaches lessons about overcoming future problems, and makes a person more experienced about the world, while being a positive input in their life contributing to the way they live greatly.
Introductory 2: The sources used have direct relations to the ways that adversities can be a good thing. To Kill a Mockingbird is a story that has a prominent focus on comingof-age. It shows how adversities shape people, and how they are necessary. Articles about how butterflies come out of cocoons and how muscle is built also relates, because the processes include different struggles. Another article directly talks about how adversities are meant to be lessons to learn to become more experienced as a person.
Malala Yousafzai was a young girl who was forced to come-of-age young because of all of the problems she had to face during her life as a female in Pakistan. Megan Phelps-Roper had been a member of the Westboro Baptist Church her whole life, and thought that all of her views were normal. After some deep arguments on Twitter, she learned some valuable lessons on how to resolve conflict. The last source is about a Kenyan tribe that puts their children through harsh adversities to create the best runners in the world.
All of the sources contribute to the argument that adversity is needed in order to come-of-age because adversity makes a person more resilient, teaches lessons about overcoming future problems, and makes a person more experienced about the world, while being a positive input in their life contributing to the way they live greatly. 1st claim: People need adversity because it helps someone learn and come back to the same problem stronger. Adversity helps a person grow stronger, and examples of adversity helping something or someone to come of age can be found right in nature.
There is a story about a man who cut open a butterfly’s cocoon, the butterfly “needed the struggle out of the cocoon to force the fluid into its wings to stretch and open them so that the butterfly could fly. By trying to shortcut the process, the man had instead doomed the creature”(joyfuldays. com). The butterfly is an example that can relate to everyday life, and how adversities are necessary. The butterfly needed the struggle of coming out of the cocoon itself to survive. To come-of-age, people need to go through struggles to come back to the same problem stronger. Just like the butterflies, adversity helps human bodies grow stronger.
To grow muscles “you’re actually slightly damaging your muscles by allowing them to lift more weight than they would in normal daily life” (Carpenter). For a person’s muscles to grow stronger, they need to damage them slightly. The damage to the muscle causes it to rebuild itself stronger. Adversity works this way as well. If a person has to go through some challenges that slightly damage them, they can make themselves stronger while they rebuild the damage. While rebuilding the damage, people can learn more about how people and the world operate. 2nd claim: Adversities can help people be more prepared to solve future problems.
Megan Phelps-Roper grew up with multiple adversities, since as a child she was indoctrinated into the Westboro Baptist Church. She encountered many disagreements with people of opposing views. The adversities helped her to maturely have arguments with people that do not agree with her views. She realized that,”we have to talk, and listen to people we disagree with”(Phelps-Roper). Adversity plays a big part in teaching individuals how to resolve conflicts, and conflicts on Twitter helped Megan Phelps-Roper resolve them maturely. All her life she was taught that her church’s way was the right way and that everyone else is wrong.
After having arguments with people on Twitter, she learned the steps of conflict resolution. Adversities teach valuable life lessons. On a similar note, in To Kill a Mockingbird after Scout beats up Walter Cunningham, Atticus teaches her a valuable lesson. Atticus says to Scout, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view”(Lee 39). Scout’s conflict at school caused Atticus to teach her about how to think during future problems. Adversities can cause other people to help people out and teach them a lesson on how to solve them in the future, just like Scout and Atticus.
Adversities don’t always give people the tools to learn a lesson themselves, sometimes other people need to help. Adversity made Malala learn that someone needed to stand up for women’s in her country, and she maturely decided that she would be the one to obtain those rights. Adversities can help a person come-of-age enough to solve problems for other people. Just like adversities 3rd claim: Adversity helps a person become more experienced about how the world works. Adversities can shape the way that people think about the world. Someone who has not come-ofage would have a naive view of the world, and only see the good in it.
Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird makes a good example of this. After the trial where the jury decides Tom Robinson as guilty, Atticus says to the children, “They’ve done it before and they did it tonight and they’ll do it again and when they do it-seems that only children weep”, in response to their dismay of the situation (Lee 285). Atticus has lived many years and has many experiences with adversities that have caused him to come-of-age. He has gone through trial after trial and watch the people always convict a black person guilty.
