“Malcolm was here.”
Served me right. It was my first full year teaching. Malcolm was an eighth grader who was the most infamous student in the school (it was a small one). He was a handful: impudent, trying, and naughty. He was on the radar of every teacher in the middle school. He was in some ways the pride and symbol of an eighth grade class that was hell-bent on accomplishing its self-fulfilling prophecy of being bad: If you don’t think we are ill-behaved, just try us!
I had taught several classes with Malcolm in it before we finally “knocked heads.” It was about twenty minutes into class when, annoyed and at the end of my rope with Malcom’s behavior, I sent him to stand in the corner with his back to the class. “I’ll show him!” I thought. Sending a student to stand in the corner was the only solution I had as a new teacher for misbehavior. Not sure where I had seen it or how I had thought of it. Maybe it was the image of the kid sitting in the corner with a dunce cap on, I don’t know. Regardless, it seemed to work. He was standing in the corner and he was not facing the class making his fellow students laugh and causing interruption.
The bell finally rang, and the students filed out to go to their next class. Pleased with my newfound classroom management skills, I started to get the classroom ready for the next class, placing chairs back under their desks and picking up trash from the floor. As I passed by the corner to which Malcom was sent, I noticed there was writing in pencil on the wall. Upon further inspection, it read “Malcom was here.” Ha! That’s pretty good, I thought. I guess he showed me!
Some twenty years later, I think I’ve probably seen it all as a full-time, middle school coach and teacher at a co-ed private school and later at an all-boys middle school, both of which are private.
Much like my own experience as a student described in “Paraphrasing GPT,” I had my own memory of acting up in class and, frankly, being a brat. I once had a fifth grade substitute teacher literally grab me by the hair on my head and drag me the length of the second floor hall, down the stairs, and straight to the principal’s office: all the way gripping and pulling my hair with all her might. It’s a wonder I wasn’t severely follically-challenged at the age of eleven. Man, was she mad at me! Another time I entered the cloakroom in class and hoisted myself onto the shelf above to hide when we had a substitute teacher. That substitute teacher didn’t get mad at me. She thought I was absent from school that day!
Most teachers will not and refuse to teach middle school kids. “I wouldn’t touch them with a ten-foot pole!” they will say. After all, it is this stage of adolescence that is fraught with weird, hyperactive, out-of-mind, hormone-infused behavior. Almost like the equivalent of the “terrible two” stage except some ten years later. If they can get a rise out of you, they will. They know how to push every button. Talk about the frontal lobe not being formed! It is an age full of followers and not enough leaders. Everybody’s a comedian, so they say. It is all about being a clown for many of them, standing out and seeing if they can make as many of their friends laugh as they can.
So what is the answer for teachers? Forms of punishment (or consequences) include demerits, formal warnings, staying after school, performing chores around school, calling parents, and being sent out into the hallway. Having to go the principal’s office is a biggie and often works, but I’m not so sure you need to be lead by your hair being pulled. Being sent to the corner, as I found out years ago, is an antiquated form of punishment that no longer works. The paddle, as I was once subjected to in junior high school, is a form of corporal punishment that was once permitted but is no longer.
There are some important things to remember here as a teacher. Kids in most cases can’t help it. It is a difficult age and they will one day mature and grow out of it. It’s just that teachers are the butt of their behavior and have to find ways to deal with it. The other thing is that each and every one of them is someone’s child outside of school: loved beyond measure and in many cases thought to be just the opposite of how they are in school: angels.
I sometimes wonder what Malcolm is up to these days some twenty-odd years later. After all, he was, as I remember, the smartest kid in his class. Just an unruly one as well. And lest we forget, loved by his parents. Wherever he is, I wonder if he is in some way reminding his superior that “I am here.”
