June 3, 2001
I decided to go to bed early last night. There wasn't much to do, and I was reading Anne Rice's Merrick, which was enjoyable because I used to be completely mad about the Vampire Chronicles. Anyway, I was dreaming about the boy who kicked me in the head in shop class (see this entry). I was beating him up (I have no idea where I was or why he was there) and I managed to get up helpless enough to drag him by his feet down some stairs. He was bleeding and swearing, and being just as nasty as he was back in elementary and junior high, when he used to punch me and say horrible things about me just because he could. There was an authority figure there, as well as a bunch of my classmates from then. The authority figure (who may have been my english teacher, actually) asked my classmates if it was okay that I'd beaten up the bully. Most of them seemed to agree it was okay because we were no longer a part of that separate dimension of junior high where things that should never have been okay were. One of my molars felt loose and I thought my mouth was full of blood and my teeth were hitting things that were crunchy. I tried to keep the loose molar in and spit into my hand. There were four or five pieces of teeth. I said I needed to go to the dentist and woke up.
I've never actually broken a tooth like that, so it was kind of like the Blair Witch project where they find the little bundle of plaid shirt and it has the missing guys teeth in it. I don't know what that means, that I beat the bully up. He looked like he did in grade nine, and I felt like me now and not then. I have a hard time figuring out if I'm a different age in dreams. I woke up really upset. I'm chalking this one up to the weird dream machine in my head. I had been thinking about the bully and wondering if he really he is a junkie somewhere.
One of my friends wrote this about my power struggle coments about the structure of junior high school:
And my friend is right about high school. They did try to control those of us who were really thinking for ourselves. But most of the teachers were glad to see us breaking out of the bonds our junior high school teachers had laid on us by not supporting us when things were beyond our control.
There was this one incident. A friend of mine was a teacher, and he told me they had kicked this kid we called Spiderboy because he brought trouble to himself. He was a goth, and wore makeup and carried a teddy bear on his backpack. He was a really gentle person who was just trying to express what he felt. Other boys were threatened by what he represented, probably homosexuality, and beat him up, nearly twice a week. This teacher friend of mine said they gave Spiderboy the option of changing his appearance to conform or leaving the school, because he was causing too much trouble. I thought the teachers were just too chicken to stand up for Spiderboy, who did nothing wrong.
But then one of the boys who beat up Spiderboy ended up beating a gay man nearly to death when we were all in university.
I don't think he was protected by the system then.
The teachers I had in junior high didn't realize they were raising a system of monster. I don't sympathize with kids who do school shootings because I don't think that kind of violence is the answer, but I understand how they get to that point. The teachers don't support them. They let these things happen. And they punish the wrong kids for the wrong behaviours because the "good kids" couldn't be doing anything wrong. The "good kids", or the "well-adjusted kids" at my junior high and even at my high school were the closest things I've ever seen to real sociopaths. Teachers need to stop favouring the "good kids" and seeing that the weaker kids are the ones who suffer under the good kids hands.
I was a weak kid and I still don't understand why. I couldn't have survived in the world of junior high much longer than I did. I dreamt of a private school when I was a kid. But from the tales I heard of the boarding school here, I don't think I would have been any better off. Girls can be worse than boys. Boys just hurt you physically. Girls leave emotional scars. I'll get to those someday.
What about the teachers, then? In my experience, jh was a power struggle between interested juvenile parties. In sh/hs it was power over students who were beginning to really think for themselves. One hell of a dirty fight, too. Bastiges. But I'm not bitter.
I think she's getting at what I was thinking. Junior high was about the power of the "popular" over the "not popular" and the scapegoats (me, for instance) through teasing, and occasionally violence (though my school on most scales was pretty non-violent. There were three fights I can remember - the new girl and this other girl in grade six, two guys in the back of the class in grade six, and the fight between a couple of the boys in grade eight.) directed from the popular towards their scapegoats. I mean, the kids I was forced to sit by in grade five used to leave bruises on my upper arms just because they could, and the major bully tried to kick me in the back of the head. I heard a little while ago, I think I was watching the view, that bullies reach their maximum popularity in grade six. My school was small, and the same kids were isolated together (I went to French Immersion, so we didn't get kids moving in and out, or even coming in) until grade nine so the power struggle just continued to get worse and worse. We were our own community and there wasn't a larger outside community that related to us as a whole so it was freakish! The kids did horrible things to each other. Once, grade seven I think, some of the popular girls decided one of their own had to go so they trashed the bathroom, writing nasty things about the new outcast and spreading menstrual blood, used tampons and pads, and feces around the bathroom. It was awful. That girl was an outcast for three years. Thank goodness for the escape of high school.
© lily keller 2001
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