When I was a 2nd-grade teacher, I had my own behavior chart hanging in my classroom. Mine was a pocket chart with four colored cards for each student: green, blue, yellow and red. A traffic light with an extra level of warning.
“Go move your card,” I’d say to a student who was behaving inappropriately — more often than not the same few students over and over, trekking back and forth from their desks to the behavior chart.
In an effort to reduce public shaming, I labeled my students’ cards not with their names but with numbers I had assigned them. In retrospect, my error was twofold: Everyone still knew who those same offenders were, and I had reduced them to numbers.
When I was my son’s age, I idolized my teachers: Mrs. Rosen, Mrs. Grossman, Mrs. Steinberg. Displeasing them would have been devastating for me. And the way I demonstrated my great devotion — my elementary school love language, if you will — was by following their instructions. When they said to sit, I sat. What they told me to copy, I copied. I shunned anyone who didn’t display the same fervent dedication to the rule of classroom law, as if their disobedience might be catching.
I suspect a lot of people — mostly girls — who felt the same way about their elementary school teachers and grow up to become teachers themselves learn the same grueling truth that I did: that we were beloved as students because we knew how to “play school” in the traditional way. We knew how to sit, how to listen, how to raise our hands eagerly with the right answers. We knew how to do what we were told.
Eli knows how to sit and listen, too. He just isn’t sold on why he should. Why should he keep his body still like a statue when it could be bouncing to its own rhythm? Why should he raise his hand and wait patiently for permission to answer a question when he could exuberantly shout it out?
I know acutely how his teachers feel. When I was a teacher, I had a checklist of teaching points for every subject for every day of the month. I had 10 minutes during a mini lesson to address that teaching point, during which time I was supposed to somehow check off the level of understanding of each of my 27 students. I had no time for shenanigans. I had no time for the whims of kids like Eli.
On the second day of the second week of second grade, Eli declared as we walked to school that he didn’t care about moving up to “Great Choices” or “Superstar Student.”
“All you get is tickets, and the prizes in the prize bin aren’t that good,” he said.
At this I felt a small surge of panic. As a former elementary school overachiever, I felt certain I would have landed on “Superstar Student” every day. My desk would have been full of tickets. The prize bin would have been my oyster.
Eli shrugged. “I’d rather be myself,” he said.
On the third day of the second week of second grade, Eli announced that he wasn’t going to school. “School is miserable,” he said morosely. “My class would be better off without me. They would earn more marbles, because I’m the only one who can’t behave.”
There was my child in the kitchen, all soft cheeks and gapped teeth, who chuckles out loud to himself at the funny parts in the Big Nate books and makes goofy faces in the cafeteria potentially when he isn’t supposed to, who so far in second grade has learned only that he’s the only one who can’t behave.
If I ever needed proof that karma was a real phenomenon, here it was: My own child was every kid who had haunted me in my classroom 10 years ago. All of those kids knew they were That Kid, too. All of those kids probably felt the same shame.
“I can’t just sit plain,” Eli explained. “I always have to be moving, or doing something with my hands. Because if I don’t do that, I would just be sitting there plain, and then I wouldn’t be the same Eli that I am now.”
In all the times we had talked about how teachers expect him to behave, I had never thought of it like that before, like school and its restrictions were somehow stripping him of his essential Eli-ness. I pictured him like a firefly trapped in a jar, his wings buzzing furiously and his light dimming out.
But even fireflies need to learn to turn their lights off sometimes, and part of what we learn and teach in school is how to sit still and be quiet: how to walk with quiet feet and wait our turn to speak, how to regulate our bodies and modulate our voices.
That day I gave Eli a stress ball and told him to ask his teacher if she would let him hold onto it during class. When I asked him that evening how the day had gone, he ducked his head and grinned.
“Great Choices,” he said. “And we earned three marbles!” He seemed super pumped.
I asked him about the stress ball.
“That’s pretty much how I got to Great Choices,” he said.
I still have my reservations about the class behavior chart: Did he know he had a good day in school only because the class behavior chart deemed it, or did he feel it himself? What will happen when he plummets to the dreaded “Teacher’s Choice” block (“I know I’m going to get a phone call home this year”)? And is his teacher really threatening to send him to the principal’s office for making goofy faces in the lunchroom? (As a former teacher, I maintain a healthy skepticism about tales my child tells me, but that anecdote stretches my patience and I haven’t met her yet.)
But I also know this: Some kids love the class behavior chart. They get to see themselves climbing the ladder to good behavior every day, and they get to feel proud of that, and they deserve that, too. Somewhere in a Facebook group right now, there is probably some parent complaining about a kid like mine who is ruining their kid’s day at school because he won’t stop talking during the mini lesson.
The school year is still young. It could go a lot of different ways. But if a genie could grant me three parenting wishes for Eli...well, I wouldn’t even need three. I would just need the one cornball phrase I use whenever we’re discussing his behavior, or his academics, or his social skills, or really anything: Be the best Eli you can be.
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