Bad Children
Here's the question of the day; looking back over your life, who is the worst child you ever saw? What was the kid doing? Where was this? And when? Wait, we're getting into lots of questions instead of just one. But think about it. You've surely seen naughty children. Which was the worst? I am spoiled by choice.
Maybe it was the big boy riding in his mom's shopping cart. He asked his mother for a balloon, the kind you see in bunches above the check-outs at food stores. Mom said, "No." The boy went berserk. He stood up in the cart and kicked wildly in all directions, trying to connect with his mother who jumped nimbly around avoiding him. He raged and swore at her. She seemed to take it pretty much for business as usual. Not exactly as embarrassed or flustered as you might expect. I was stuck in the checkout line behind her, couldn't get away, had to witness the whole episode. She eventually turned to me, caught my eye, smiled lamely, "We're a little cranky today."
Then there was an awful sixth-grader I had one semester in school. Between classes we teachers were supposed to patrol our section of the school halls, allowing students to go into class with no teacher in the room. For safety's sake, if I had a student whom I considered a danger to himself or others, I'd make him stand by the door until I went into the room with him. Well, this little bad boy was annoying but had previously shown no inclination toward bodily damage, so it didn't occur to me to keep him in the hallway with me. And then one day I walked into class to see all the children in their chairs except for crazyboy who had climbed up onto the heating unit in front of the window, opened the window, and was on his way out into the second story air. I dived across the room, grabbed him by the ankles and pulled him back inside, off the heating unit, and marched him into his seat. All that time, he twisted and struggled, screaming at me to get my hands off him as though I were abusing him. Then I called for the principal who removed the dear lad from my room and sent him home. Next day the boy's mother showed up saying that she'd decided to sue me because I had injured her little darling. There were bruises on his ankles. The principal came upstairs, asked me to step into the hall, then he went into my room and closed the door. Later he told me that he asked the students to tell him what had happened the previous day. They all said I'd saved the kid's life but I should have let him fall.
Many years ago I had a little boy in kindergarten who had never been disciplined in any way, a truly feral child. The structure of a school day came as a nasty surprise to him. He fought it all and pretty much wore me out. One day he took his tantrums to a new level by getting down on the floor like an alligator and following me around trying to bite my ankles. He connected a few times and although I ordinarily struggled through the morning with him, about then I gave up and called for the principal. She walked in and saw me jumping around to save myself from being bitten, laughed and said something to indicate that she considered the whole problem a result of my lack of experience. Then in a kindly voice, she said, "Now, Myron. I want you to stop biting Miss Jenkins and come with me." He ignored her and kept after my ankles as though he were starving and I were steak. The principal abandoned the kind voice and spoke sharply, "Myron! You stop that right now and come here!" He ignored her. Well, it escalated until finally the principal tried to pick the little boy up. He stopped biting me and turned on her, bit her all over the hands and arms, snapping like a mad dog. She set him down and then picked him up by the ankles. Head down, he snapped at her legs and at one point got her a good one. Holding her arms straight out to keep him as far from her as possible, she staggered out the door with the child twisting and turning still trying to bite her.
Then there was the eighth grade boy who'd fried his brain on drugs, usually pretty quiet because he was stoned. One day, though, he came to class twitchy, jumpy, couldn't sit still for a minute, couldn't shut his mouth for a minute, babbling senselessly, facial tics going to beat the band, bouncing around, hitching and jerking in his chair. I walked toward him intending to quietly ask him to step back out into the hallway. He jumped up and yelled at me, "Don't you come near me. If you do, I'll have to kill you." At that point, I was standing between him and the classroom door. Students were still coming in to class. I turned away from him toward the door thinking of asking a student to go get the large man who taught in the next room. Suddenly a big boy grabbed me from behind and yanked me to one side. Another child slammed into the back of the drugged boy knocking him out into the hallway, a third boy slammed the door shut. Fortunately at that time all teachers had to keep their classroom doors locked because of a problem the previous week with a drunk that wandered into the building and made trouble. The boy in the hall threw himself violently against the door, roaring, "I'm going to kill you!" and beating on the door with his fists. The glass in the door was steel mesh reinforced or it would have shattered. I used the room phone and called downstairs. The principal, a gym teacher, and the school policeman ran upstairs and removed the boy. Probably the boy wouldn't have been able actually to kill me, but he certainly intended to try and I owed grateful thanks to the three who knocked the kid out of the room and got me out of his way.
