My first year of high school I remember the upperclassmen talking about one of the teachers that had retired at the end of the year before. I don’t remember a name, or even a gender, to be honest, to go with this tale, but I do remember them laughing about how said teacher would come to class drunk and sometimes sleep through it. I had teachers that would come back from their brakes smelling of cigarettes, and if you could hear them on breaks they would talk about the conversations they had in that sacred space called the teacher’s lounge, where none of us were ever allowed, in part because of the smoking, and in part because of these conversations. Or maybe it was because of the liquor stash. But I caught a couple of the guys who taught neighboring classed once talking about what a lot of dumb shits some of us were.
This was no secret though. They would tell us to our faces, too! Only difference was, they would be a little more tactful. Rather than saying “you are a dumb shit!” They might use something like, “you are never going to amount to anything when you grow up, are you?” Rather than, “you are so stupid!” it might be, “I had a pickle in my sandwich at lunch that was smarter than you.” They would happily say that we were going to end up living on the streets. Never would they hesitate to tell us that we were as dumb as a box of rocks. It somehow seemed less direct than “you are an idiot.” But I would get the sense that they were cleaning it up not just for any kind of liability’s sake, or to not end up on the bad end of an argument with a parent. They were cleaning it up from the generation before them that would tell them they were idiots, and perhaps the generation before that would put a ruler across their knuckles.
We sure didn’t get ceremonies and trophies for every little accomplishment. And I am not saying I am against that, either! Hey, kids should be celebrated! But some of us are floated up like on a balloon. Some of us are dragged up. Some of us were kicked up. I am from the generation that was kind of dragged with the occasional kick. Hell, I was spanked for bad behavior in elementary school once by the principal, a creaky old man who had seen his best days before the war. Seriously! He would have been born around 1900. If having your ass tanned is a ceremony, then that was one of my best.
Things improved, even during the time I went to school. I saw the changes over the years I went. And now, I look in as a parent of two kids in school. They have serious attitudes against bullying now. I think when I was a kid, if a kid could not bear the bullying and intervened in their own life to stop it, then it was said of that kid that they could not hack it. It has a certain inevitability to it, like that was how Survival of the Fittest was interpreted back then. Many people still think of it that way, but they do a lot more to stop bullying, or to prevent it in the first place. I have got time for that. I was bullied quite a lot as a kid. There were people who made my elementary, middle, and high school life a pure and living Hell. I did not want to go. I hated being there. I feared some of these guys. And if I learned anything, for a brief while, it was how to hate. I grew out of that, and I honestly hold no ill will towards them. I don’t think much about them at all, except for something like this, an historical reflection. But I don’t have kids now who say of anything like this.
I did. I had one who went through a lot of bullying in school in England. It was both better there, and worse there. He had a teacher who quite literally hated him. We came across her in the grocery store one day, and he got all excited to see his teacher out in the real world. I watched him as he called her name, then looked at her and watched as she turned her nose up at him, turned herself and her daughter around, and huffed away. Never before or since have I seen a worse human being teaching children. That hurt him. At the time. After coming to the US, he got going in school and learned horse riding. Some time passed, and I asked him why I never hear about him being bullied anymore. His reply was, “When you learn to move a thousand-pound animal around, even the big kids at school don’t look so big anymore.” IT was one of the best moments in that I saw in his life. No more bullies! Well, non who could just get away with it, anyway.
Neither of the two kids still in school complain about the crap we put up with when I was a kid. Maybe the adults are the key! Maybe they are better at teaching them young not to be little jerks, and stopping them doing it when they are older. And maybe they are even better now at treating the kids with respect and not telling them their innermost feelings. Whatever the case, the ones of my generation who think that kids are being raised too soft would welcome back a world where people are deliberately rude to each other. I have got no truck with the world being a better place. Especially for the children.