I'm writing this for myself. I'm writing this for God. But above all, I'm writing this for my students.

This is my shortcut to find a good supplemental text for my lesson plan by, well, writing the text. But this is also my way of modeling and articulating to my kids a valuable theme and life lesson: who did what in a drama doesn't matter. What matters most often is what happens after.

Recently, my students and I have been focusing on the Battles of Lexington and Concord, and direct primary sources that contest who fired the first shot at Lexington and Concord. The first shot is known as "the short heard around the world" by famous figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Gerald Ford because the Battles of Lexington and Concord started the American Revolution.

What isn't known about the first shot, even today, is what side instigated the shot, whether it was the colonists or the British. I have some students who believe it was the British, based on sworn testimony of soldiers involved, like Nate Mulliken, a colonial soldier, and John Parker, a colonial captain. I have other students who believe it was the colonists based on the primary sources of colonial officers, like Lieutenant John Barker and Major John Pitcairn.

The argument for the colonists firing the first shot was that they had six days before the trial. In those six days, the colonial soldiers like John Parker and Nate Mulliken could have coordinated a story, as both accounts were shockingly similar as to the details of British aggression towards colonial militiamen on the green. The argument for the British firing first was that the colonists did swear before a court, where they could have been tried for perjury had they lied. The primary sources for British soldiers were a diary for John Barker and a memo from John Pitcairn to his general, Thomas Gage.

Yes, I am teaching to middle school kids, so the rigor of the sources isn't at the academic post-college level I'm used to engaging with. So I will delve deeper into the primary sources online available.

One undetermined British officer rode into Lexington, waving his sword, demanding that the colonial militiamen put away their guns. "Lay down your arms, you damned rebels," the officer said. Captain John Parker ordered his men to follow the officer's orders, but due to the chaos and confusion, his militiamen and British soldiers couldn't hear him. Both Pitcairn and Parker attempted to de-escalate and ordered their men to stand down.

The ironic fact that multiple witnesses agree that the shots didn't come from the British soldiers or colonial militiamen facing each other. Instead, it may have come from an onlooker from behind the tavern, but many agree that it didn't come from the people in the trenches themselves.

Someone fired a shot anyways. No one knows who.

We debated and went back and forth on the issue about whether the colonists fired first or whether the British did. But I've been thinking about whether it mattered in the first place. The "shot heard around the world" eventually would have led to the Revolutionary War. And if the shot that fired and started the Revolutionary War didn't start it, well, tensions between American colonists and the British officers had escalated so much that something else would have.

History was going to play its course. It was going to play its fate.

What does that mean for us, in this world, in my school?

The fact is that the "he said, she said" version of events, that was the case between colonists and British soldiers in the aftermath of Lexington and Concord, is not a productive conversation. If tensions are so high that one shot instigated an entire war.

Like the Revolutionary War didn't just end at Lexington and Concord, it didn't just start at Lexington and Concord either.

Most conflicts are like that. They didn't arise out of the blue. A marriage doesn't go sour overnight, and neither do kids not like each other over a single confrontation or incident.

Middle school is a time with kids undergoing puberty and a lot of transition. I remember what middle school was like for me, a time of heavy depression and anxiety. I was the shy kid. I had a lot of trouble talking to people and I sought other people's approval for everything, and I grew up in a very different environment from the kids I teach.

Arguing about who did what and who said what isn't productive. But instead, it's about looking past what happened and looking at what to do next. Anthropologically and biologically, conflict is not the most important factor in the strength of relationships. It is in post-conflict resolution, and in the flight-or-flight immediacy of most drama or incidents at an inner-city middle school, sometimes it's hard to see how a conflict is resolved. Sometimes it's hard to see whether a conflict is resolved at all.

The British and the colonists resolved their conflict with war. It wasn't pretty, but it's history, and it happened. War is more conflict, and there has to be alternative to conflict resolution besides more conflict.

I don't know what that alternative is yet. But I do know that other people do, and there are a lot of things that work, including restorative circles for us to process and talk about whatever happened, for us to gather as a community to work out what's the best way to move forward, resolve our conflicts, and strengthen our relationships.

We're all on the same team. We have the same goals, and we're all in this together. Sooner or later, let's act like it.

Thank you to Erik Brown.