I was done with all the copying and cutting and gluing of the adorable, annoying, fall-themed projects I had been helping Mrs. McConnell prep for the next week in my first volunteer session. A botched nightmare of red, yellow, and brown construction paper. The children suddenly put all of their work away at the same time, without being told, and gathered on the large carpet in the front corner of the room. As if compelled by some amazing, unseen force.
“What’s going on?” I asked 2nd grade Sophie, who had come to take my hand and lead me over to the murmuring klatch. Those wonderful, frustrating days when Sophie had to have my hand at any given moment around other people.
“It’s The Agenda,” she said with whispered emphasis, her eyes rounding big as she leaned into me.
“What’s the agen…”
“Alright, everyone, please have a seat. Criss-cross applesauce until I call on you, then you may stand up and have your turn. I’ll wait until everyone’s QUIET!” Mrs. McConnell suddenly seethed, as there was far too much 7 year-old chatter plaguing the circle.
They all instantly shut up. Amazing what a few conniptions early on in the school year will do to tighten up behavior later. Sophie sat down in the circle and I grabbed the largest tiny chair I could find to straddle backwards.
“OK now please raise your hand if you have something for the agenda,” she said, kind and patient again. Everyone raised their hand, save a few shy kids lost in the crowd. Mrs. McConnell looked at me, bearing no expression of exhaustion, as I would have worn. This was her time. She expected this.
Mrs. McConnell was a unique teacher and individual. A “project-based educator” as they called it, and an actual artist to boot, her classroom often looked like a library and an art center had a dizzying affair and suddenly decided to move in together, with the details of their living arrangement still up in the air. But Sophie loved it. Loved her. A magical year in a kind of classroom forest, always something interesting to read and draw and paint. Sure, the classroom always looked liked it had exploded, but there was always something different to catch a child’s nascent interest. Sure, she was an occasionally spectacular yeller, but it almost always was in response to some really bad behavior and when it was over, it was all over. She allowed a year of right-brained, mostly-managed chaos, louder and messier than most adults would have it. She was a teaching artist, of which few remain in education these days. Now we have technicians and engineers, paving the way for our techno-teaching future. Great for one side of the room, but we are unbalanced on the other, and the lesser for the passing of our children’s artist teachers. They were efficiently shooed into early retirement. Like Mrs. McConnell was. Suddenly just gone.
“OK, James.”
James stood up and pointed. “Jaden pushed me on the playground at second recess.”
“He spit on me first!”
“That was an accident!”
“OK, that’s enough,” she said patiently. “Jaden, you shouldn’t push, and James, no spitting. Both of you apologize to each other.”
“Sorry.”
“Sorry.”
Having completed their half-hearted apologies, the lasers they were firing at each other’s eyes were extinguished. They sat down, smiling. It was over! Amazing!
They relished it. Relished the tattling, the righting of wrongs, the sheer power of everyone’s attention focused on them, and the justified shaming of their foe. And then it was all over, which was perhaps the most hilarious and significant aspect of the whole endeavor.
“Austhten called me a butthead,” lisped the sweetest little red-headed girl in pony tails through her missing front teeth. Who could ever call her a butthead.
“I did not! I said her face looks like a butt!” Said Austen without a hint of laughter or guile.
“Thaths even wowse!” She said and started to redden all over, the tears right at the front door.
“Austen! Apologize to Stacey.”
He glared at the teacher, growled a little bit, but said it anyway.
“I’m sorry I said your face looks like a butt,” he mumbled.
“LOUDER.”
“I’M SORRY. I SAID. YOUR FACE. LOOKS LIKE A BUTT,” he said sarcastically, but at least audibly.
I did my very best to keep a straight face, which was not successful, but I at least exhaled silent air away from the group. None of the other kids seemed amused at all, at any of it. They merely switched from admonishing faces, as each peer’s misdeeds were outlined in detail, to intense concentration as they desperately waited for their turn to expose the world to their own transgressions of the day. How fantastic.
