I have been watching the kids going back to school this week and it has stirred many memories of my own school days. It occurs to me that every year’s crop of kids is the same. Year after year, the names change, the titles and protocols may change, but the basic categories of kids that end up mixed into each grade, now as in the distant past, continue to be represented by a few core ‘types’.
Over and above the fact that it is a nasty sin to label anyone for anything anymore, I would put money on there being the following kids in every class of every grade at the elementary school down the street.
Without a doubt there is a smart kid, a non-smart kid, a kid with twice the energy of everyone else, an athletic kid, several girls who make an effort to look alike, one tall kid, one short kid, a kid who seems rotten to the core (by nature), a very attractive kid, a kid with limited financial means, a kid with plenty, and one kid that everybody dislikes but nobody really knows why. Per class.
Then the rest of the class is filler—average kids who aren’t too smart or too non-smart or too attractive, etc. The Average Majority.
In my school, those who had a title or designation didn’t realize that they stood out from the blandness of the rest of us and that made them memorable, they only knew that they were picked on or ignored, as their designation demanded. Our politics were simple and ruthless. That’s kids for you.
The smart kids in class were a double-edged sword. Generally, we had no reason to dislike any of them because they were delightful kids who made fine friends, but in the classroom it was demoralizing to sit near them (unless it was to copy answers off their test papers) (which, of course, was beneath me) so they were avoided. The smart kids excelled in academics, which was the point of why we were all there, but for the most part were just as dorky as the rest of us outside of the classroom and that swung things in their favour. We spent a great deal of time eye-rolling at them.
The non-smart kids may well have excelled in every area of life other than academics, but they had been publicly shamed as not-as-smart-as-the-rest-of-us in class and were judged solely on that. We didn’t pick on the non-smart kids in my school because the teachers did a fine job of it on their own and we all instinctively felt that injustice. And, for the average majority, it was just a relief to have that end of the list anchored by somebody else.
The kid with twice the amount of energy as other kids was often a hitter or liked to scream loudly right into your ear, so we tended to give them a wide berth and tried to stay just out of arm’s reach. The same went for the kid who seemed determined to get themselves arrest by Grade 8 graduation. Wide berth, avoid being their collateral damage.
The athletic kid was forever challenging the other kids to races or petitioning others to play organized games with them. There was no point to this because the athletic kid would always come out on top. It’s hard to work up any interest in playing something that you know you have no chance of winning. Well, at least that was the girls’ take on things—the boys always seemed to think that maybe this one time they could take him.
I was one of the look alike girls, so I have nothing more to say about that.
The kids who were tallest or smallest were victims of their own bodies and there was nothing they could do about that. But we were cruel to them anyway. I am ashamed.
In our neighbourhood we didn’t taunt the poor kids. We all knew who they were and while we might have whispered behind their backs periodically, their financial deficit was nothing that put them into the line of fire with us. Likewise, in our neighbourhood the separation between ‘rich’ kids and the average majority was noted only by the fact that since both of their parents worked at paying jobs outside of the home, they brought better snacks for recess than we did. Most of our moms worked at home, and we had to suffer with homemade cookies for recess. Bummer.
There were kids who moved into the neighbourhood and had to negotiate their way through our embedded social structure, and those who moved away and took what they learned with/from us to their next school. And there were always kids who were marked by a single public incident and had to wear that badge for the rest of their school careers—probably still have it brought up at every school reunion they attend. It could have been for something heroic like stealing into the school office and turning on the PA system, or it could have been for breaking down and sobbing during class or passing out cold and having to be taken home.
I have to say that I lived a very fortunate childhood in that I was given a front row seat to watch how grade school politics operated, while staying largely unscathed by them (hooray for the Average Majority!). The knowledge of human behaviour that I learned during my elementary school years has been able to be applied to almost every group of adults I’ve ever found myself surrounded by since. I’d imagine my teachers would be disappointed to know that that was what turned out to be the take-away from my entire educational career.
Good luck to the students who started school this week. My advice is to watch and learn, kiddies, watch and learn!
