It’s unthinkable today that people could possible live their lives not knowing the rules or what is expected of them in every given situation.
In order to get a drivers license, you have to know the rules in order to pass your driving test – both written and behind the wheel. When you are pulled over for speeding and the police officer asks you if you know why you were pulled over, how many people feign innocence?
In college students are given a syllabus which lists expectations, policies, and objectives for the given class, which includes exam and assignment dates, behavioral do’s and don’ts, add and drop dates, etc. How many students feign innocence when they show for an exam unprepared or arrive in class without a homework assignment the day it’s due?
How about elementary, middle and high school? Teachers give their students a list of rules and expectations, often on the first day of class. Some teachers create the rules with student input, because the belief is when children have ownership of the rules, they are more likely to follow them.
So far all of this makes perfect sense.
I come from a different era however. Rules and expectations were never taught. In fact during my grade school experience, only one teacher ever had a set of rules posted in the classroom and that was my third grade teacher. She was a little unconventional even for the day and only taught one year. She did very little actual teaching – everything was pretty much student centered and self-paced. My teacher wrote the day’s assignments on the board and we students worked in pairs to complete them. She almost never checked our work for completeness or correctness. We did not have a pencil sharpener in the classroom – we used a pocket knife!
Third grade was the year I learned the least.
Although it was many, many years ago I still remember a couple of the rules:
1. Eyes front
2. Do not leave your seat unless necessary
As a seven-year-old I thought the rules were silly for two reasons. First, I knew it was impossible to always direct your focus to the front, so it was an impossible rule to always follow. Second, eight-year-olds do not the have maturity or wisdom to decide when leaving their seat is necessary.
This brings me to the focus of today’s musing: how did we know when we were doing the right thing or not?
As I had mentioned previously, I come from a different era. Corporal punishment was the trend of the day and punishments were meted out seemingly petty reasons.
Does it come as a surprise that I went to Catholic school? That’s almost cliché, so I’ll resist the temptation to comment on this further.
Tom B was hit in seventh grade because he did not know the words to the Lord’s Prayer. Now a twelve-year-old Catholic school student should probably have known these words. To put things nicely, Tom was not the sharpest tool in the shed, but I do not believe that his infraction warranted the use of corporal punishment.
My fifth grade teacher, Mrs. A without warning slapped my hand hard as I rested it on my desk, because I had started on the next spelling list in the workbook.
Here’s what’s interesting about his particular infraction: Mrs. A did not specifically tell me or anyone else not to continue in the book if we completed the assignment. She gave no instructions other than to complete the given task. However I was an efficient student and finished quickly. I grew bored with sitting and doing nothing, so I began the next spelling list. From a ten-year-old perspective, what harm could that do?
Mrs. A however thought a little differently from your run-of-the-mill ten-year-old. One of my classmates on the other side of the room had begun the next spelling list and Mrs. A saw him. She proceeded to yell at him for starting the next list. Remember that no further instructions were given – only to work on the given assignment.
Since Mrs. A was yelling at another student for doing the same thing as me, I knew I was guilty of wrongdoing. I quickly began to erase my work on the next spelling list – lucky for us we only wrote in pencil.
But I was not quick enough for Mrs. A. She quickly crossed the room, yelled at me for doing what she yelled at my classmate for doing – I should have been listening! My left hand was resting on my desk and without warning she slapped my hand as it lay there. I honestly think it hurt her more than it hurt me!
I hope everyone is following: I was yelled at and slapped because I should have been listening when the other student was being yelled at – not because I refused to follow a directive that had been previously given.
This brings us to the mother of all infractions that I was caught committing in third grade. An unwritten rule that seemed to apply only to me.
My friend Andrew and I caught buses to go home in front of the church. Getting to my bus stop required crossing the street from the school. I’d leave my backpack at my bus stop and cross a second street to hang with Andrew at his bus stop. His bus stop was more fun than mine because there were trees there and we’d climb them – we were after all eight-year-old boys. We’d cross a third street to buy ice cream at the gas station that was there and hang at Andrew’s bus stop until one of our buses arrived.
We’d been doing this for a while. One particular Friday, as I was crossing back to my bus stop with my ice cream, who was waiting for me but the mean second grade teacher, Sister Janice. I was verbally reprimanded for breaking a very serious, unwritten rule: thou shalt not cross the street to buy ice cream. Although two of us were guilty of breaking that rule, only I was reprimanded – my friend Andrew was not.
Sister Janice informed me that I would be seeing her the following Monday. Sister Janice was known to be very generous with caning students’ hands for the most minor of infractions.
I worried about getting hit on Monday: the pain; disappointing my parents; being embarrassed in front of my friends. Monday came and Sister Janice did not hit me. In fact she was surprised to see me. She had forgotten about the rule I had broken. Then she explained that the reason for the unwritten rule was safety. Crossing streets is dangerous. Yes, I thought. Andrew and I had to cross streets to get to our bus stops.
As you all have read this, many of you are thinking: how did we know what the expectations were if we were never told? The answer is actually very simple: we learned by watching what other students did. If they were yelled at or corporally punished for doing something, we did not do that thing. Or better yet, we learned not to get caught!
Times are different. We do things differently and better. We teach rules and expectations, then we teach our students how to correctly follow them and leave nothing up to interpretation.