Of course, a list of bad kids would have to include a boy who was quite a bit bigger than any of the others owing to the fact that he'd failed every grade and should have been almost ready to graduate. He was a bully and any teachers on playground duty had to watch him full time because he loved to hurt the smaller children. One day I saw a circle form on the other side of the playground, and the whole playground got quiet in a hurry. Children ran from every direction to see what was going on inside that circle. Of course, I, too, ran to see. Pushing through the mob, I came up behind a very little boy standing frozen with fear. Across from him stood the bully, a knife in his hand. He threw the knife a short distance from himself and it stuck in the dirt. The bully said, "Next time I'm throwing it farther," and he did. Everyone remained frozen in place. Said the bully, "Nobody better move because I might make a mistake and hit you," and he smirked. I pushed the little boy behind me and walked up to the bully, my hand out. To my surprise, he gave me the knife.
That kid was like a boy who threatened me with a gun. He entered school mid-year because he'd been expelled from the school district next to us. A greasy kid who chronically needed a hair cut. Did no school work at all, sat sneering in his chair, a bundle of hostility. According to neighborhood gossip, his dad was a local Mafia enforcer, a leg breaker, etc. Clearly, Louis was headed for dad's line of work and saw no need for an education. Some muley impulse wouldn't allow me to just fail him. I had to get him to do his school work. So he hated me even more than he hated the teachers who let him sit doing nothing but sneer. Many times he told me that he was going to kill me. Then one day the class was quiet, everyone working on an assignment, and I sat down at my desk to begin grading papers. After a few minutes I looked up and there was Louis, staring at me, sneering, not doing his work. I said, "Louis, get going," and he reached down into his book bag, I thought, to get a pencil, but what came up and pointed at me was a gun. I got up and walked toward him, hand out. Surprisingly, he gave me the gun. It turned out to be part of his father's business equipment, had been used in the commission of several unsolved crimes. That was the last we saw of Louis.
Hm... who else? Oh, yes. Can't forget the boy so terrible that he was almost never in class. He sat in the hall all the time doing nothing. Not a teacher in the building could stand this kid because he was so violent, foul mouthed and oppositional. My heart sank when I saw his name on one of my class lists because I knew all about him. He was infamous. Sure enough, he set himself to add me to his long list of defeated teachers. I didn't believe in putting children in the hallway and I certainly couldn't just dump the boy on the office staff, so I wracked my brains for ways to keep him out of trouble. Sometimes I almost succeeded but it was a discouraging task and senseless, really. Looking back, I should have set him in the hallway like everyone else did. However, I persevered against all advise and daily the boy got madder at me. Finally, one day he jumped up, grabbed an empty desk, picked it up and whirling it in the air over his head, advanced on me yelling that he was going to kill me. Without being asked, a student ran for help. As I dodged around the room away from him, John continued to whirl the desk and come after me. A posse of four men teachers and the school policeman rushed into the room and almost didn't manage to drag the boy out with them. He fought like a maniac. Before being taken out of the building in hand cuffs, he was able to smash a section of reinforced glass in the front of the school. For an average child of that age, it would just about be possible for him to pick up a desk, but not to lift it over his head let alone whirl it around. Gotta be crazy strong to do that. Imagine my horror one day many years later when I went into a gas station down the street and saw this kid, then grown up, behind the counter. Recognizing me, he grinned evilly and said, "Ah. Miss Jenkins. You know it wouldn't be much work for me to figure out where you live. You'd love me to come over to your house, wouldn't you?"
