Dashed Hopes and Pop Psychology

“We’re going to whip up on the boys. . .” my daughter exclaimed as she bounced into the car this afternoon. “Excuse me?” I asked. “That’s what Miss ________ said when we were practicing!” was her reply. “Practicing?” I inquired. “Yes, for the math relay - boys against girls!”

And there it was. The one glimmer of hope from this already-too-long school year dashed. In the midst of our pleas to the school administration two weeks ago, we heard one small message that gave us hope. “Oh, Ms. ________ has assured us that she won’t be doing the math competitions between boys and girls. . .” It was the only point in the meeting where we felt the administration had “seen” the absurdity of it all and responded. It was the one small effort on this teacher’s part of recognizing our concerns even when she wouldn’t budge on anything else. All gone.

I spent the ride home fantasizing about a conversation I might have with the principal – all in the folksiness that seems to be required of school conferences, “Why Ms. Principal, I don’t know how you do things here in West Virginia, but in Georgia we’d call that insubordination – just say’n. . . . “ to which (it is my fantasy after all) the principal profusely apologizes and immediately writes the teacher up for the infraction. Yeah, right. . . . .

Instead, I sent an email to the teacher and c.c.ed the principal – letting her know that there was no need to set up a conference regarding the issues surrounding the report card – that if she could not follow through on a promise she made to her own administration we certainly had no hope that she would listen to us or do anything differently.

Later this evening as I was wandering through the grocery store I continued to wrestle with the absolutely wretched behavior of this woman. At some point in the middle of a near empty store, it hit me. Please forgive the pop psychology that follows. I suddenly realized that I had been trying to understand this woman from the perspective of a functional and rational human being. I assumed that her line of thinking would fall in line with mainstream teachers and, if so, she couldn’t help but see the negative implications of her actions.

But then I thought about it. There are a lot of damaged and dysfunctional people in the world. To some extent, we all carry about a lot of baggage and could probably count ourselves in a very large part of the population that is functionally damaged in some way. For most of us, we learn to cope with our issues and hopefully find ways to be in the world that won't exacerbate our weaknesses or increase their effects on others.

So, I began to think, “What if this IS the way this woman sees the world?” What if life is some big competition for her? What could have happened in this woman’s life that would make her so obsesses with seeing the world full of winners and losers? Did she grow up as a loser and prove herself otherwise? Did she always see herself as a “winner” and now wants everyone else to be defined accordingly? Was her family highly competitive and thus her worth was only recognized when it was accompanied by “best” or any number of adjectives as long as they ended in “-est”? If that is the case, then I imagine that she sees her interactions with Rick and me as a competition. She is out to “beat” us. When faced with a simple problem like promoting gendered competition in math and in spite of assuring her own administration that she would stop, she continues. Something is very, very wrong. Why else would she do this unless it is to “beat” us - to show us a thing or two?

Wow. What a frightening possibility. Rick and I are at a loss to respond at this point. If Audrey was older, we could have a developmentally appropriate conversation with her and hope that she would boycott this competition. That is too much to impose on a second grader at this point. For now, we just sit and wait – and hope that some administrative intervention prevails. Unlike my last blog entry, I’m not holding out much faith at this point. . . .