Coming of Age

If you have any high school kids, you probably know (or maybe it is just English teachers who know) that they read coming of age novels. Initiation novels. Why? Because that’s the stage of life they are in. Sometimes it is easier to read about someone who has the same problems as you do than it is to talk about your own. Sometimes the distance helps the kids work things out.

Anyway. The sophomores just got done reading A SEPARATE PEACE by John Knowles. In this book the narrator, Gene, matures through the death of his best friend, Phineas.  Gene didn’t figure out how much Phineas really meant to him until his friend had died.

I was not in school yesterday, and this morning, when I got out of my car, the sophomore English teacher greeted me with,”Did you hear about our tragedy?”

Such words uttered in a high school setting always make my stomach sink. I had not. One of the kids in the sophomore class had committed suicide. The Shrek Kid. Now the Shrek Kid had sort of made everyone miserable last year, but this year I had thought he was a little better. What do I know? His class is full of boys who give their teacher a run for his money. He was no different in that respect than any of the others. But his obituary states that he was a Christian.

Some of the boys in his class got permission to go to this boy’s house this morning and visit with his parents. The visit really threw them. Several of them came back to school and called their parents to take them home. The others talked. They talked about their classmate’s mom and how all she could do was cry. They talked about how everyone there cried, even the assistant principal who drove them there. They talked about how the grieving mom asked them, her son’s friends, to be there for him now. “I don’t care what’s going around your school,” she said. “He did it because he was scared. Tell them that.”

Her statement really speaks to me because of an experience I had when I was fifteen. We were going to have a class party, and one of our classmates didn’t show. He was a really quiet boy, and everyone just moaned and said it was just like him not to show. To ruin our party.

He was dead. By his own hand.

I was in the class with people of all ages, and a few of us got together to go the funeral home. It was my first experience with someone my own age dying. Donald was Catholic, and he had a black rosary wrapped around his hands. When my classmates and I got to the funeral home, his mother came up to us and said, “He didn’t leave a note. Do you know why he did it?”

We didn’t. We all were aware, though, that we had not been as nice to Donald as we could have been.

I asked the youth pastor at my church later on about Donald. I was worried, you see, that he hadn’t gone to heaven. Worried that he had made that one mistake out of all the mistakes teenagers can make that can never be made right.

This is what my youth pastor told me: “It’s not up to you to judge. Only God knew the attitude of Donald’s heart when he took his own life, and it is God who decided where he ended up.”

As a fifteen-year-old that really comforted me. I understood then that suicide was about pain, but I don’t think I understood the attitude of the heart thing all that well. I think Christians do commit suicide because sometimes Christians, like non-Christians, hurt. And sometimes their thinking gets mixed up. So when the Shrek Kid’s mom said he had taken his life because he was scared, I understood. And I think that his friends sort of did, too.

Our school handled things well, I think. They had a minister there to talk to any of the kids who needed it. Of course, all many of them can think about now is the viewing, which will be open casket. A freshman died earlier this fall. One of the seniors had an accident and is paralyzed. Knowing that things like that happen to people your age is a lot to think about when you are a sophomore in high school.

So, like in A SEPARATE PEACE, the death of their classmate may, for these kids, be their “moment in history,” the one place in their young lives at least, where things changed. Hopefully, the change will be for the better. Hopefully, they will learn that there are other alternatives to pain. Or fear. That there are people there to help them. That they can help each other. I hope they figure out that people make mistakes and that suicide is the only one that you can’t learn from. I am proud of them for going to comfort the family. And they are in my prayers.

As is the Shrek Kid’s family. I hope you will take a moment and say a prayer for them, too. I cannot tell you his real name.

But if you pray for the Shrek Kid’s family, God will know who you mean.

Bullying

I have been a witness to some bullying for the past few days, and I feel the need to rant, so here goes.

I know that everyone has been the victim of some bullying. I used to show my junior high kids the movie ANGUS to show them that even the popular kids have such problems, but it does seem that the more vulnerable among us are bullied more often. The movie is based on a story by Chris Crutcher, some of whose books are quite controversial, and while I never would have even read the story out loud to my “kids,” the movie has proved its worth time and again.

