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Causing Trouble

 I love re-reading this poem by Naomi Shihab-Nye. This time, these lines made me pause:

Once my teacher set me on a high stool
for laughing. She thought the eyes
of my classmates would whittle me to size.
But they said otherwise.

We'd laugh too if we knew how.

This idea of whittling a kid to size by shame and judgement of peers often ends up having the exact opposite result. The peers who are meant to proscribe end up being in awe, hero-worshipping the one who was stood up on a high stool. What might have started as small act of non-compliance can with such fuel blossom into large scale defiance often just to attract more fuel to burn without any real cause. I think of a about a dozen kids from my childhood who had been similarly named and shamed. In all cases nothing good came out of it. No one I recall every actually felt whittled down to size. They only re-doubled their efforts to stick out and get into "trouble" again, turning into habitual offenders. Over time, the interest in them faded and they blended into the crowd of kids who end up getting little to no value out of school.

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