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Quinn Ehlers
Mr. Balagna
ELA 8
3 June 2020
What I Did For the Greater Good
When I think of the greater good, I think of people doing something that benefits more people
than just one. When I think about what I have done for the greater good, I think of instances where I have
done something that was good for many people besides just me. In general, there are not many things that
I have done that have been extremely beneficial to a lot of people. One thing I do remember doing,
however, is leading the groups during a Boy Scouts cleanup at Winchester Elementary School.
I remember arriving at the cleanup, only to see a bunch of Scouts and adults standing around with
tools in their hands and looking confused. I walked up to one of the adults and said, “Have we started yet,
or..”, and he responded, “Yeah, but the Scoutmaster is not here yet, so we don't know where we’re
supposed to start.” I thought that just because the Scoutmaster was not here did not mean we could not
start yet. I decided to stand on top of the pile of mulch and started directing people around, assigning
people to certain jobs and asking them to do certain things. I did not really have a good idea of what was
supposed to happen, so I enlisted the help of a few scouts who had done the same cleanup before and they
helped me decide where we should assign certain people and how certain jobs should be done. The weird
thing was that people listened to me and went where I said they should go and did what I said they should
do, as if I was their Scoutmaster.
After we had assigned people to jobs, we got down to work ourselves, too. A lot of people were
directing Scouts my way to ask questions about what they were supposed to be doing or the like, so I
mostly had to stand around answering those questions. However, eventually I got to work myself, and
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everyone was working very efficiently. You could hear the wheelbarrows squeaking, the shovels scraping,
and a lot of other things that suggested we were working hard. It was strange how we actually got more
done faster than we did any of the other years that we had done the cleanup. It made me feel good to see
how a bunch of people that I had directed to do certain jobs were doing those jobs efficiently and
effectively. There was one problem though, and that was that certain people were not doing what they
were supposed to or even doing any work at all, and there really was not anything we could do to get
them to do work because they would not listen when we told them they had to do something other than
stand around and throw dirt at each other. Then, I had an idea. Since we were doing this because we were
trying to help the kids at Winchester have a better-looking outside of their school, I said this to the kids,
“imagine you went to this school, and someone was cleaning up your school. You would want them to do
the best job they could, wouldn’t you?” They suddenly looked extremely guilty and grabbed a rake each,
and started to work on something. That was strange, I thought. I did not expect that to work. But now
everyone was working, and things were getting done a lot faster. In the end, I figured that me taking
charge of the whole operation would not have been good for anybody, but it actually ended up being more
efficient than it normally would have been. That was strange, because I had never done anything like that
before. At the end of the cleanup, people came and congratulated me on what a good job I had done
directing the whole thing. It felt really good to hear people congratulate me on something I had done for
the benefit of many other people. I knew that what I had done was a beneficial thing to many people.
That taught me that I could take charge of things that I thought I could not. It contributed to the
greater good because it caused a lot of people to be able to enjoy a nicer-looking school on the outside. It
also made me realize that I could be a leader if I wanted to and that people looked up to me and came to
me with their problems when they needed help. I also learned that the greater good does not have to be
something you do that affects a city or the whole world, but only something that impacts other people in
a good way other than yourself. I think that more people should do whatever they can to work for the
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greater good, because more people need to be taught what that is and what it means to do something to
benefit a whole group of people, and not just themselves.