By Coleen Armstrong

Now, of course there are degrees of pain. So it’s best to paint a picture. Imagine a kid who enters your room every day acting hostile. Who kicks his chair and slams down his books before sinking angrily into his seat. Who huffs and sighs elaborately every time you mention an upcoming essay. Who whistles, belches, sings and snorts during lessons, pokes his classmates’ collars with a pencil (on the rare occasions that he remembers to bring one) and then pretends innocence when someone turns, irritated. Who plops his feet on the adjacent empty desk, then closes his eyes, feigning sleep, just as you’re trying to make an essential point.
 
He also challenges every statement with hopscotch logic, steering every discussion into an intellectual wasteland, and grins delightedly when his purpose (to distract, confuse and squander precious time) has been achieved.
 
Trouble doesn’t begin to describe it.

“I want him to learn. I probably care more, in fact, about his education than he does.”

Send that kid to the office, you say? Not so fast. Administrative intervention is reserved for true insubordination and verbal abuse. This guy walks a fine line, a disciplinary tightrope. His actions aren’t reprehensible, only obnoxious. He stops just in time and then sits there, looking pleased with himself.
 
Call his parents? Not necessarily a solution. Those whose offspring behave so badly have a peculiar tendency to defend them, perhaps even to accuse teachers of stifling their creativity or even––heaven forbid––being blind to their brilliance.
 
Besides, I don’t want the boy grounded, pummeled or removed from class. I want him to behave. I want him to learn. I probably care more, in fact, about his education than he does.
 
So I take him aside. Speak gently, with understanding. Sometimes it works. More often it doesn’t. Sometimes it takes eight months of sparring, from which I emerge more bruised and bloody than he. Of course he doesn’t see that, not yet. He doesn’t realize that he’s masking huge amounts of pain and insecurity by lashing out at the nearest available target––his teacher.
 
Who, by the way, can’t fight back. We don’t play by the same rules, he and I. I’m not allowed to descend into baiting, sarcasm or name-calling. He is. He attacks my motives, my integrity. Accuses me of being unfair. Dismisses my lesson plans as stupid. He shouldn’t have to attend school, complete assignments or follow rules. It’s a free country, isn’t it?
 
And then, at around the end of May, something changes. Maybe it’s the warm weather or the prospect of freedom from responsibility running out. Watching final minutes tick by, contemplating the thought of needing to earn his own living for the next forty years, he suddenly becomes––dare I say it? Focused.
 
The insight hits him like a thunderbolt. Hey! My teachers haven’t been my enemies! They’ve been trying to help me! Maybe if I hadn’t fought them so hard, everything might have been easier.
 
New knowledge is always too heavy to bear alone. He must share it, give it voice. That’s when I hear the doorknob turn, see the sheepish grin and steel myself for what I know is coming.
 
“I’m sorry,” he says.
 
Two words. He thinks they’re enough. He’ll be forgiven; children always are. They have endless chances to set things right. Adults have one. And that’s the network he’ll be a part of soon. No longer able to make excuses like, I’m in a bad mood, or I’ve had a rough day. (Show me someone who hasn’t.) Somehow, somewhere, he knows that.
 
As for me, I can only sigh, reach inside my purse for the tiny aspirin bottle, and wish that wisdom, insight and a guilty conscience had arrived just a few months earlier.

Coleen Armstrong’s distinguished teaching career includes several state and national recognition awards.  She is the author of Please Don’t Call My Mother:  How Schools and Parents can Work Together to Get Kids Back on Track and The Truth about Teaching:  What I Wish the Veterans had Told Me.