The door would not open. After spending most of lunch working to make the plans for this class just a bit more interactive – they were already fine, but I wanted better – I had nipped upstairs to the photocopier before the first bell. A few early birds were arriving as I left, so I called, “Be right back!” as they filed in and I rushed out. And I truly was right back – maybe three minutes had passed and the second bell hadn’t yet sounded when I found myself facing unexpected resistance from my own classroom door. 

This was not good. I (mostly) affectionately call my after-lunch grade 9 class the “Chaos Crew.” I’ve written about them before, most recently because this group of anything-but-work students chose Romeo and Juliet as a better alternative than anything I had planned to teach. It’s a full-inclusion class, so there are only 18 students, but the kids vary widely on every metric you can imagine. At any given moment, a lot is going on. At this moment, someone was preventing me from opening my classroom door.

I announced myself loudly and pushed harder. The door gave suddenly. Two students stumbled back. Others were on their feet. Voices overlapped at various volumes. Amidst the chaos, I registered important information: a student who has been the target of relentless low-level bullying (mostly not in my classroom) and a student who I have suspected since late September as a primary bully had nearly come to blows. I was not impressed.

My teacher-voice was clipped: “Sit. Down.” I addressed the class while pinning the two perpetrators in place with my eyes. The others moved. “Do. Not. Move. From your seats.” They stilled. The push-in support teacher had not yet arrived, but the sheer chaos had alerted my another colleague and she was already at the door, ready to help. “You two. With me.” I turned on my heel and moved towards the door.

“But, Miss, I didn’t do anything,” the whining began. “It was him.”

I had no patience for this nonsense. I whipped around and said, “I didn’t ask if you did anything. I told you to come with me.” The bully complied. The bullied had taken up his defensive stance: threatened, he turns himself into an unmovable mountain and refuses all verbal or eye contact. Unphased, I said to the bully, “With me.”

“But he started it! You can’t just leave him here!” 

“I can and I will. What happens with him is no concern of yours. With me. Now.”

He complied. As we passed my colleague and the support teacher (who had come running), I nodded toward the mountain-child and whispered, “Help him get to the office, too. If he won’t move, call admin.”

The bully spat excuses all the way to the office door. A VP saw us coming, took one look at my face and said, “I’m on it.” As I hurried back to the classroom, I saw the second student coming, escorted by my colleague. He, too, told me that it wasn’t his fault. I ignored him.

In the room, students were tittering and laughing. The minute I walked in, they started defending their friend – the bully. I shut the door firmly and walked to the front. My face must have been tornadic because when they saw me, they all stopped talking. And then I tore a strip off of them. In fact, I tore several strips off of them. I do not remember the last time I have been so angry at a group of students. It might be never. Because, of course, the bullying hadn’t been just this one time. It never is. Last week, five boys had been suspended from their math class (same group of students, alternating days with English class) for their behaviour towards this same child. Two more freely acknowledged that they would have been suspended had they not been in the bathroom or talking to the teacher – aka in trouble. By my count, that means 8 of 18 are actively involved in this ongoing situation. The other 10 are either encouraging this (either 3 or 4, it’s hard to tell), trying to ignore it, or hiding so that they’re not next.

Until Friday I had not seen a single send-to-the-office offence. Once, in late September or early October, I had spoken one-on-one with two students and insisted that they change their behaviour or risk phone calls home. Both boys were vaguely contrite; both were careful not to be caught again. Both, of course, continued. Bullying is wildly frustrating to catch. It’s easy to see a wad of paper land, but much harder to see who threw it. It’s easy to catch the reaction when the targeted child finally lashes out; it’s hard to catch the provocation. I can talk to students one-on-one or in a group, but in the end, they have to change and, in my experience, they rarely do. 

But they might now. To say I was livid on Friday is an understatement. I told them I was ashamed of them, that I was embarrassed to teach them. I told them that this was the very definition of bullying, that people who behave in this way are cruel. I told them that if my child were accused of doing this, my heart would be broken. When ring-leaders claimed that they had done nothing and shouldn’t feel bad, I offered to call parents and invite them in. I said I would happily sit with them while they explained to their parents precisely the kind of nothing they had done. When someone smirked, I reminded them that they were smirking because they were unkind. I said, “after this class, when you laugh in the hallway because ‘Ms Potts went crazy’, I want you to remember that you are laughing because you are unkind.” Again, someone insisted they had nothing to do with this – someone who definitely had a lot to do this. “You’re right,” I said. “You’ve done nothing. I’m sure you’ve never laughed when your friends did this. You’ve said nothing mean or cruel about [your peer]. When your friends behaved badly, you stood up and said, ‘lay off, man – he doesn’t deserve that.” I spoke for maybe three endless minutes, and finished my tirade with this, “Every one of you who is thinking that this is not about you needs to take a long hard look at who you really are because way back in September, you had a choice: you could have chosen to lead with kindness. Any person in this classroom could have said hello, could have offered to help, could even have been polite. You could have led with kindness but not one of you did. Imagine what this class could have been if only you’d made a different choice.”

And then I asked them to open Romeo and Juliet. As you can imagine, they did. One child had tears in their eyes. Slowly, slowly, we made our way through the next scene. I did nothing exciting or interesting with it. We just worked. Twice a student started to lose focus. Twice, I stopped and told them that I was no longer entertaining students’ arguments for their own limitations. The second student sheepishly asked what that meant. I explained that I refused to believe that the students in this class were particularly incapable of learning, that I *knew* they were smart and capable, and that I would spend every minute I had with them until they graduated from high school to insist that they could both learn and be kind. I got a quick nod in reply.

Slowly, over the rest of the class, they decided that Romeo is possibly an idiot (they are not pleased that he starts the play in love with someone who is NOT Juliet), that Paris is “a creep” and that Benvolio might be the coolest of the characters they’ve met so far. At least he seems like fun. 

As they worked, I checked in on some of the students and left some others alone. The student who had been teary simply said, “when you said to imagine the class if we’d been kind, I realized that it could have been beautiful.” By the time class ended, the emotions in the room were mostly cooled. As the students left, some stopped to thank me. A very few stopped to apologize. My co-teacher paused on her way to her next class to congratulate me. Once everyone was gone, I closed the door and cried.