The way that he says his line sounds like as a child he used to be in such disbelief as the children had experienced. After experiencing the same problem over and over again, he realized most people in his area experienced prejudice, and he stopped being surprised when they convicted a black person guilty. Another example of childhood naivety is Malala Yousafzai’s story. She went through an extreme adversity. Her father had founded a school for girls, and the local terrorists did not approve of this. Though she was a little frightened, she was not too scared because she thought that “The Taliban have never come for a small girl. (Yousafzai).
This proved wrong when later on she was shot by a member of Taliban on the school bus. Malala learned about the adversities that her and other women are facing in her country. The problem she personally faced helped her realize that the world isn’t all nice and she could very well get hurt. The adversities helped her realize that she should fight for women’s rights in Pakistan. She came of age at around 11, when she ” took on the Taliban, demanding that girls be given full access to school” (Parade) In relation, adversities can be seen as lessons that can potentially teach people about the world.
People can choose to learn from it or not, but if they do not, they ” will be handed a more difficult scenario of the same lesson again”(Brunkhorst). The lessons that someone is meant to learn will keep coming back until they “learn them completely. ” If a person chooses not to learn from their adversities, they might happen again and the person would not know how to handle it. When adversities appear, it teaches people the skills they need to overcome future problems of the same type. It teaches someone how things work, which help them come-of-age.
Teaching how to resolve future problems is a key point in the importance of adversities in life. Counterclaim 1: Some may argue that adversity is not needed for a person to successfully come-of-age. They may claim that “adversity in childhood damages students’ long-term learning and health”(Sparks). While the argument is correct in the sense that too many adversities can damage a child, adversities are still necessary for someone to come of age. If someone does not have knowledge on how to handle conflict, individuals could still view the person as childlike. One aspect of coming-of-age is the ability to handle adversity well.
If someone does not have experience with other adversities, they might act like a child would in a similar situation. People who have matured would have experienced the problem or something similar, and know exactly how to deal with it. Malala Yousafzai learned what she needed to do to deal with problems, just like Megan PhelpsRoper and Scout Finch. After Malala was shot, she realized that women needed better rights in her home country of Pakistan. Malala “was only 11 when she took on the Taliban, demanding that girls be given full access to school,”(Parade). nd main claim: Adversity is a positive part of a person’s life. Adversities always occur throughout a person’s life, and they are a positive input on people’s lives. Adversity actually creates the best runners, as a tribe in Africa uses special tactics to always win marathons. They go through an initiation that if they don’t endure they are labeled a coward. The adversity creates an “enormous social pressure placed on your ability to endure pain is actually great training for a sport like running where “pushing through pain” is so fundamental to success”(Warner).
Though it may seem like a negative experience at the time, it turns out to be beneficial in the long run. An example was that one of the runners from this tribe won a marathon while he had a gallbladder infection, which are extremely painful. He was able to make it through the marathon because he had experienced much more pain than what he was enduring right then back at home. Adversities are a positive input on a person’s life and they can use the experience from them for future problems. Adversities are positive in To Kill a Mockingbird, as well.
Since Scout learned about how to treat people, it helped her come of age successfully. As said in the famous quote from To Kill a Mockingbird about crawling into someone else’s skin a walking around in it, Atticus tells Scout an important lesson about how to see the world maturely. The lesson Atticus taught her, helped her think more maturely about Tom Robinson’s situation, and to not have prejudice. Her struggle with Walter Cunningham helped her learn a lesson that she used later, and helped her come-of-age. Adversity was a positive impact on Scout Finch’s life.
Conclusion: Next time that someone is experiencing an adversity, they should not only see the bad, they should look at the good as well. Adversities help shape people into who they are and how they act. Though the situation may seem bad at the time, it most definitely helps the person out in the long run. Things like adversities cause people to be more resilient, more intelligible, and stronger mentally and sometimes physically. Adversities work beneficially toward a person, and people should stop thinking of them as only negative.
