I really wasn't a kid you wanted in your class. On the surface I was a good girl... apparently well behaved, pretty bright and polite as a pin. But, when the teacher's back was turned, I was a sly, manipulative little demon with quick fingers and an even quicker imagination.
In kindergarten, our teacher hated tattletales, and there was a girl who tattled ALL THE TIME. We rode the same bus and, for some reason that I still don't know (and that lasted all the way through high school), she hated me quite a bit. Rather than telling the teacher that she was picking on me, I found ingenious ways to bait her. I'd take multicolored beads to schools in the pockets of my blue and white striped overalls and show them to her, knowing that they looked like M&Ms. She'd tell on me for having candy, and she'd get sent to time-out. I'd tell her that the teacher said she should go to the block area because it was my turn to paint, and she'd get sent to time-out for being in the block area when it was closed-- and then for telling the teacher that it was my fault. I'd wait for her to finish cutting out her shapes and then quietly steal one so she'd get in trouble for being careless. Etc, Etc, Etc...
In 1st grade I hated my teacher because she loved the well behaved, nicely dressed little girls who colored in all of the superflous pictures on the dittos and dotted their "i"s with hearts. I'd wait until she was gone for lunch and get a pass from the cafeteria to the bathroom and stop by the classroom to empty the shavings from the pencil sharpener into her bag or onto her desk or just onto the floor. When we got back from lunch the entire class would be punished, and then she'd ask for a helper to clean it up-- offering a cookie as a reward. No matter how many times I voluenteered to help clean up, I don't think she ever appreciated my help. The same year we had little plastic baskets that held our crayons in our desks. She HATED it when they spilled on the floor- so she would offer us a class reward- a cookie each- for every day that no one spilled their crayons. If we got too close to earning a cookie at the end of the day I'd tip mine out just to ruin it for everyone else. For some twisted reason, I found the disappointment of my classmates far more satisfying than a Chips Ahoy.
In 2nd grade I moved to all out vandalism. I carried a permanent marker with me whenever I went to the bathroom and left a hip-high squiggly line along the wall. Once I got there I would trash the place. Crawl under and lock all the doors. Wads of wet toilet paper on the walls, mirror and ceiling. Dry toilet paper decorating every surface. One day a sign appeared in the entryway that read "If you are locking the doors or making the bathroom a mess, we are watching you." The two "o"s in "doors" had eyes in them. It was kinda menacing. I didn't think they really had cameras in the bathroom, or they would have come for me by then. It occurred to me to check out the boys' bathroom- there was no sign in the entryway there. I decided to start sneaking in there and doing the same thing, just to mix it up a bit. Sure enough, the same sign appeared a week later-- in blue this time. (The original was pink.) While I liked my 2nd grade teacher, I was hooked on the thrill of surreptitiously disrupting the class. I began stealing flimstrips from the box in the back of the room on Fridays (the day we watched filmstrips) and flushing them down the toilets (wouldn't ya know... the damn things started to clog!). In all honesty, I was kinda torn about this. I really wanted to watch the filmstrips.
My 3rd grade teacher totally lucked out. I was a gem-- too distracted by my first all out crush to make any mischief.
I might have just kept riding my 3rd grade high, but 4th grade landed me in the class of one of the meanest, most burned out teachers I've ever encountered. It was her last year before retirement and she really couldn't have cared much less what we did in class, so long as we left her alone. She called in sick nearly every Friday, let us play outside most afternoons, fed us the answers to our standardized tests and would often abdicate her authority, putting another 4th grade student (albeit the one who was eventually our valedictorian) in charge of the teacher's manual. One of the perks of her hands-off teaching style was that we never got our own texts books. There was a stack of text books for every subject under the windows and whenever we needed a book someone would pass them out at random. Since she didn't care, I didn't really care either, so I took the year to hone my emerging understanding of how to properly use foul language. I was the kid who filled the books with "Go to page 35... go to page 67... go to page 104... go to page 68...." and so on until you eventually got to the final page and found a string of oddly assembled expletives. Or an inaccurate picture of male genitalia. Or giant boobs made to look like eyes. Or, in some random cases, a riddle with no answer. Inevitably one of my classmates would raise his or her hand to tell the teacher that someone had been writing in the books and class would be disrupted and I would look up from my current treasure hunt to feign interest with the rest of the kids.
Once I left elementary school I kinda went underground and found other outlets for my "creative" tendencies... though these antics never complete subsided (just as my grad school Mercy College friends about the time a security guard interrupted our class looking for a "teenage boy" who had been hanging unsanctioned political fliers in the hallway...). I can honestly say that, as a teacher, my past has left me one step ahead of my "bad" kids... if they're thinking of some kinda stunt, I'm probably thinking of it too. I'm also acutely aware that the "bad" kids really aren't all that bad at all. Most of them actually have some pretty amazing potential.
So why, with the wisdom of time, am I not sorry? Looking back, I can see how desperate these actions were and how dilligently I was doing the classic, "crying out for attention." I think about the number of teachers who probably suspected I was up to something and didn't call me on it, the number of teachers (right up through my senior year of high school) who figured something was going on and turned a blind eye. I'm sorry for the money I cost my school to repaint the halls and replace the materials I destroyed. I'm sorry for the individual frustration my teachers must have felt as they cleaned pencil shavings out of their hair brushes, searched in vain for lost filmstrips or believed me while they were searching for that paper I INSISTED I'd handed in. Mostly, I'm sorry that no one stepped in and tried to figure out what was going on.
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