Out of Line - a woman was rebellious in elementary school

Humanist, March, 1999 by Julie Ede Campbell

You were pretty wild when you were little," said my mother, her voice carrying a mixture of exasperation and delight. "A hard one to control," she added.

I smiled into the phone. Dear to me, my defiant spirit is a thing whose reality I cannot deny. It seems a life beyond my own--as it has led me places a more timid me wouldn't have ventured, bringing consequences both dire and fortunate. It was met by most teachers with great disdain. I laughed too loudly, talked too much, ran too hard. But here was my mother's affirmation, now, to her thirty-two-year-old daughter, 3,000 miles away and over the phone: "You were wild." I heard the sweetness in her voice.

But what of those teachers? How had they reacted to my spirit? How had they responded to that force that never really wished to be kept in line but, instead, always sought the line in order to go beyond? How they reacted--indeed, how they taught--was evidence of their values. Did they value creativity? Discovery? Order? Submission? Correctness? Experimentation? Whatever the teacher valued transcended the curriculum to become the most important lesson--the lesson every student learned, whether it be a grave one or a life-giving one. From kindergarten through twelfth grade, I experienced lessons of both the grave and life-giving variety.

So many of my teachers, particularly in elementary school, held mere compliance and docility as golden virtues paramount to student success. Such expectations simply set me up for what they would see as failure. Not one of these teachers, I am sure, would say, "Creativity is worth nothing." But that

was the lesson they taught all the same. They loved order--and maybe power--too much.

I didn't always respect their order; I didn't always acknowledge their power. It wasn't because I was mean, nasty, or ill-bred; I wasn't. It wasn't because I refused to learn; I did want to learn, to experiment, to create and discover. But my desires didn't represent what they were asking me to do. And so teachers reacted. They labeled. They made calls to my parents. They recommended me for testing by the school psychologist. And various school psychologists had various remedies for "my problem": "Buy her a pants suit." "Put her on Ritalin." "Buy her a horse." I was high-strung. I was a joker. I had an attitude. I was different.

"Yes, you were wild," my mother said over the phone, and she laughed a little. We talked of when I left St. Michael's Catholic School after second grade to attend public school. Knowing my penchant for mythologizing myself, I decided to ask my mother if I had, as indeed I thought I had, been kicked out of Catholic school.

"Absolutely not!" came her sharp and somewhat amused reply.

I had, in fact, left St. Michael's after second grade but I hadn't been kicked out. My own memory, however, had exalted me to outlaw status, creating for my reminiscent delight a sort of Jesse James of the second grade, terrorizing nuns and generally acting in complete defiance.

My mother said that she and my father decided to remove me from St. Michael's for a couple of reasons. She said it all had to do with the busing--a situation that hadn't been in place when my eight older siblings attended St. Michael's but which was the case with me due to a new facility the church had built for grades one through three. "You had to travel forty minutes every morning," Mom said. "It just wasn't worth it."

Dad said the reason was Mrs. Robarge.

That Mrs. Robarge was a teacher who liked boys better than girls was a fact "commonly known among St. Michael's parents," said my mother. However, neither she nor my father had shared this fact with me when I reported daily to Mrs. Robarge as one of her second-grade charges. It wasn't a child's role to question; for my parents to reveal their mistrust of my teacher would only exacerbate what must have appeared a difficult situation regarding their daughter, whose conduct report from Mrs. Robarge read "D."

A D in conduct! I remember feeling mortified. I always felt--and still do--that it was Mrs. Robarge who deserved the D--maybe even an F. At recess she separated the boys from the girls on the playground --the boys' side being where the jungle gyms were located. It was she who had treated me every day with nothing short of contempt. Without knowing it, I was learning that I was somehow a bad person and that girls were not as good as boys.

I'm sure it was the inherent nonsense of her method that one time prompted my own bit of nonsense. I was never very successful with math. In an effort to inspire me and other underachieving math students, Mrs. Robarge ceaselessly praised the mathematical talents of one of my classmates, John Olesky, who always received the highest grade on every math endeavor. She dangled his achievements before us like savory morsels; were we but to nibble at the bait, we, too, might be able to achieve such greatness.

Her method didn't work on me, however. I remember taking a math quiz and feeling as if it were pointless for me to even try to answer correctly. After struggling through the first few questions, I simply began putting down wrong answers, not even looking at the problems but instead writing "23, 24, 25, 26" and so on, perhaps as an outward exhibition of my boredom. Before handing it in, I wrote "John Olesky" in the "name" blank at the top.