What about bad girls? I've seen lots of them. Maybe the worst was a girl from a criminal family; everyone did time; they were all terrible people. I didn't have this girl in class but I knew about her. One day I heard a yell, "Hey! A fight!" and the sound of running feet. Classes were changing and the hall was full of bodies, most of them running in one direction. I struggled through the crowd. At the center of the herd was a boy down on the floor. This bad girl sat on top of him, her thumbs pressed into his throat. His eyes were bugging out and his face was blue. The crowd encouraged her, "Kill! Kill!" they chanted. I grabbed her by one arm and pulled until she let go of the boy. With her other arm, she made a fist and punched me in the face as hard as she could hit, screaming, "Get your hands off me!"
Another awful girl asked to be excused to use the bathroom. She was carrying an enormous purse that I hadn't seen before. Obviously she had a lot of stuff in that purse and it was kind of heavy. I just thought that she sure was carrying a great deal of unnecessary weight. It never occurred to me that she might be up to no good with the contents of the purse. So she went into the bathroom and unloaded the purse which held about half a bushel of newspapers. She separated the papers into single sheets, crumpled these, piled them all in a corner of the restroom and set the paper on fire, and came back to class. After a short while the fire alarm went off and soon the hall filled with smoke and water as firemen doused the entire area. Outside standing in the sunshine, waiting for the OK to go back indoors, I put two and two together.
Then there was the girl from a family of relocated southern rednecked racists, the kind of people who outspokenly hate African Americans. Apparently she was working to maintain the osmic balance by going way too far the other way. Madeleine was on a mission to get pregnant and have a black baby. She had to handle all necessary proliminaries toward this goal while she was in school since her family never would have let her date a non-caucasion boy. During Madeleine's Junior High years, the whole staff had to be vigilant, everyone from cooks to custodians to teachers. At any time when she was not sitting at a desk in a class, that girl was sure to hook up with a black boy and was doing her level best to get herself pregnant. She was pried off boy after boy after boy and in the craziest places. No shame whatsoever.
I remember a girl who certainly had a power personality. She was smart and could have been an A student but instead used all her intelligence to get herself and others into trouble. It was something different every day; she just kept me hopping. No way to anticipate what new devilishness she'd invent. The worst thing was her ability to lead weak minds, to get dumb little kids to do her bidding. I could have written a book about the semester she spent with me; she came up with so many crazy and disruptive schemes. One of her talents was the blue-eyed, baby-faced honest-to God believable lie and she managed to convince the school principal that she was a poor little picked on child, unfairly singled out for punishment by the twisted minds of the entire school staff. So she managed to avoid all consequences of her reign of terror until the day that she went too far. She skipped school and talked two dumb girls into going with her. They went to the part of town where hookers cruise the sidewalk looking for business. There, they successfully attracted several customers each, using the men's cars as their work site. With the money they made, they went to a liquor store with their last customer, a man who agreed to go into the store and buy liquor for them. They took the tequila to a park, sat on a bench and got drunk, shared the alcohol with several homeless men in the park. Finally, all of them drunk out of their minds, they went back to this girl's house long enough for her to go to the kitchen and find a knife for each of them. Then the whole group walked to school and somehow were able to just walk in. They got busted when one of the girls went to the door of a classroom, knocked, and asked the teacher if they might please speak to a girl in the class; drunkenly honest, they said that they'd come to, "Cut her bad." The teacher, astonished to see this party of drunks, adult men and junior high school girls, closed her door in their faces and called for help. Getting all those drunks into police cars was a circus to behold. Teachers had a lot of fun telling the principal, "I told you so!"
