When
the Teachers are Worse than the Bullies
October
20th, 2007 by Tim Lovett
It seems that every class of
school children has that one kid who becomes the ultimate
social outcast. In addition to having no friends, he is also
the most frequent target of bullying from the cooler or tougher
kids. My class had such a child. His name was Bertrand. However,
there is always one person who is eternally grateful for his
existence – the second most unpopular child. For this
reason, Bertrand was one of my favorite people in the world
during elementary school. Oh, how he shielded me from social
oppression.
Looking back,
what I find most tragic about Bertrand’s elementary
school days is that even his teachers helped damage this poor
kid’s reputation at times. There are two instances in
particular that I can remember vividly. Whenever I reflect
upon how great it is not to be in school anymore, these two
episodes often pop into my head.
Episode
1: “Thou shall not have Dirty Hands”
Back when me and
Bertrand were young, innocent Catholic school kindergarteners,
December was a month full of fearing Santa’s watchful
elves and endless schooldays of Christmas-themed busywork.
If that weren’t enough to ruin the holiday season, our
teacher came up with this bullshit activity involving us going
out and doing good deeds, all in the name of making Baby Jesus
happy. Every day, any student who did a good deed would report
it and then, as a reward, they got to put a cotton ball in
Baby Jesus’ manger. The idea was that Baby Jesus would
eventually have a massive fluffy bed in which to lay, due
to everyone’s acts of goodwill. Its sheer corniness
almost makes one want to be bad out of spite.
But sure enough,
most of the children, sheep that they were, went out and did
their good deeds and were constantly adding cotton balls to
the manger. I on the other hand, was generally too busy playing
videogames to be bothered with it. Besides, I knew darn well
that a cotton ball was a lousy payoff for doing a good deed.
That teacher wasn’t fooling me one bit. I figured Baby
Jesus would back me up on this and even if he didn’t,
I knew he had to forgive me. Christianity has its perks.
Now one of the
primary reasons for Bertrand’s unpopularity was that
he had an unkempt appearance. It wasn’t uncommon to
see Bertrand with messy hair or an untied shoelace, for example.
The teacher had often bitchily reprimanded him for this, perhaps
like only a Catholic schoolteacher could, becoming angrier
each time she did so. All of this built up anger would finally
explode on this fateful day of childhood trauma.
We were now a
few days into this activity and Bertrand had finally decided
to participate. When the teacher asked the class who had done
a good deed in the last day, I can only imagine the pride
Bertrand must have felt as he raised his hand. Bertrand had
done something nice and it was possibly going to help him
fit in with his fellow classmates.
Unfortunately,
there was a problem, his hand was dirty. When the teacher
spotted this, she had had it. She promptly opened her mouth
and snarled out this gem:
“Bertrand!”
she screamed, “Those hands are absolutely filthy! There’s
no way you’re putting a cotton ball in Baby Jesus’
manger. I DON’T CARE IF YOU DID A GOOD DEED!!!”
So, if I were
to understand my teacher’s logic correctly:
Having Clean
Hands > Doing Good Deeds
A thousand monkeys
could type at a thousand typewriters for a thousand years
and they would be hard-pressed to come up with a better insult
for a five-year-old. At this age, Bertrand’s mind was
ripe for programming with pro-social and pro-Christian behavior,
but all that had been thrown out the window in favor of arbitrary
cleanliness.
Not only had Bertrand
been publically made to feel like a dirtball, but he had been
told that he was unworthy of Baby Jesus’ attention!
Awesome.
Episode
2: “A Lesson in how to not be Sneaky”
One uneventful
morning in 4th grade, our class was quietly working on an
assignment, when suddenly, my teacher noticed that something
wasn’t amiss. Bertrand had his fly open.
Looking back on
this now, I cannot help but wonder if she had been repeatedly
inspecting everyone else’s crotch as well.
My teacher, supposedly not wanting to embarrass Bertrand by
alerting him to this aloud, devised a not so masterful plan
of stealth action. Her plan was to have one of the “nice”
boys in the class enlighten Bertrand about his wardrobe malfunction
by having him whisper it into his ear. That nice boy happened
to be me. Let’s see how this strategy played out.
First, the teacher
got out of her seat and waddled her nearly three-hundred pound
body over to my desk, before whispering the sensitive information
into my ear. This alone caught about half of the class’
attention, as anything was more interesting than focusing
on the assignment.
I wish I could
have said something along the lines of, “Bitch, leave
me alone,” but of course that wasn’t going to
happen.
The next thing
that happens is I get out of my seat and walk over to Bertrand.
The loud clunking noises of my dress shoes against the hardwood
floor does nothing to help the cause.
So, in my estimation,
about two-thirds of the class watched me whisper something
to Bertrand, who then quickly fixed the problem. If it were
anyone else than Bertrand, this event probably would have
gone by without incident. However, at this age, many of the
other boys in the class were constantly looking for any reason
to pick on Bertrand, so there was no way this little event
would go by without scrutiny. Make no mistake about it, nine-year-olds
are fucking pricks, contrary to popular belief.
About an hour
later, recess arrived, which meant that everyone was allowed
to get out of their seats. The class bullies wasted no time
and headed straight for my desk to find out what had happened.
Their violent instincts had accurately told them that something
important had taken place and they needed to know what it
was, right now! I mean, it was already ten o’clock and
they hadn’t made fun of anyone yet. They had a schedule
to keep.
One of the boys
asked me what I had said to Bertrand. I knew that telling
them would be bad for Bertrand, but I also knew that not telling
them would put me on their bad side and I wasn’t exactly
part of the in group to begin with. I had nothing against
Bertrand, but we weren’t really friends either, so I
did what I had to do, I spilled the beans. Better him than
me.
If I were older
and wiser, I may have protected him by refusing to share his
sensitive information or by coming up with a clever lie to
eliminate their curiosity, but such is the folly of youth.
Bertrand got to
spend the next fifteen minutes of his life surrounded by laughing
faces and being made fun of, causing him to feel bad about
himself for the rest of the day.
There are plenty
of better ways the teacher could have handled the situation,
so exactly what the fuck she was thinking remains a mystery
to me.
Epilogue
There’s
no need to worry about Bertrand, his story has a happy ending.
While for many children, puberty can be a bad thing, it was
the exact opposite for Bertrand. Once his hormones started
to do their thing, he got really big and really strong, really
fast. A few fights and couple of fucked-up bullies later,
Bertrand’s social life was completely changed. In this
case, Bertrand’s new found strength and toughness had
earned him the respect of his peers and he found acceptance
among them. From that point on, his social life would be,
for the most part, normal, proving once again that violence
is the answer to all of our problems.
I haven’t
seen him in over eight years, and given that he hasn’t
gone on any massive killing sprees that society knows about,
I’m going to assume that he is still doing fine.
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