Boys Will Be Boys? Part One

After three years in the Open Classroom Concept experiment at Lewis and Clark Elementary in the late sixties, I was asked to no longer be part of that school or my mother removed me from their experiment. The family history is murky on this count.I was in the third grade. The next fall I found myself enrolled at St, Joseph's Elementary surrounded by children all wearing the same clothes. Well that was not completely true. The girls wore skirts and the boys wore heavy dark corduroy pants with cuffs. But we all wore the same white shirts and the same green sweaters. This was my first introduction to enforced conformity and may have led to me becoming an anarchist (in the Noam Chomsky tradition) later in life.


I was one of three non Catholics in the entire school so many of the rituals confused me. Once a week, the red eyed alcohol sodden priest made us all sit through some sort of mass. I sat for three million years in the back while the entire school got a treat and I did not. The treats did not look very tasty. It looked like a piece of round flat cardboard but at the age of 10 all I knew was that everybody got to eat and drink while I just sat. Ash Wednesday found every single kid on the playground with the mark upon their forehead except for me and two others. The priest told me I could have the ashes too, that it wouldn't make me Catholic but even before I knew Walt Whitman I followed his advice to "resist much, obey little."


But what sticks in my brain all these years later is not the unusual rituals or the mass conformity or the curious psychology of Catholic girls. What sticks in my mind is that we were surrounded by female authority. To complicate this dynamic, most of the women had consciously chosen not to have males be a part of their lives. They were celibate. Having never experienced males (as far as we knew) or at least not any more they did not understand boy energy.


We always baffled, confused and astounded them. In response they squelched and suppressed our energy. Being boys we took advantage of this and sometimes drove them crazy on purpose. It was often worth an hour of detention just to see Sister Mary No Fun (that's what I call all of them now) completely lose it and hurl a stack of freshly graded papers across the classroom.

Two incidents in particular stick out from my three year sentence there.There were a lot of rules and they were hard to keep track of. The rules that made no sense were the most baffling.

One morning before school my friends and I were playing with our newly acquired DuncanYo Yo's  behind the school. The day before a Yo Yo master had visited the school and done an assembly and showed everybody all sorts of cool tricks. Of course we all acquired new Yo Yo's and were practicing eagerly. We tried to outdo each because we were boys. Special attention was paid to the tightness of the knot because if was too tight it would bind. If it was too loose it would just stop spinning and returning. Predictably we tried to smack each other in the testicles every now and then. Being a boy can be dangerous.


But we weren't smoking weed. We weren't spray painting graffiti or vandalizing the school. We weren't chewing or smoking tobacco or fondling girls or looking at pornography. That all came later. No, we were playing with Yo Yo's.


Sure enough, we were deep into our innocence and fun and the head Sister Mary No Fun burst through the doors screeching incomprehensibly about how the entire school was looking for us along with the National Guard and the PTA.

For our crime of Yo Yo fascination and being in the wrong place for too long we were sentenced to write a 2,000 word essay on "Why School Rules Are Important." We would not get recess until this was finished. We  were all in the fifth grade.

To be continued     NEXT