Well, I could go on forever telling war stories about bad kids. Hard to pick a winner in that category, too many strong candidates. 99.999% of school children are good little people who behave and do their best. That .001% of baddies, though, is a dynamic group, unforgettable.
naughty disobedient rotten stinky kids
Maybe it was the big boy riding in his mom's shopping cart. He asked his mother for a balloon, the kind you see in bunches above the check-outs at food stores. Mom said, "No." The boy went berserk. He stood up in the cart and kicked wildly in all directions, trying to connect with his mother who jumped nimbly around avoiding him. He raged and swore at her. She seemed to take it pretty much for business as usual. Not exactly as embarrassed or flustered as you might expect. I was stuck in the checkout line behind her, couldn't get away, had to witness the whole episode. She eventually turned to me, caught my eye, smiled lamely, "We're a little cranky today."
Then there was an awful sixth-grader I had one semester in school. Between classes we teachers were supposed to patrol our section of the school halls, allowing students to go into class with no teacher in the room. For safety's sake, if I had a student whom I considered a danger to himself or others, I'd make him stand by the door until I went into the room with him. Well, this little bad boy was annoying but had previously shown no inclination toward bodily damage, so it didn't occur to me to keep him in the hallway with me. And then one day I walked into class to see all the children in their chairs except for crazyboy who had climbed up onto the heating unit in front of the window, opened the window, and was on his way out into the second story air. I dived across the room, grabbed him by the ankles and pulled him back inside, off the heating unit, and marched him into his seat. All that time, he twisted and struggled, screaming at me to get my hands off him as though I were abusing him. Then I called for the principal who removed the dear lad from my room and sent him home. Next day the boy's mother showed up saying that she'd decided to sue me because I had injured her little darling. There were bruises on his ankles. The principal came upstairs, asked me to step into the hall, then he went into my room and closed the door. Later he told me that he asked the students to tell him what had happened the previous day. They all said I'd saved the kid's life but I should have let him fall.
Many years ago I had a little boy in kindergarten who had never been disciplined in any way, a truly feral child. The structure of a school day came as a nasty surprise to him. He fought it all and pretty much wore me out. One day he took his tantrums to a new level by getting down on the floor like an alligator and following me around trying to bite my ankles. He connected a few times and although I ordinarily struggled through the morning with him, about then I gave up and called for the principal. She walked in and saw me jumping around to save myself from being bitten, laughed and said something to indicate that she considered the whole problem a result of my lack of experience. Then in a kindly voice, she said, "Now, Myron. I want you to stop biting Miss Jenkins and come with me." He ignored her and kept after my ankles as though he were starving and I were steak. The principal abandoned the kind voice and spoke sharply, "Myron! You stop that right now and come here!" He ignored her. Well, it escalated until finally the principal tried to pick the little boy up. He stopped biting me and turned on her, bit her all over the hands and arms, snapping like a mad dog. She set him down and then picked him up by the ankles. Head down, he snapped at her legs and at one point got her a good one. Holding her arms straight out to keep him as far from her as possible, she staggered out the door with the child twisting and turning still trying to bite her.
Then there was the eighth grade boy who'd fried his brain on drugs, usually pretty quiet because he was stoned. One day, though, he came to class twitchy, jumpy, couldn't sit still for a minute, couldn't shut his mouth for a minute, babbling senselessly, facial tics going to beat the band, bouncing around, hitching and jerking in his chair. I walked toward him intending to quietly ask him to step back out into the hallway. He jumped up and yelled at me, "Don't you come near me. If you do, I'll have to kill you." At that point, I was standing between him and the classroom door. Students were still coming in to class. I turned away from him toward the door thinking of asking a student to go get the large man who taught in the next room. Suddenly a big boy grabbed me from behind and yanked me to one side. Another child slammed into the back of the drugged boy knocking him out into the hallway, a third boy slammed the door shut. Fortunately at that time all teachers had to keep their classroom doors locked because of a problem the previous week with a drunk that wandered into the building and made trouble. The boy in the hall threw himself violently against the door, roaring, "I'm going to kill you!" and beating on the door with his fists. The glass in the door was steel mesh reinforced or it would have shattered. I used the room phone and called downstairs. The principal, a gym teacher, and the school policeman ran upstairs and removed the boy. Probably the boy wouldn't have been able actually to kill me, but he certainly intended to try and I owed grateful thanks to the three who knocked the kid out of the room and got me out of his way.
