The joker was just bored, not wild

My first grade class photo for Douglas Road School (pictured here, and I can still smell that pungent chalk-dust/pee combo that premeated those oiled-wood floors) shows a kid (namely me) in a striped T-shirt with a big grin on his face. He looks happy enough, and is obviously unappreciative of the fact he has 11 more years of this incarceration, with literally no time off for good behavior. Eleven years and then, by his own choice, a further five years after that before he is free to … be whatever he has turned out to be, but that’s a different story.

In this same photo there are 35 other kids of whom I have only remained in touch with one. But, that too is another story.

And, there is the pedagogical unit, the teacher. The look on this late middle-aged termagant’s face would make Saddam Hussein squeal for mercy, such is her harsh demeanor. Mrs. Hallworth was her name and she was the sort of individual who believed frivolity was wasteful and not to be tolerated under any circumstances, at any time. She wasn’t a cruel woman in my recall; she was just very, very serious and I do not recall her ever smiling.

I wasn’t very serious. I mean, I was in the sense that I was filled with assorted anxieties and areas of distress that were both part of being a six-year-old finding his way in a still largely alien world that forced children to go to places that were antithetical to their temperaments, like school, for example. Schools in those days were not the 12-year amusement parks they have become (and I’m not saying what they have become is an entirely bad thing) but instead they were places of ‘discipline’. Teachers and principals still wielded the strap and detentions were handed out with impunity, regardless of whether or not it was in the darkness of mid-winter and the allegedly antisocial juvenile miscreant had to walk two miles in the chill to get home. No, there weren’t wolves or bandits along the way, but I generally imagined there were.

There are many example of Dickensian cruelty I could cite here. In about third grade I remember a noisy kid being dragged out of a school assembly by the hair. I’d still cherish seeing somebody do the same thing to the teacher in question, if he were still alive. But, I read a few years ago of how he had died of cancer at the age of 55. I was happy about that. I hope it was painful. I recall our elementary vice-principal coming in to tear strips off the class for having been noisy in yet another hideous assembly, and him making references to “If this should happen again the janitor will have to come in and wipe the blood off the walls when I get through with you!” All this because we were noisy? It was a fucking school assembly! Wow, you people take your petty little calling very seriously, don’t you?

How was a kid to deal with such thuggish officialdom? It wasn’t easy. There was always the risk of the strap. Not a pleasing experience. A big chunk of V-belt leather and fibre was brought brutally down on palms or ass for as many times as the moron wielding it deemed fit. Flogging of prison inmates had fallen into disfavor years prior, but little kiddies were fair-game. Anyway, I ran afoul of the strap on three occasions in my first four years of school, and I just didn’t like it. My rebellion would have to be of the non corporal-punishment demanding sort. Of course, with some of those classroom bozos you never knew. They seemed to have been entitled to wield at whim. Hungover? Strap the bejesus out of a kid. Had a fight with the missus? Strap two kids.

Anyway, how I got around it was by becoming a class-clown. I seemed to have been granted the ability to amuse other kids. For me clowning around alleviated the tedium of being there every day. I failed to understand what all the fuss was about in terms of learning. I mean, I was rarely taught anything new, so mainly I was bored and exasperated by the ‘seriousness’ of it all. With the exception of arithmetic (which mainly bored me because it was in essence tiresome and uninspiring, at least the way it was taught then) I did well enough. Had I the potential to do better? Of course. My old report cards are festooned with such comments as: “Ian is not working to his capacity,” or (my favorite) “Ian is a capable student – capable of much better work.” A bit of waggishness on the part of that teacher. Of course I was capable of better work, but nothing moved me to go there. So, I went for the cheap laughs, instead.

Jump ahead a couple of decades and when I was teaching school, it was the kids like me I looked for. I wanted to somehow take the care that was needed with the two-bit jokesters, the hippie-wannabes, and the kids for whom the idea of a student council (and those who served therein) was as much anathema as a lye-enema. I knew the irreverent ones were the ones with genuine potential, and that potential might be realized if they were approached honestly and with a bit of a sense of humor.

I probably reached some of them, and no doubt failed to reach others. But, I believed (and still believe) we clowns should be heeded and if we tap into the clownishness, we just might find some serious business afoot between the ears. Anyway, who would you rather read, Mark Twain or Kierkegaard? To me the answer is an easy one. Go with Twain and you might just get a better insight into the nature of humanity – and you’d get a giggle enroute, too.