school fights

[garote]

When I was in the third grade, I would occasionally get picked on by a revolving list of bullies. There was sometimes a fine line between mocking someone in a playful way, and just mocking someone - and when that line was crossed, punches were thrown. I was in a class taught by a sweet old woman with curly grey hair, who remembered my name five years later when I passed her in a grocery store. Her class was a generally happy place for me, even though I had a brutal and accidental mishap with the corner of a desk one day that left a scar near my eye.

Some of the other kids, most of them bullies as far as I could tell, had a class with a different teacher. She was tall and thin, with severe lines on her face, and straight brown hair in a ponytail. I remember her face well, even though I wasn't in her class, because I was called to her class several times. I had to pack up my things and put them under my desk, then walk empty handed out of my own classroom, across the campus alone, and into her class. All the students would be sitting in a circle of chairs along the edges of the room, all facing inwards at an area where the desks had been pushed aside to reveal a single chair. I was ordered to sit in the chair.

The teacher would introduce that session of "The Agenda" by making some trite speech about justice and good conduct, which I can't remember a word of. Then she would call on a student, who would recount the details of a conflict that happened during recess, that I had been involved in. I always knew who it would be beforehand because when I got into a scuffle or exchanged insults with the student, he or she would shout "I'm putting you on The Agendaaa!" in a taunting voice. And the next hour or the next day, I would be called out of class.

So the student would retell the story - sometimes accurately, but often with various details omitted, and sometimes with outright lies. I would be ordered to explain myself or say something in my defense, and then the teacher would ask various students how they would have acted differently, had they been in my alleged situation. I remember feeling surprised a few times because the story the "victim" told was completely different from what I remembered happening - and though I wanted to stand up and declare that I hadn't done any of those things, I was never given permission to. I was afraid of the teacher, the authority figure, so I just sat and held my tongue.

Eventually the teacher would suggest some form of punishment, disguised as a bizarre remedy for my maladjusted emotions. Once I was ordered to take a large foam-stuffed punching bag outside the classroom to the lawn, and beat and kick the bag for half an hour nonstop, in full view of the tinted bay windows that bordered each room. It was supposed to "cure" my aggression, the teacher explained, by teaching me "the futility of fighting". Another time I was convicted of chasing someone (it was never revealed that I'd chased the person because they'd said horrible things to me), so I was ordered to go outside and run laps around the campus for 45 minutes. "Maybe if you get your running done now, you won't chase people later" she opined.

"The Agenda" became a campus-wide phenomenon. People who weren't even in the woman's class would threaten to put others on "The Agenda", bluffing in retaliation or in self-defense. Some students who were too eager to threaten with it got abused more severely by their attackers, who would push things further to show their defiance.

I can't say being on "The Agenda" taught me anything, in the immediate sense. It was years later before I was mature enough to think about it abstractly. All I remembered at the time was, "There's this adult, who has a mean streak, and she gives her students the power to humiliate and punish me. I can't do anything about it. I fear her, and I hate her students."

Those years later, my memories of the ordeal would conjure a seething, righteous fury inside me. That woman treated me like a dog. If I'd had access to the school records, I would have called her, and each of her students, on the phone, and screamed at them, until my voice gave out, for taking such advantage of that confused, hapless younger self that I had been.

Now that I'm older my perspective has cooled somewhat, though I'd still probably yell at the teacher if I met her in the street. My memories of schoolyard fights got me to thinking about "Zero Tolerance" rules that some districts have adopted. The rules have variations, but their basic theme is, "punish everyone involved, not just the aggressor". Given the ability of some children to tell outrageous lies with the same voice that they use to speak the honest truth, and the scarring emotional consequences of punishing the "wrong" student, I can say that I eagerly endorse that one aspect of "Zero Tolerance". However, pretty much the rest of the program is draconian poop. A society so eager to discard a subset of its developing young members, by expelling them from school and denying them access to further education, it a society with its collective heads up its collective asses.

I got in many fights in Elementary School. Those tapered off in Middle School, as I matured and wrestled with my emotions. Finally in High School I joined the football team, and that completed the puzzle by showing me that there were acceptable venues for my rage. How badly would this progression have been stunted, if I'd simply been ejected from school altogether? Would I have proceeded to far worse crimes?

Comments

[thegoodreverend.livejournal.com]

I literally have trouble beliving this. I'm not sure other teachers or parents would have put up with this at my elementry school - it's a sort of social conditioning that you hear about happening in private boy's schools in England in the 1950s.

I'm willing to bet not everyone came out of their expiriences as well-adjusted as you did.

it's pretty funky, yeah

[garote]

I think there was a lot of experimenting going on at that school by people who wanted to exert influence beyond their job description - and qualifications. Since each student was under the care of one specific teacher for an entire year (instead of rotated around like in later years), there had to be some method for addressing inter-classroom conflicts. I think teachers were given far too much freedom to design their own flavor of criminal justice.

It wasn't all witch-hunts and barbarism, thank goodness. I remember my home-room teachers showing as much sympathy for my misunderstood intelligence, as they showed frustration over my lack of discipline. They knew I wasn't a bad kid. Just a puzzling one. There was also a school counselor I had several talks with, named Mr. LaBou, who was very earnest and said a lot of things that made sense to my young mind. However, my emotions were truly beyond my control at that age, and though Mr. LaBou may have laid the groundwork for my struggle to master them later in life, he wasn't able to stop me from flying into an indignant rage over the injustices of that schoolyard. I have a lot of sympathy and respect for a person whose role was essentially damage control for kids whom other adults had written off or mishandled out of frustration.

This kind of segues into another topic though ... Since I expressed so little control, I was a good candidate for Attention Deficit Disorder medication. My parents considered it for a while and then decided against it (or so I am told). The only medication I remember taking is Tetracycline, years later, to try to control my acne. For some reason I have a profound sense of relief that I was never medicated.

A large part of me is convinced that, though my inner mind wasn't predictable to outsiders, it was at least consistent to myself, and over the long haul I became familiar enough with that consistency to develop what others called "coping mechanisms". If I hadn't eventually persuaded one part of my mind to adapt to the other ... what would my alternative have been?

Stay on the medication forever?

Hrmm, This would seem to validate my opinion

[garote]

From Coping Skills for Adults with ADD, ADHD:

cluelessnMN: Hyperfocusing. Good Thing? Too much of a Good Thing?

Thom Hartmann: Yes! Yes!!! The trick is learning to notice when you've switched it on and then deciding if it's useful in that circumstance, and then choosing to hang out in that mode or turn it off. That's a process of learning self-awareness that's very useful and that most people, surprisingly, have never really explored. Start noticing how you notice things, noticing your reactions and responses to things, and noticing the internal switches and levers that switch you on and off. From there to taking control of it all is actually a surprisingly short path.

[monkinnabeanpod.livejournal.com]

moo. I must say that sounds like a traumatic experience...I'd like to say more, but I can't elaborate as of now due to lack of sleepies...