Of course, a list of bad kids would have to include a boy who was quite a bit bigger than any of the others owing to the fact that he'd failed every grade and should have been almost ready to graduate. He was a bully and any teachers on playground duty had to watch him full time because he loved to hurt the smaller children. One day I saw a circle form on the other side of the playground, and the whole playground got quiet in a hurry. Children ran from every direction to see what was going on inside that circle. Of course, I, too, ran to see. Pushing through the mob, I came up behind a very little boy standing frozen with fear. Across from him stood the bully, a knife in his hand. He threw the knife a short distance from himself and it stuck in the dirt. The bully said, "Next time I'm throwing it farther," and he did. Everyone remained frozen in place. Said the bully, "Nobody better move because I might make a mistake and hit you," and he smirked. I pushed the little boy behind me and walked up to the bully, my hand out. To my surprise, he gave me the knife.
That kid was like a boy who threatened me with a gun. He entered school mid-year because he'd been expelled from the school district next to us. A greasy kid who chronically needed a hair cut. Did no school work at all, sat sneering in his chair, a bundle of hostility. According to neighborhood gossip, his dad was a local Mafia enforcer, a leg breaker, etc. Clearly, Louis was headed for dad's line of work and saw no need for an education. Some muley impulse wouldn't allow me to just fail him. I had to get him to do his school work. So he hated me even more than he hated the teachers who let him sit doing nothing but sneer. Many times he told me that he was going to kill me. Then one day the class was quiet, everyone working on an assignment, and I sat down at my desk to begin grading papers. After a few minutes I looked up and there was Louis, staring at me, sneering, not doing his work. I said, "Louis, get going," and he reached down into his book bag, I thought, to get a pencil, but what came up and pointed at me was a gun. I got up and walked toward him, hand out. Surprisingly, he gave me the gun. It turned out to be part of his father's business equipment, had been used in the commission of several unsolved crimes. That was the last we saw of Louis.
Hm... who else? Oh, yes. Can't forget the boy so terrible that he was almost never in class. He sat in the hall all the time doing nothing. Not a teacher in the building could stand this kid because he was so violent, foul mouthed and oppositional. My heart sank when I saw his name on one of my class lists because I knew all about him. He was infamous. Sure enough, he set himself to add me to his long list of defeated teachers. I didn't believe in putting children in the hallway and I certainly couldn't just dump the boy on the office staff, so I wracked my brains for ways to keep him out of trouble. Sometimes I almost succeeded but it was a discouraging task and senseless, really. Looking back, I should have set him in the hallway like everyone else did. However, I persevered against all advise and daily the boy got madder at me. Finally, one day he jumped up, grabbed an empty desk, picked it up and whirling it in the air over his head, advanced on me yelling that he was going to kill me. Without being asked, a student ran for help. As I dodged around the room away from him, John continued to whirl the desk and come after me. A posse of four men teachers and the school policeman rushed into the room and almost didn't manage to drag the boy out with them. He fought like a maniac. Before being taken out of the building in hand cuffs, he was able to smash a section of reinforced glass in the front of the school. For an average child of that age, it would just about be possible for him to pick up a desk, but not to lift it over his head let alone whirl it around. Gotta be crazy strong to do that. Imagine my horror one day many years later when I went into a gas station down the street and saw this kid, then grown up, behind the counter. Recognizing me, he grinned evilly and said, "Ah. Miss Jenkins. You know it wouldn't be much work for me to figure out where you live. You'd love me to come over to your house, wouldn't you?"