I hate bullying in all forms. I particularly hated it when my grandson, RJ, was the victim of bullying. His bullying came from an adult, and there is something about that that seems particularly insidious. I was an adult before I realized that some wives are bullied by their husbands. Many women of my generation (and men, too) were raised to ignore bullies and hope they go away. I think one of the good things about kids nowadays is that at least some of them speak up. And some adults listen instead of telling the bullied kids to “have a stiff upper lip.”

My son was the victim of bullying by both children and adults, and what made his experience so unbelievable was that it happened at a parochial school. He had a concussion before his dad and I really had a clue, mostly, I think, because we just couldn’t wrap our minds around the fact that such a thing could happen at a Christian school. Yet it did. And my son was not alone.

Recently on Focus on the Family, I heard a talk by Dr. Wess Stafford, who is the president of Compassion International. Dr. Stafford tells a moving story of how it was to grow up as a missionary’s kid on the Ivory Coast of Africa. Sadly, that story includes his account of the abuse he received, both at the hands of adults and that of children, at the boarding school where missionaries’ kids were sent at that time. Dr. Stafford’s story is doubly sad because he presents the abuse he and his fellow classmates suffered as a case where Satan won, turning some children away from God forever.

With all that in mind, remember when I wrote about the Shrek Kid? Had I still been in school, being in class with him would have been my worst nightmare. I try to serve all the kids at school, but I will admit that I was relieved on the days that the Shrek Kid was absent. He could smell out vulnerability, and you never knew who would be the victim.

The Shrek Kid is in one of the classes to which I have been assigned this year. And he wasted no time in picking on one of the kids for whom I am there. Somehow, he managed to involve the whole class. The really sad thing about that is that, in this case, the whole class went along. And the butt of the teasing is one of the school’s most vulnerable students. I guess things haven’t changed that much, either. The first day, she just took the abuse and went home and cried. The teacher had done little, and I was not in a position to help her without making matters worse.

The second day, I intervened. While the teacher gave a talk about mutual respect to the rest of the class, I took the girl for a walk. I am an inclusion aid. Such things are really my job. And when we came back, she sat next to me. That might seem inappropriate to you since this is high school we’re talking, but like I said, this is one of the school’s more vulnerable students, and she has just as much right as the bully does to be in the classroom. Inclusion is now the law.

My reaction to the bullying was not the immediate thing that you will see if you read this post by Shannon at Wind Scraps. Shannon is talking about rescuing a chick from its mother, who would have pecked it to death:

I screamed “Hey!”, threw my trough to the ground, raced through the garden and around the side of the chicken yard, yanked open the door to the coop, dropped to my stomach (and I won’t describe what I laid on to do so), and reached out the open door and beyond the ramp, scooping up the dazed chick just as the hen was readying herself for another bloody blow.

Maybe it should have been. Like I said, it does seem to me that bullies smell out the most vulnerable among us, and just like the chick, in the aforementioned post, sometimes their “pecking” leads to worse things than the drawing of blood. I did, figuratively at least, scoop this student up in my hand. And I can keep her safe by me. At least for that class. But who is going to be there as she goes to lunch? Or to seventh period, where she will see the Shrek Kid once again?

Dr. Stafford says that the evil in society rolls downhill, that while adults may be hungry, for instance, it is children who starve. And maybe that’s where we need to start, to look at society over all. Maybe bullying is an evil perpetuated by Satan, as Dr. Stafford says, a kind of “poverty” in many ways, where Satan convinces a child to give up. Maybe the bullies are suffering from a kind of poverty of their own. Children need more than food on their backs or clothes to wear. They need to feel safe. Maybe bullies don’t. Maybe society needs to be wary of the warning Jesus gave us in Scripture:

See that you do not look down on one of these little ones [or even the not-so-little]. For I tell you that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father in heaven. –Matthew 18:10

I am in the job that I am because of the kids. I feel God called me to it. And I don’t see an easy solution to the problem of bullying. Throughout the day, I have asked God to give me wisdom in this situation. And there have been no neon signs to point my way just yet. So I will do the only thing I know to do, to turn the problem over to hands more capable than mine.

