Taylor the Teacher

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I broke up a fight at 3:40 on Friday afternoon out by the busses. The only reason I was even there to see the fight was because I was waiting in my car for a colleague who needed a lift home. There were about 4 cops around the school but none by the busses even though most of the fights I have witnessed have happened either during the lunch period or out by the busses. Nor were there any administrators there. I was able to take one of the boys away from the situation but the other one ran off to get on his bus. The child I was with was spitting blood out of his mouth and had several small cuts on his face. (The second student was later found by the police officer and hauled into the front office.)

This incident has me thinking about several related things that have come to mind this week regarding this issue, to wit:

1. Students are not on our side on this when the chips are down.  Don’t believe me? Look at this website. I will not link to it, so you’ll have to copy and paste. http://www.school-fights.com/ During this, as during all school fights I have seen, other students were standing around watching the show. I never have seen a student move a muscle to go get help from a male teacher or administrator or cop in response to my demands that they do so.  Not when there’s a news event going down. Besides, they’re not going to break ranks to help a teacher. Not unless there’s something else at stake:  I have seen one male student physically restrain a female that was fighting at lunch to try (vainly) to keep her out of it. The girl was his cousin, and he didn’t want her to get into trouble. He himself was in a fight away from school several months later involving a hammer and a two-by-four, and caught the business end of the hammer to the back of his head. He missed several days of school but was back the next week with stitches.

2.  The surveillance cameras around the school aren’t helping, and might even be making it worse. I once stood in the hallway after the bell and saw something was going on, but I couldn’t figure out what. It was a gut feeling. There were two groups of students on opposite ends of the hall, but each group was loosely congregated and smiling. They weren’t saying or doing anything I could put my finger on. I went to start class. Then my seniors in the classroom started giggling, tittering, and looking strangely at me. One or 2 minutes went by and one of them said to me, “Do you think there might be something going on out in the hallway?” They found this hilarious. I went to the hallway. Nothing. The fight had moved to the stairwell (which goes down only from where we are.) Why? You guessed it. No cameras in the stairwell. But the stairwell is much more dangerous.

3. This is high entertainment to the students. The thing that makes me the most angry about this every single time, and it does happen every time, is that the fans get such a kick out of it. In the incident mentioned in #2, I laid into my class. I came the closest I have ever come to just outright bawling them out, raised voice and all. I asked them why it was funny. Their answer was that “freshmen are stupid.” So, although they are the “mature” seniors, they don’t see a problem with laughing and enjoying the fact that several students are about to debase themselves as humans by solving their problems with violence, probably get arrested, get a record, and get suspended (thanks to zero tolerance), and possibly get really hurt. These stairs are steep, narrow, and made of concrete. Fighting in that passageway is colossally stupid. Good way for someone to break something. Like a neck.

4. They are better than this. In most situations, these are great kids. They astound me. This is why it makes me so angry for them to have this attitude toward violence. Dave Grossman and Loren Christensen write,

We have some wonderful kids in America today. The teenage pregnancy rate is down, the teenage drug use rate is down, and teenage alcoholism is down. Although some juvenile violence indicators have gone up, the bottom line is that most kids today are a notch or two better than they have been in a long time. These kids are courageously and heroically reporting the presence of guns, bombs, and threats in their schools. We have stopped more school bombings and school shootings in recent years, than ever before, and in most cases it is because kids reported it.

5. They learn it from us.  On yet another occasion I talked to every one of my classes about fighting (a particularly bad one had happened the day before.)  My point was that education is supposed to teach people not to solve their problems with violence (among other things, of course.) Without exception, during each class period someone said, “That’s not true, look at President Bush.” I pointed out that having a degree doesn’t make a person educated. This turned the discussion every time onto a discussion of the Iraq war rather than the rationality of slamming other people into lockers.

What I should have done, however, was let the students discuss that issue in groups, comparing the two situations. (Ex. What measures were taken in advance of the Iraq occupation to try to avoid war? What are the possible consequences of inaction? Etc.) But that would be like condoning or justifying this war, which I cannot do. Besides, I’m not sure the answers to those questions would be favorable to my non-violent agenda, which I admittedly have. People should not hit other people. Or bomb them. This is not radical. Every mother of a toddler teaches her child not to hit or bite or otherwise assault others on the playground. Teaching kids not to harm others is part of our responsibility as adults.

6. They learn it from us. I had a parent say to me this week, regarding the permission forms I have to get signed for students to watch PG-13 films, that he didn’t mind if his daughter saw violence as long as she didn’t see any sex.  Nice. The process by which all life is created and by which married couples sustain a loving bond is too disgusting to look at, but it’s okay to hurt other people. I must have registered my reaction on my face because he said, “She just laughs at the violence anyway.” I feel so much better.

7. They learn it from us. Watched the news lately? Police brutality? Bombing of civilians?

8.  They learn it from us. Watched any commercials for horror films lately?

9. Punishment doesn’t make anyone better. We have to punish the offenders, and we’re doing that. The result is that we’re constantly putting out fires and pulling kids off of each other. We are not proactive enough. Punishing without teaching conflict resolution will not do it. Punishing without modeling proper behavior ourselves is hypocritical and immoral. For more on this, read “A Clockwork Orange.” I can’t explain it the way Burgess does.

10. It’s not the school’s fault. We didn’t make the kids this way, they came to us this way from the culture at large and from their homes. Peggy Noonan writes about her experience in Northern Ireland in an article called, “Hatred Begins at Home:” 

Whenever I think of war, I think of this: It was 1982 or ‘83, I was in Northern Ireland, and a local reporter was showing me around Derry, then a center of the Protestant-Catholic conflict. The neighborhood we were in was beat up, poor, with Irish Republican Army graffiti on tired walls. There were some scraggly kids on the street.

Suddenly an armored British army vehicle slowly rounded the corner, and the street came alive with kids pouring out of houses, grabbing the heavy metal lids of garbage bins, and smashing them against the pavement. They made quite a racket.

A woman came out. She was 35 or 40, her short hair standing up, uncombed. It was late afternoon, but she was in an old robe, and you could tell it was the robe she lived in. She stood there and smirked as the soldiers went by. She’d come out to register her dislike for the Brits, and to show the children she approved of their protest.

As I watched this nothing sort of scene, I thought: That’s where it comes from. That’s what keeps it alive.

I knew what kind of person she was. She was lost, neglectful; she was what would come to be called dysfunctional, and whichever of the kids were hers you could tell she wasn’t giving them order or safety, not often.

But here at this moment she was being responsive to something–the presence of the enemy. And she was showing an emotion: hatred.

And I thought: Those kids banging the lids on the pavement, they are going to wind up like her, and for some utterly human reasons. To get her notice and approval. To ally themselves with her grievances–if they can’t have access to any other part of her, at least they can have her resentment. To be part of her world, of any world.

They would grow up and assign their misery to outside forces. The boy humiliated because he’s never sent to school with a clean shirt will turn that into “Britain Get Out of Ireland.”