What about bad girls? I've seen lots of them. Maybe the worst was a girl from a criminal family; everyone did time; they were all terrible people. I didn't have this girl in class but I knew about her. One day I heard a yell, "Hey! A fight!" and the sound of running feet. Classes were changing and the hall was full of bodies, most of them running in one direction. I struggled through the crowd. At the center of the herd was a boy down on the floor. This bad girl sat on top of him, her thumbs pressed into his throat. His eyes were bugging out and his face was blue. The crowd encouraged her, "Kill! Kill!" they chanted. I grabbed her by one arm and pulled until she let go of the boy. With her other arm, she made a fist and punched me in the face as hard as she could hit, screaming, "Get your hands off me!"
Another awful girl asked to be excused to use the bathroom. She was carrying an enormous purse that I hadn't seen before. Obviously she had a lot of stuff in that purse and it was kind of heavy. I just thought that she sure was carrying a great deal of unnecessary weight. It never occurred to me that she might be up to no good with the contents of the purse. So she went into the bathroom and unloaded the purse which held about half a bushel of newspapers. She separated the papers into single sheets, crumpled these, piled them all in a corner of the restroom and set the paper on fire, and came back to class. After a short while the fire alarm went off and soon the hall filled with smoke and water as firemen doused the entire area. Outside standing in the sunshine, waiting for the OK to go back indoors, I put two and two together.
Then there was the girl from a family of relocated southern rednecked racists, the kind of people who outspokenly hate African Americans. Apparently she was working to maintain the osmic balance by going way too far the other way. Madeleine was on a mission to get pregnant and have a black baby. She had to handle all necessary proliminaries toward this goal while she was in school since her family never would have let her date a non-caucasion boy. During Madeleine's Junior High years, the whole staff had to be vigilant, everyone from cooks to custodians to teachers. At any time when she was not sitting at a desk in a class, that girl was sure to hook up with a black boy and was doing her level best to get herself pregnant. She was pried off boy after boy after boy and in the craziest places. No shame whatsoever.
I remember a girl who certainly had a power personality. She was smart and could have been an A student but instead used all her intelligence to get herself and others into trouble. It was something different every day; she just kept me hopping. No way to anticipate what new devilishness she'd invent. The worst thing was her ability to lead weak minds, to get dumb little kids to do her bidding. I could have written a book about the semester she spent with me; she came up with so many crazy and disruptive schemes. One of her talents was the blue-eyed, baby-faced honest-to God believable lie and she managed to convince the school principal that she was a poor little picked on child, unfairly singled out for punishment by the twisted minds of the entire school staff. So she managed to avoid all consequences of her reign of terror until the day that she went too far. She skipped school and talked two dumb girls into going with her. They went to the part of town where hookers cruise the sidewalk looking for business. There, they successfully attracted several customers each, using the men's cars as their work site. With the money they made, they went to a liquor store with their last customer, a man who agreed to go into the store and buy liquor for them. They took the tequila to a park, sat on a bench and got drunk, shared the alcohol with several homeless men in the park. Finally, all of them drunk out of their minds, they went back to this girl's house long enough for her to go to the kitchen and find a knife for each of them. Then the whole group walked to school and somehow were able to just walk in. They got busted when one of the girls went to the door of a classroom, knocked, and asked the teacher if they might please speak to a girl in the class; drunkenly honest, they said that they'd come to, "Cut her bad." The teacher, astonished to see this party of drunks, adult men and junior high school girls, closed her door in their faces and called for help. Getting all those drunks into police cars was a circus to behold. Teachers had a lot of fun telling the principal, "I told you so!"
Well, I could go on forever telling war stories about bad kids. Hard to pick a winner in that category, too many strong candidates. 99.999% of school children are good little people who behave and do their best. That .001% of baddies, though, is a dynamic group, unforgettable.
naughty disobedient rotten stinky kids
1 Comments:
Let's see -- the worst and best behaved child I have ever seen is mine. He has shown me the most spectacularly awful behavior, and the most glitteringly beautiful behavior. Like JC Penney -- it's all inside.
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