I will pray for the girl that is being bullied.

And I will continue to pray for the Shrek Kid.

The Shrek Kid

Do you remember high school? Some people say that they would go back, that high school was the best time of their lives, but not me. I wanted out almost as soon as I got in.

Part of the reason I wanted out was because I was (am) tall, and that wasn’t really something people were comfortable with about girls in 1969, which was when I started high school. There were comments made about its being too bad that my height (6′1″) was wasted on a girl. And, horror of horrors, I was tall and did NOT play basketball.

Still, I survived. High school did end, and it did make me stronger instead of killing me like I thought it would. So I moved on to college, where I found other tall girls and decided my height was socially acceptable. I proceeded, pretty much unruffled, under that assumption until I started substituting a dozen or so years later. I was in the basketball coach’s math room, and there I saw a poster. In essence, what it said was that it was such a waste for someone to be over six feet tall, interested in basketball, and ….a girl. GRRRRRRR!

I thought things went pretty well from there on in, though. I didn’t care what other people thought about my height. I am old enough now, maybe, that men can see past that. It does seem to be men that it bothers. And tall is more accepted than it used to be. More women’s clothing is made for long legs. There is more variety in larger shoe sizes.

After Christmas break I got put in this high school class where this stupid, immature boy did. Care about my height, I mean. He decided I look like an ogre. Shrek, to be exact. And he didn’t mince any words in telling me so, although he was always careful to be out of earshot of the teacher, though he didn’t mind making his point in front of his classmates.

I don’t like writing kids up, so I decided I would take the high road here. At first, I ignored him. Then, I told him that he was being rude and he needed to stop. He is a behavior problem for the teacher and is, I assume, mouthy everywhere he goes, so I wasn’t going to take it too personally.

But then today, the teacher was gone, and she had left instructions for me to take the Shrek kid and two others out of the room to work with individually. (Basically, she wanted two of the three gone because they are disruptive. The other one just benefits from one on one instruction.)

So I went up to the Shrek kid and told him he needed to go with me. He makes a fuss about everything and, not surprisingly, he threw a fit about this, too. He didn’t want to go.

“Those were the instructions your teacher left, ” I said. “Get your stuff and come on.”

“Right,” he said. “I have to go with the Shrek lookalike.”

Now you may think I was angry at this point, but I was really just trying to get him out of the room like I was supposed to. And he came, but without any materials to work with. So I had to send him back. While he was there, he referred to me and the other aid as the retard teachers. She took that as meaning that we were the retards, but truthfully, he could have said that because we are in the class to help with the mainstreaming of special ed kids. I wasn’t there.

Anyway, she came to find me and wanted to write him up because of what he had said, but I volunteered for the job because his incident with her on top of what he said to me seemed to be enough. I didn’t have any big hopes that he would get some meaningful consequences, but he would be out of our hair for the rest of the period and the other kids would think twice about acting up. (Kids always act out more when there is a sub.) That was fourth period.

I saw the other aid at the end of seventh, and she came up to talk to me.

“This will make you laugh, ” she said. “I was in the office, and the kid we wrote up was in there. He asked me to go get ‘that girl.’”

I will be fifty-one in March. No one has called me a girl for a long time.

She feigned ignorance. “What girl?”

“You know,” he said. “The one who wrote me up. I don’t know her name.”

Now, not knowing my name may surprise you since we have been back to school for a month and I have been in his class that long. The teacher says my name and that of the other aid often. But then, this kid is apparently bored anyway, so why would he learn names?

The other aid told him she could not go get me, that wherever I was I was probably busy. And I was. But we were both pleased to know that he was still in the office at the end of the day and that, apparently, he was sweating it a little.

I don’t think I am a particularly vindictive person. I have, in fact, been told that I give problem kids a lot of slack. However, this kid’s behavior needed to be stopped. He was not only disrespectful to me, but to the other two women in the room as well. Maybe his parents taught him better, and maybe they didn’t. I don’t know.

But maybe next time, in that classroom at least, he’ll think twice before he is rude again.