Life has a tendency of turning on a dime. At the end of seventh grade, my first year at St. Francis Xavier, I received the Daughters of the American Revolution Good Citizens award. Sometimes being the new kid on the block, the unknown, has its advantages.
By the next year, that award was old
news.
It began as a casual observation,
thrown out in haste, and obviously, with little or no thought given to the
consequences. After spending most of the afternoon standing in the back of the
room as punishment, my three classmates and I had been called to our teacher’s
desk to explain our continued misbehavior. Had we shown a sufficient degree of
remorse, apologized and promised it wouldn’t happen again, we could have been
on our way, but instead we chose to dig that hole that our parents had always
warned us about.
The question was a very simple one.
“What do you boys think
you’re doing?”
Schoolboys have been
asked this question for ages, and the correct response has always been the
same. Look down at your feet, shuffle them around a little, shrug your
shoulders, shake your head from side to side and then say, “I dunno.”
That is the only
acceptable answer. No one really expects you to incriminate yourself. “What do
you boys think you’re doing?” has never been a question in search of an answer,
but rather a rhetorical assertion that whatever you were doing—and no one
really needs an explanation—but whatever it was, was the wrong thing to
be doing.
Our teacher was only
interested in getting that question out of the way in order to move on to the
punishment phase. The request was a formality, an icebreaker as if school were
a social event and breaking the rules a party game to be treated as such. Smart
kids know this. Of course, smart kids don’t get in trouble.
I accept much of the
blame for what happened next because I was the one who responded to her
inquiry. My foolish comeback didn’t even answer the question she had posed, but
reluctantly, students don’t get do-overs in the classroom the way they do on
the playground.
“The other eighth grade is better than ours,” I said, in response to the question, “What do you boys think you’re doing?”
