i learned i had to kill them myself.

Everybody who read The Jungle Book knows that Riki Tiki Tavi's a mongoose who killed snakes.
When I was a young man,
I was led to believe there were organizations to kill-a my snakes for me,
i.e. the church, i.e. the government, i.e. the school.
But when I got a bit older,
I learned I had to kill them myself.

-Donovan, "Riki Tiki Tavi"

The first week of school is one alternately filled with excitement and boredom. There's all the newness, and there's all the orientation. New teacher! New forms to fill out. New classmates! New syllabi to cover. New school supplies! New speech about attendance that doesn't really seem all that new somehow.

You get the idea.

During my first week of the third grade, my teacher Mrs. Allen gave a speech that I had not heard before. It was a long speech, as I think she was trying really hard to communicate a point to us, but didn't have the right words. As it is, I didn't even get it until recently.

The basic point of Mrs. Allen's speech is that we were allowed to punch each other in the face.

Of course, there was quite a bit more to the speech, like I said, which was her clarifying why she said we could clock classmates so she wouldn't get a lot of calls from angry parents. She explained that despite our forward and enlightened thinking in modern twentieth century society, sometimes, there are bullies. And sometimes, after rhetoric and good sense and tattling have failed us, what a bully needs is a good right hook to the jaw. Then she told us that if any of us gave a bully what he needed, she would punish us to the full extent of the elementary school law. Principal's office, note home, suspension, whatever it was that happened to kids for fighting in the third grade.

My understanding of the speech at the time was that she used to get picked on as a kid, so if we did end up giving some kid what was coming to him, she would secretly give us a high-five as she escorted us to the principal's office. I remember being confused about the whole thing, wondering how someone could condone and not condone an action at the same time. Of course, I didn't yet know the word "condone," so my thinking was probably even more muddled.

I've since decided that Mrs. Allen's speech was really about consequences. There are several messages that I've gleaned here. One, we all have the ability to do anything allowed by physics without anyone really stopping us, but there are consequences for all actions. Two, sometimes the establishment cannot protect you, and you must kill your own snakes, for which act, the establishment may even punish you. Three, sometimes the consequences for breaking a rule are preferable to not breaking the rule. In short, Mrs. Allen was telling us that sometimes you have to stick it to The Man.

Now this all seems to be a rather adult message, and though I agree with all of it, it still seems pretty radical to tell third graders to think about rules in this way, i.e. that they might need a good breaking. If I were my mother, I would've called up and voiced some concern, at which point, Mrs. Allen would have said, "Don't worry, Sandra won't really get this for another ten years or so." I don't think we were ready for it, but maybe she was hoping that at least one of us would file it away in the back of her mind to bring out every once in a while and poke at it before finally understanding and writing a blog about it. Considering blogs hadn't even been invented yet, Mrs. Allen was impressively ahead of her time.