When I was 10 years old, I helped pioneer Detention.
Before then teachers were allowed to hit kids. But we were the first wave of the new age, the post-war baby boom, and we changed things. We swamped the schools. Our necessity inspired the establishment of split sessions and made the adults tell us to go into education ourselves – because instructors were in such short supply.
Mediocre teachers (who are by definition average and thus most of them) couldn’t deal with students who wouldn’t sit still or acted scary or talked back, so the practice arose of simply removing certain individuals from the class for awhile. If it had been just one bad kid the principal’s office would have sufficed, but like I said, we were multiple. Nobody called it Detention then, but we were moved to an unused classroom.
We were in the sixth grade in a K – 6 elementary school, across the street from the junior high we’d attend the following year. It was Keith and Steve and Patrick and me, mostly. Keith and Steve had a way of egging each other on, so they were usually sent out of class together. Patrick and I tended to disrupt individually.
Keith was the scary one of us. He was a coarse-featured, heavyset, clumsy freckled guy – the classmate most likely to grow up looking like a fat redneck. He had a large head, thick fingers with ugly nails, and a nasty subversive gleam in his eye. Keith rocked when he sat in class; we had those desk/chair arrangements with a book rack below the seat and a kidney-shaped work surface that curved around our right ribs and I can still picture Keith rocking, regularly, rhythmically and hard enough that he kept slamming his chest and back against the furniture. He wasn’t loud. He’d mumble his anarchic ideas. But his constant rocking made an area of chaos in the classroom that could not be ignored.
Steve was kind of handsome. His parents came from Russia and he had a striking dark appearance. He grew too much hair a few years later, and his good looks submerged under an apelike demeanor, but in sixth grade he reminded us of Errol Flynn. Steve could not sit still. He used any excuse to jump out of his chair and he fidgeted when he had to stay in it. Even on the playground he was a maniac, darting around as if trying to play it all – four square and dodgeball and tetherball and the monkey bars – in the too-short recesses we enjoyed.
Patrick was sweet. His looks were nondescript; his blond hair was crewcut. But he had a dreadful stutter. Other kids mocked him and that made it worse. It was always easy to discombobulate him, and then class could not go on till Patrick was gently removed.
I was the only girl. I didn’t rock or run or stutter; I just wouldn’t shut up. I wanted to learn faster than the teacher taught, or quibble about what a question really meant. When I wasn’t daydreaming (and I had an imaginative world of considerable acreage), I was probably stirring up enough whispering or laughter near my seat that the teacher found my presence unwelcome.
I’m sure there were other kids in that room sometimes, but we four are the tenants in my memory. We didn’t become close friends – even Keith and Steve stopped hanging together the next year, when we started cycling through multiple classrooms each day – but we constituted a cognitive posse. That proto-detention room is where I began to understand that just about everyone (in the USA anyway) has an impulse or attitude disorder. It had to take some crazy to settle our east coast, let alone cross the continent to the west…
The real questions are: How severe? How triggered? How accommodated? Think of what a relief it would be, to seek those answers instead of a mythical fix.
