I've had my socks made fun of.

Lots of people lament the decline of civility in our society. But sometimes people have a shallow understanding of what that means. I don't mean it would be "nice" if people said "please" and "thank you" more often.

I mean that we are living in a world where a fifteen-year-old made fun of my socks. How can I be my true self, how can I be present and really be there for the kids if I have to worry about being disrespected on such a fundamental level? I've certainly had much worse things said to me, but for some reason the "socks" thing really stings. I think it's because nobody wants to look like a dork, and that fear runs really deep all through life.

I was wearing socks because it was 2000 and I was teaching at a California high school in which all the classroom doors opened up to outdoor hallways and it was freaking cold at 8:00 a.m. and therefore I couldn't not wear socks under my hippy-chic / professional long skirt from the '90s. I thought the length of the skirt hid the socks adequately. I was wrong.

This person who made fun of my socks (and gave me all sorts of other grief) was eventually classified as "gifted at-risk" and accepted into what is called a "middle college," or a high school housed on a college campus.

When I first heard of such schools, I thought it was a neat concept. High school sucks for smart kids, and how cool that someone finally saw that and made an alternative place for us! Oh, except not for me, because I was not only smart but also respectful, and that respectfulness would have been stereotyped as submissiveness.

I'm troubled by what I see as a trend of confusing acting like a jerk with having something to say. I even took an interview for a teaching position at this middle college high school, and they flat-out said that they wanted the student who will argue with the teacher. Now, a good teacher will invite students to argue with her intellectually. But I had the feeling they meant merely the student who challenges authority just for the sake of challenging authority.

I saw Dr. Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade speak at Mt. SAC last spring, and he was talking about the disruptive student in the back of the class, and how that student "has so much heart." I think an extrovert who is smart or hurt may show it by acting out, but I worry that some educators seem to believe that all who act out are smart, hurt extroverts. The thinking seems to go something like this: the more trouble-maker-ish you are, the more interesting/smart/hurt/worthy of attention you must be. Could it be that sometimes people act out because they are jerks? I am troubled by the idea that acting like a jerk is acceptable if you have a good reason.


It's not acceptable to be a jerk just because you're smart. Or because somebody hurt you. Two wrongs don't make a right.

Don't make fun of my socks, man.


Finally, I think acting out in response to grief is a behavior particular to extroverts. By only focusing on the jerks' problems, what happens to the introverts? I suspect the introverts are the ones that punish themselves, not others, for their pain. I suspect it's not the extroverted trouble-maker who falls through the cracks, who gets depression, who self-harms. Who's looking out for those kids?