Crime & Punishment

In which I try my hand at being a hard-ass principal

One Monday I woke up early and put on a necktie, something I hadn’t done since I’d interviewed for this principal job a year and a half earlier. Standing in front of the mirror, I pushed the knot up tight against my neck, into my Adam’s apple, and looked at myself head on. De Niro style. Time to roll some middle school heads.

In the kitchen, I drank my coffee black, standing up. Things had been getting out of hand at my school, a group of 8^th graders had slowly taken over the floor, walking out of classes, cussing with impunity, congregating in the bathroom. Teacher morale was low. Parents were asking questions. The administrative team and I had reached the depressing conclusion that our idealistic, progressive approach to discipline had failed. It was time to go nuclear. Starting Monday—today—any cussing, disrespect or bathroom loitering would be met with the worst punishment you can mete out on a 13-year-old human being: After School Detention.

It fell on me to implement this new regime: Judge, jury and executioner. A hard-ass, necktie-clad principal. Me.

I finished my coffee, left the cup dirty in the sink, stepped into the carport and, having no other viable option, began riding my green bike to work. An early blow to my confidence—hard-ass principals do not bike to school—but I did my best to hide my typical bike-riding giddiness (“Look, Dad! No training wheels!”) and tore through the city with panache, taking up the whole damn lane, my necktie whipping dangerously behind me.

Outside the building, I locked my bike up then strode inside, where—in another hit to my strongman veneer—I had to punch in at the iPad sign-in station. A teacher approach, excited about the new regime. “We got this,” she said. I nodded, silent and strong. Rode the elevator up to third floor, ducked into the bathroom to tighten up my tie, considered doing those confidence poses I had seen on a TEDtalk, decided against it, and walked out of the bathroom and into the worst six weeks of my career.

It fell on me to implement this new regime: Judge, jury and executioner. A hard-ass, necktie-clad principal. Me.

I could share any number of stories from that period in my career—the kid who called 911 to report child labor when we told her to clean desks; the bitterness of being audibly booed by the students when leading an assembly—but the emblematic moment came a few weeks in, during a mid-afternoon patrol, when I came across an 8^th grader in the hallway, just outside the bathroom. He held no hall pass.

This was not any old 8th grader, but one of the chief instigators of the chaos, determined to use his prodigious imagination and intellect to tear down the school and any rule-respecting classmates. Before the new regime, I’d tried to handle him with compassion—he was a child, after all, and had his own demons—but since we’d started doling out detentions, the thread of our relationship had frayed, and then snapped. Already he and I had suffered through a few detentions together, he complaining constantly, me patiently ignoring him, joined in our misery.

Now, met in the hallway, he glared at me.

I asked him if he had a pass.

He said he didn’t.

I asked if he knew what that meant.

He said he did.

We stood face to face, six feet apart, hard-ass principal versus misbehaving kid. Goliath versus David. Darth Vader versus Luke. Hatred coursed between us, electric. I took a breath and was about to officially assign him his After School Detention, when out of the bathroom behind him came a slight 4th grade boy, shaking his hands dry.

The 4th grader looked at me, looked at the kid, then put his head down and tried to get the hell out of there, but the 8^th grader grabbed him by the shoulders. He leaned in close to the startled child and pointed at me, the way a father points out an animal in the zoo.  “You want to see a prick?” he said, not unkindly. “There’s a prick.”

The 4^th graders eyes went wide, perhaps stunned by the brashness of the 8^th grader, perhaps surprised to learn that a prick looks like a middle-aged white guy in a necktie. Beside him, the 8^th grader smiled up at me, his arm draped lovingly over his protege’s shoulders.

Now, you tell me, what should I have done? How does a 45-year-old man, a good guy who loves working with children, once a beloved English teacher and coach, a well-intentioned, law-abiding citizen whose only sin was that he wanted to Fix Education & Save the World—how should a man like that respond to a moment like this?

In the hallway I stood, the kid smiling up at me, the fourth grader waiting, the knot of that necktie pushing harder and harder into my Adam’s Apple, making it hard to breathe, and all but impossible to swallow.