A Lesson in Civil Disobedience

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When you spend two hours a day, five days a week with a group of students and a couple of teachers, you grow comfortable with each other.  You don't necessarily like everyone, but you take comfort in the certainty of their actions; you know what to expect from them, and you tend to act and react in certain patterns.  The teachers are a part of this interaction, and with one of my teachers in particular, I had build up quite the rapport.

Mary Peterson, Peetie for short, and I liked to verbally spar.  I was a punk of a kid, always pushing the boundaries of respect, believing that the rules were for everyone else around me, but I was above them in some grand way.  Mary (and I would call her that to her face in front of other students) seemed both to thrive off of my general disrespect and be horribly annoyed by it.  She once called me Timone (from the Lion King), and I quickly snapped back that she was Pumba, the wild boar.  She turned a wonderful shade of red after that one.

Late in the year, we were studying the 1960s, specifically Martin Luther King, Jr. and his brand of civil disobedience.  To drive this lesson home, Peetie called a pop quiz one day.  The rules were simple: everything off your desk, no talking, 10 minutes.  When the quiz was passed out, it was on material we hadn't yet covered in class.  I raised my hand, but I wasn't called on to ask my question.  So I asked it anyway.  Immediately, Mary threw me out of the class, told me to wait in the hallway.  There was murmuring from my classmates, but they were quickly snapped at to be quiet. 

I waited out in the hall, fuming, for 10 minutes, while the rest of the class tried in vain to answer questions to which they hadn't been taught the answers.  At the end of the quiz, Mary called me back from the hall, and she asked me to stand in front of the class.

She apologized for not cluing me in (she wanted an honest reaction), but the quiz was a fake.  The real lesson was to prove to the class how difficult it was to stand up to authority, even when you knew that wrong was being inflicted.  There were about 60 students in the class, and none of them stood up for me.  I was innocent this time... I swear.  Mrs. Peterson drove the point home.  I still remember being hurt by her actions, but dumbfounded by the lack of action from my classmates.  I wonder what I would have done had the roles been reversed.  Who I have spoke up and risked my precious grade?

I'd like to think I would have... if for no other reason that to try to take Peetie down another notch.  I really was a punk of a teenager.