*names have not been changed. There are no innocents here.
In the summer of 1981, in suburban Prairie Village, Kansas, the Shawnee Mission school district closed Porter elementary school and split its students between Belinder and Prairie elementary schools. I was entering fourth grade at Belinder, comfortable in who I was, kinda nerdy, but got along with most everyone. I had a hard time paying attention in class and never seemed to get any work done, but I had an amazing third grade teacher who figured out that I needed glasses, which was probably why I zoned out when she was teaching. I was also more interested in the chapter book I was hiding behind my math textbook, most likely a copy of Encyclopedia Brown’s latest.
So entering fourth grade I thought life was pretty good. I had new glasses, I had a Dorothy Hamill haircut, and I would have the super nice fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Wright.
None of that worked out the way I expected. The kids from Porter came into our world trying to find their own place on the shifting food chain, so me and my new glasses and weird haircut fell straight to the bottom.
The new glasses meant that I could actually see what I couldn’t before: the disdain of the other kids in the classroom every time I raised my hand, spoke, or got out of my chair, which, to be fair, was often. I could also see the barely held contempt from the new fourth grade teacher whose class I landed in, who was not the super nice Mrs. Wright, but instead the young and glam Miss Billie Aaron. Fresh out of teacher college, she decided two things about me real quick: I was the most annoying child in the room, and she was going to break me of my worst habit - sucking my thumb.
Yep, I still sucked my thumb in fourth grade, just one of a host of quirky behaviors that I didn’t understand at the time. I had no idea this was an issue at school, it had never come up before. No teacher had ever mentioned it, though my mom had been trying to get me to stop by painting my thumb with nasty tasting stuff, which didn’t work. I wasn’t even aware of doing it most of the time, it was a self-soothing tool. But Miss Aaron hated it. So she decided that every time she saw me with my thumb in my mouth, she would stop in the middle of whatever lesson she was teaching and stick her thumb in her mouth and stare at me until every kid in the room turned to also stare at me, and I stopped, humiliated.
Eventually I stopped sucking my thumb at school and it became a bedtime only routine, until I managed to stop for good about two years later. I guess Miss Aaron won on some level. But on another, she ensured that I would never have any social capital among that group of classmates. I developed a hypervigilance around making sure I did NOT accidentally put my thumb in my mouth, so I chewed on pencils, pens, paper clips, shirtsleeves, my hair as it grew out, etc. It also meant that when I didn’t have something in my mouth I talked more, something Miss Perfect Teacher probably didn’t think through. HA.
As the year went on, I was bullied constantly by the Porter kids. But aside from the situation with my thumb sucking, there are only a couple of situations that stand out for the straight up meanness of the kids behind the incident.
Gather round younguns, and let me tell you about the olden days before The Google. Classrooms like mine kept a giant Webster’s Dictionary on the shelf in the back of the room, open at all times, accessible. Anyone could walk to it and look up something anytime they needed to. It was also a place to waste time looking up dirty words or random phrases, which was the favorite past time of a bruiser of a kid named Walter Egan.
Walter was new that year, though I am not sure he was one of the Porter kids. Walter also didn’t have a lot of strong social skills, his way of making friends was to bully them into being his sidekick and doing his dirty work for him. Think Draco Malfoy, but Italian and well fed.
One day during indoor recess, Walter and his henchman Billy French turned their attention to my name in the dictionary.
I was on the other side of the room from the dictionary, obviously with my nose in a book. I slowly became aware that the entire class was focused on the two boys at the far end of the room, rolling on the floor laughing. I began to realize that whatever the joke was, it was about me. I felt my face getting red before I even knew why, and steeled myself for whatever was coming.
They had discovered that in the dictionary, a definition for “jenny” is a female donkey.
Awesome.
By the time I finished the fourth grade school year, I was a different kid. My self-esteem had been obliterated. The friends from previous years barely spoke to me or played with me at recess, or did so only occasionally, depending on where the social pull was at any given moment. They would still play with me on the weekends in the neighborhood, though, when the social cliques of the classroom weren’t enforced, which just confused me even more.
That one teacher did more to break me, and several other kids in her classroom, than a whole host of other teachers in the building all put together. At one point, in a fit of rage and frustration at my inability to stop talking, she sent me out to the hallway saying “You add no value here, you only take away from your classmates who are trying to learn.”
As a teacher now, I understand where her frustration comes from, but I’m appalled when I think back at the way she treated those of us who weren’t perfect angels. I feel bad that whatever education program she attended did not prepare her for kids with ADHD, or really give her any classroom management skills at all.
After that, I spent the rest of the year in the hallway as much as possible, teaching another classmate how to read, because at least there he and I weren’t getting yelled at. He needed help she wasn’t giving him, and I needed to be valued. We had a pretty good time together, and we were both glad to be out of her line of fire.
Plus, he knew that a jenny is also a name for a bird, a Jenny Wren.
Recent Comments