Square Pegs, Part 2

(Authors Note: Sensitivity to the feelings of the children and their families requires the anonymity of the square pegs whose stories are told here as well as acknowledging the necessity to select youngsters outside our close knit community as representative of the many like square pegs including our own. Nonetheless, please be assured that the four children you will meet are youngsters I have encountered as a professional educator discharging duties in the last six years.)

Charlie was a bright, smiley fourth grader. Every day we would find ourselves enjoyably talking about many things, but he had one subject of great interest, baseball. In fact, he would talk baseball even in the middle of winter when everyone else was in basketball mode. However, it didn’t take long for me to understand that while his interest in the sport was genuine, as well as his interest in talking with me, he was respectfully changing the subject. Whenever I would request he be about doing his school work he would engage me with his baseball talk. And when finally he saw he couldn’t talk anymore he would do something else, something definitely not school work.

Frequently, for example, he would engage me in talking baseball when he was to be working on math problems collaboratively with a classmate. I would re-direct him to his task and he would stop talking. However, he would then quietly rise from his seat, amble about the classroom examining all he found interesting before returning to me wherever I was in the room to continue the conversation. In gym, as the other youngsters were standing quietly having complied with my request for silence to give directions for the game to be played he would loudly start-up on baseball. I would ask him to listen rather than talk and he would agree politely. But, then he would quietly move to the bleachers, sit and, indeed, not talk, until the game for the period began. There were many such digressions none of which were malicious and all resulting in politeness and very little school work being done.

For Charlie the problems were about being made to read dump stories about silly people doing silly things- that was the way he stated complaints about English Language Arts-about being made to do stupid games, “like” cross word puzzles or matching columns, about being made to do endless boring math “problems”. He had a long list of complaints about “being made to” and all using the epithets, stupid, silly and boring.

He said at one time, all he wanted was to be in a place which “made sense”. At his tender age he couldn’t get beyond that slogan. But he knew being forced to expend his energies doing “stupid” and “silly” nonsense was a waste of time. Yet, in the uniform school the only way Charlie could express his being out of place was to be non-compliant. Countless numbers of times did I see him being escorted to the Principle’s office by one teacher or another. Indeed, the more discipline these folks put down on this youngster the greater his non-compliance. The amazing thing about Charlie during the time I worked with him was in his ability to keep his anger in check. No matter the provocation, he would remain polite, non-compliant but respectful. However, this lad did not keep that mental balance as being out of place with no alternative available continued to exert an ever greater cost: eventually, in middle school he turned mean.