The experience put me strongly and securely in my child’s shoes, and I was suddenly awash in the rush of emotions she had described to me – shame, embarrassment, injustice, unfairness, misunderstanding.
The teacher yelled at me in front of the whole class, and it had not at all occurred to me that I had been doing anything wrong. My intentions had been stellar, but they had turned me into a pariah.
Sometime during the school year, my daughter had come to me distraught, at the end of the school day, to describe what happened. She had gotten yelled at in front of the whole class for something innocent and unintentional. I don’t remember what it was, and when I brought it back up to her this week, she didn’t either, but she still remembered the horrible feeling of being unjustly attacked in front of everyone else.
The stress of it had given her such a stomach ache that she couldn’t focus on the rest of the class; all she could think of was getting out of there.
I was taking a class called Complicated Things on the Computer, or something like that. I was out of my league, so I’d better take notes, and lots of them, to later remember what I’d be learning.
However, I take loads of notes in any class and every meeting I attend, anyway. I had been a reporter for 20 years, but even before that, had been in the habit of taking notes, partially to have a later record of what was going on, and partially to keep my mind on track and keep it from wandering.
At this point in my life, the habit is so ingrained that I don’t know and don’t care if I take notes because I was a reporter or if I was a reporter because I take notes, but the practice serves me well.
Most of the time.
Right in the middle of a sentence about something complicated about computers, the teacher turned to me and boomed, “Will you STOP that typing! The noise is so distracting I cannot concentrate on what I am trying to say.” He added something else about how I should be paying attention to his class and not be doing other things.
Shocked, I apologized and explained I was just taking notes.
He wasn’t done scolding me, though, and it seemed that he didn’t believe my explanation, and he ranted on and on, eyes blazing into mine, voice loud, in front of the whole class.
It was almost a day-long class that only had just begun, too. My face was blazing red in shame and I tried to keep my composure and remain polite and just hoped he’d hurry up and turn his attention back to the lesson.
Finally, he did. He turned away from me and back to the class, opened his mouth, then shut it. He turned back to me: “That’s why I hate interruptions. Now I have no idea where I was in the lesson.”
I read him back my last two lines of notes, and he resumed his instruction.
That’s when my daughter’s experience washed over me. In that moment, I was my daughter. I was every misunderstood kid in school. I was the kid who initially wanted to learn but now just wanted to get out of there as fast as possible. Just slink low in the chair and wait out my sentence.
I thought of all those kids who accidentally get pegged as the class troublemaker.
I was the class troublemaker.
The lesson continued, and I tried to pay attention, though my mind wandered some. At some point I realized I didn’t have any idea what the teacher was explaining. We were supposed to be doing something on our computers, but I couldn’t do it.
Then the class moved on to the next step, and the next, and I couldn’t follow.
“I probably wouldn’t ever have to be doing this stuff in my job anyway,” I thought to myself. I was miserable and out of place and couldn’t face the rest of the day in that place.
One great benefit we have as an adult over a kid is that we can just get up and leave a class when we want to. I daydreamed of doing just that. I did once walk out of a class I couldn’t stand, on cake-decorating when, after five weeks, I still couldn’t keep the cake crumbs out of my frosting, and that day’s lesson was to make a cake with clowns on it. The clowns, which I don’t like anyway, were the last straw, so I got up and left in frustration, and in a satisfyingly dramatic gesture threw my lumpily frosted cake in the trash in the parking lot.
I would have left that computer class simply on the basis of not understanding and not caring about the classwork —- but if I had walked out, everyone would think it was because of the scolding I had received, so I made myself stay.
“Look pleasantly interested and polite,” I told myself over and over again as the minutes ticked on, keeping a forced smile on my face.
Eventually, the topic switched, and I started understanding what was happening.
The instructor started teaching some things that would indeed be helpful in my job. I’d want to remember them, so I started taking notes again.
Slowly and quietly, I started typing.
I left that long, long class with two important lessons: How to do some computer calculations that may be useful to me at work – with all the steps carefully typed out so I’d remember – and, also, I was reminded of giving others correction gracefully and compassionately in private, and to be careful not to shame people in front of others.
