The Ultimate Authority
This is me when I wrote this in 2021.
I went to a Christian primary school and was a good little student up until the age of 11 when my father died suddenly of heart disease. All of a sudden my life had shifted from a typical suburban family to one filled with grief - indescribable, deep, dark grief. My mother was left with a 16 year old son, 13 year old daughter and little 11 year old me. Together we went through a roller coaster of emotions.
Over the next five years our lives shifted completely, the normality that we had taken for granted forever altered. My brother became a manic depressive with an opioid addiction, my sister became a rebel who was expelled twice and arrested. I shifted from a goody two shoes, to a child with ‘challenging behaviour’. I developed an issue with authority, I hated being told what to do, what to wear, where to go. Everything they told me to do seemed meaningless. I don’t remember consciously noticing the shift, but it is now obvious to me that the death of my father altered my world forever. I was deeply depressed, shoved into a teenage prison system and left to figure life out in a sea of peers who had no idea what I was going through. The five years of grief was all encompassing, it left no room for their bullshit.
I was frequently in trouble, their rules meant nothing to me. Their lessons were essentially meaningless, I was only there to hang out with my friends. It was easy not to go, I probably missed on average one day a week because I just didn’t feel like going. Mum would call me and ask me why I wasn’t at school, “I just missed roll call” I would say, “they marked me away, but I am here”.
My attitude to school can be summed up by my opinion of the school uniform. When I started year 12 the new principal brought in a rule where you couldn’t wear black socks - only white...ugh why? The irrationality and ridiculousness of this still today makes me mad. Who cares what shade socks we wear? How does this impact our education? Even now I just want to say “fuck you, get a grip”. I could understand if they banned bright coloured over the top socks, but black socks? I remember feeling the unfairness of it, why did they take something so little and unimportant away from us? Was it just to remind us that they - the Principal and teaching staff - were the ultimate authority. That they were the ones to decide what we wore, and strip us of any control we did possess.
My life is a paradox. I hate being told what to do, yet I spend 40 hours a week telling 24 ten year olds exactly what to do. Commanding them to be respectful, chastising them if they’re not. It is a strange thing, hating authority while at the same time being the ultimate one. At the beginning of the year I had a boy in my class who can be a little bit disrespectful, rolls his eyes, does minor things that annoys me. I spoke to other teachers about him, they affirm his dad is an asshole, just like him, at least we know where it gets it. I go home essentially thinking what an asshole he is. Then I have a dream I am in his position, I’m back at university and the teacher is telling me to put my hand up. I’m enraged, “we’re adults, why the fuck do we need to put our hands up?” I wake up realising how similar I am to my students, the ones with “challenging behaviour”. The ones who piss me off when I’m in front of the class.
It’s crazy to realise how much power you have as a teacher. The kids have no choice but to do what I say. If they don’t comply I talk to the deputy, then I call their parents, and together we gang up to create a plan to sculpt them into perfect little workers. The power gets to you, there is no doubt about it. Any teacher who denies the power trip you get from telling people what to do all day is either lying or unconscious. It is the Stanford Prison Experiment all over again. It wouldn’t be an issue if we weren’t indoctrinating them into a system designed to weaken them. Especially the boys, always the boys. The creative ones, the movers who can't stand sitting still, being quiet. They’re asked to go against everything that is natural for them. Moving, exploring, hunting, building, running...but we know that, there is ample research exploring the struggles boys have in the contemporary education system. Yet nothing changes, it only gets worse.
