Kindness is NOT the answer: The problem of bullying (Part 3)

Are we demanding kindness while we model unkindness?

Part 3

Read Part 1 and 2 of Kindness is NOT the answer

One day, my child gets in the car and tells me that a teacher announced in front of the whole class that she did not like my child’s creative writing piece that it was bad and he would have to do it again. That same day another teacher told my child that if he thought it made sense to sit on the floor in the hallway waiting for his classroom to open he should not be in honors classes. A third teacher of a subject he adores and pours himself into told him that she was going to take off points from his test because his work was too messy. He tells me all this as he enters the car, bottom lip trembling. Now, this presents a problem.

When children are unkind, it was easy to help my kids process their unkindness but now I am facing a line of adults. I am also facing myself. As he waited in the back of the car, eyes big, tears brimming, expectantly awaiting my reaction, I took a moment. I envisioned my child in the classroom, handing in his creative writing, his metaphor assignment. I had seen him review his three possible starting paragraphs repeatedly and finally settle on the one he would give to his teacher. He had read them over and over, analyzed them from his perspective, then, as is his way of being, tried to analyze them from hers and settled on the one he would give her. I imagined him sitting there proud of his work as she began handing them back, sitting there as she turned to him in the classroom and told him it was “bad”. “Where are you in the cafeteria or on a mountain?” I could see him looking bewildered, not understanding the obvious disappointment and rejection he heard, as he thought, wasn’t that the point of a metaphor? He was in the cafeteria in the story but he had felt he was on a mountain. I can picture him there in the classroom, among his peers, registering his failure. My heart flooded with anger. Next, I flashed to him sitting in the hallway, between classes, outside the door to his class, waiting. “I was sitting with a friend, just talking.” I see the teacher with all her own thoughts, her own worries circling in her mind, rushing down the hallway to see my son in her way. I see her thinking to herself, “Really? One more thing. Really? This kid is going to get hurt. What the heck is he thinking? He is going to get stepped on or someone else will get hurt. Who sits in the middle of a hallway?” My heart went out to her, partly. I know my son. He is the child who is so in the moment that he forgets his surroundings. In any moment, his full heart is there, his full being is there, and it forgets to look around. In my mind, I want to hug that little boy sitting there and gently move him to the side but I also recognize the teacher’s exasperation. Who sits in the middle of a hallway? That same question has popped into my head frequently with my son. Next, I see that other teacher sitting at her desk, stacked high with papers she must grade. I see her there, worried about the fight she got in with her husband, or how her child had marched off to school angry and she’s sitting there at her desk watching these fifth graders hand her test after test that she knows she must go home and grade and my son walks up and hands her his test. He is proud because this is his subject, part of his identity, this is what he loves, the subject he feels proud of. He hands her his test wrapped in his hope that she will see him, when she grades it. She looks down at his work and there is no order to it. The math runs across the page, sometimes going down, sometimes horizontal and sometimes diagonal. She knows that this paper will take her three times as long to grade, to find his answer and suddenly, she is mad. She doesn’t have that time, she has her marriage to worry about, a child who she feels slipping away, how can this child in front of her be so thoughtless and selfish to hand her a paper that will take her too long to get through, where the answers aren’t obvious and easy to find. She has told him this before. It was careless before, now it is oppositional. She glances at his work. Without looking at him, she says, “I am going to take off points for how messy this is.” He is filled with shame as he finds himself with his peers staring at him once again and thinks to himself “Why am I so messy? What is wrong with me?” Again, my heart fills with sorrow as I watch that boy turn and head to his desk. I want to rush over to him, grab him up in my arms, and snatch him from that classroom, run down the hall, put him in my car and drive away. But I immediately wonder what I am driving him toward: home? Home, where just last night when we were doing practice test after practice test to get ready, I had said, “I can’t work with you anymore if you are going to be this messy. It’s too hard. It takes too long. Why can’t you just be neat?” I realize that last night, I was that teacher, not at a desk with fourteen other tests to grade but sitting on my couch next to him, delivering the same message, with our bodies side by side.

He is still watching me in the back seat, waiting to see how I will process all this, waiting to see how he must process all of this.

Read Part 4 of Kindness is NOT the answer