Conduct

Back when I was in elementary school we had to take our grade reports home for our parents to sign. I dreaded grade reports. My grade reports weren’t all that bad. My grades in English, history, and math were okay, but I always got a D in Conduct. That confused me. I remembered the teacher covering all of the other subjects in class, but I couldn’t recall a single session of instruction on Conduct. I didn’t know what Conduct was, or meant, and it seemed unfair to be graded on something that was never covered in class.

When I got home my grades were never good enough. The C’s should be B’s, and the B’s should be A’s, and the A’s, well, I never saw one of those till middle school or later. But it was the D in Conduct that I knew would hurt me. Mom chided me gently about the Conduct grade. “Tom, you HAVE to do better with your conduct!” I’d nod my head, knowing that it was important to remain silent while being disciplined. When Dad got home from work that night I’d get verbally punished for my mediocre grades all over again, and spanked for the D in Conduct. I REALLY didn’t like grade reports.

Still, I didn’t know how I was going to get better at Conduct if I didn’t know what it was. It never occurred to me to ask. Adults were, to me, all-knowing authority figures. I figured they’d tell me what Conduct was when it was time for me to know; kind of like Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the over-sized hotdog at the baseball field the other kids snickered about. I could tell there were secrets out there somewhere, but I was confident that all would be revealed to me at the proper time by the proper authorities.

My D’s in Conduct became a regular occurrence over the period of several years. I was pretty excited when the school announced that rather than issuing grade reports 4 times a year, they would only be issued twice a year. I thought, “Awesome; only two spankings this school year instead of 4.”

Concurrent with the D’s in Conduct was a problem I had with talking in class. I had no idea that the two phenomena might be related. From time to time I was given a special homework assignment. I had to write “I will not talk in class” 25 times. The next occurrence was 50, then a hundred, and it went up by hundreds from there. I am certain that I reached 500 before the end of the year, but remain foggy about reaching 1,000. I do know I went through reams of notebook paper every year.

If the teacher was covering something important, like football, maybe I’d have paid attention. The really important subjects to me were tag, baseball, football, basketball, wrestling, and swimming; that’s six subjects right there, and the school was only devoting one hour a day during PE class to those six subjects. The school was wasting my time with reading, writing, and arithmetic, which were completely useless to me during daily recess time and summer vacations. “Yo, teachr mon, give me sumthin I kin use!”

I remember one night I was writing out my punishment of a gazillion sentences in a corner of our family room. Mom was watching me struggle laboriously through the handwriting, and commented, “Wouldn’t it just be easier NOT to talk in class?” I nodded my head in agreement, but inside I was thinking, “Can I stop a cough, a sneeze, or a fart? Can a bed wetter will himself not to wet the bed? Oh Mom, I wish it were so. I so wish I could stop myself, but the words are out of my mouth before I can stop them. Mother, forgive me, for I know not what I do.” I had no control over my talking in class.

Here’s an example. One day the teacher was droning on about Abraham Lincoln, who happened to be my favorite president. In fact, I already knew that Abe was the sixteenth president, so I‘d made 16 my favorite number to honor him. I was sure old Abe was pleased with this honor even as he lay a-moldering in the grave. Anyway, the teacher wasn’t telling me anything new as I’d recently read a short biography on Abraham Lincoln and knew everything worth knowing, or so I thought.

This permitted me a free moment to ponder the Transparent Man model that my older brothers had assembled from a kit. The model had transparent skin so you could see all the organs inside the man. It also had a door into the abdomen so you could take out all the organs, and then put them back in like a 3-d jigsaw puzzle. As I recalled the placement of the organs it occurred to me that the stomach wasn’t in the location where everyone patted their tummies when they were full. The fools were actually patting their intestines. In a moment of clarity I realized that the stomach is actually much higher in the abdomen than we generally give it credit for. Now here was a fact worth knowing. I bet the teacher and the class didn’t know that! It was much more interesting than what the teacher was saying about Abraham Lincoln.

My attention returned to the teacher who was still droning on about my close and personal hero, Abraham Lincoln. I was sure the teacher and the class would want to know my newly discovered fact. I was so excited. I had incredible news that they were missing out on. I raised my hand knowing that I must not talk in class without permission. The teacher called on me and I said, “Did you know that your stomach isn’t down here (pointing to my belly region) but really is more up here (pointing to the sternum)?”

At that point she put me and my chair in the back of the room facing the back wall, but that was okay by me. She hadn’t said anything important all day, and I had important things to ponder, like where does the white go when the snow melts? Now there is something worth knowing.