No wonder this class was always late. No wonder all the aged suckers with their babies, parents and grandparents and babysitters, were milling out there, clueless as to what the hell was going on in here. Waiting outside the closed classroom, all the other classes let out long ago, the grounds teeming with yelling little kids done with their day. We all assumed they were finishing up intense learning sessions, cleaning up, gathering today’s assignments in their little backpacks. We never imagined all of them in a circle, haranguing each other about their poor hygiene and social skills. Apparently feats of strength and learning went on all day before this, eventually punctuated by an intense bitch session to cap things off. I had never discovered this gleaming truth until I volunteered and was on the other side of the shuttered proscenium.
Crazy Mrs. McConnell was solving all the world’s problems one grievance at a time, mano a mano. Confront your transgressor, get an apology, solve the problem. No one standing outside understood this anymore. All of them, all of us, with broken relationships littering their life, many of them over a simple misunderstanding. A careless word, a thoughtless action. Some horrible transgressions, for sure, but so many that were just tiny things that turned into big things. Things that never got put away by good old Mrs. McConnell, by the cathartic airing of the grievances. Face to face spat where you get to tell each other what they did that was shitty to you, and everyone has to apologize. Such a better way to do things than angry silences and stupid texts and life-long relationships stranded, broken for who knows why. Nothing important enough to remember 10 years later, just that you’re still angry and you aren’t friends anymore and the only thing left is pride, really. Wounded pride and the false sense of holding on to some ideal that is actually the opposite of what we cling to. “The principle of the thing.” There are no principles that support what you are doing but we all do it anyway. We all hold onto that stupid pride that is an empty satchel we are afraid to open. All because we didn’t get our turn in the circle.
“Yes, Lauren.”
“Colin picked a big booger with his finger and chased us around the playground with it.”
“I did not!” exclaimed Colin as he jumped up. Familiar with his malfeasance for years, I wasn’t surprised in the slightest. I say GUILTY!
“Yes you DID!” responded Sophie, amazingly loud for her in a group. Apparently she was among the tormented that afternoon and was not going to go quietly into that boogered night
“Colin, did you…”
“OK, yeah, I kind of did. Sorry. But they deserved it.” He admitted with a twisted smile, knowing his word had no chance against three little girls.
I don’t know how it came to be called “The Agenda,” but it’s been around at least since Sophie was in first grade. A word that came to be known, campus-wide, as the official airing of grievances at the elementary level. Lilah is deep in it now in her own 2nd grade class, but there is no more mano a mano catharsis. Now it all lives in a special book. Still hilarious and cute, but different. The face-to-face injustice seminar was gone now, due to the high volume of complaints and lack of time, with the intense academic regimen 2nd grade now commanded. The volume was read a few times a week, and the complainants were anonymous, which took much of the teeth out of the telling and also allowed for pencil rage. Entertaining as all hell, still, but lacking the ensuing grace provided by the face-to-face encounter. And written in broken, sloppy, 2nd grade crayon and pencil.
“Connor acidently farted in Maya’s face and she yelled at him and he got in troble even tho it was a acident.”
“I kept calling this kid by the wrong name cuz I’m new and he looks like enother boy in the class and he said you keep kalling me a name so now I’m gonna call you one. Dummy!”
“Lilah wrote me in the agenda.”
Perhaps that’s what doomed the agenda that now lays hidden. Volume 5 was the last one issued. Writing people in the agenda because they wrote you in the agenda. A Kafkaesque nightmare, shrunken down to 2nd grade complaints.
In the end, it is so much better to have it out then and there. The agenda doesn’t belong in a text, on the shelf, bouncing around in our head and hearts. Another’s wrongs seething and boiling in the back of our mind unchecked. Right away, at the end of the day, it belongs on the carpet.
You called me a name. I’m sorry. You hurt me. So did you. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. You farted in my face and it made me mad and nauseous. I’m sorry, it was an accident, I had too much cheese. My parents are waiting, I gotta go. Sorry.
Beware The Agenda. Long Live the Agenda.
This is a beautiful, poignant narrative. Well done, Matt!