The Lake is Calm

My high school principal just died. It's a strange feeling when someone you once spent a lot of time with but haven't thought about in decades dies. I spent some time reading the outpouring of grief in the commentary section of the press release and become confused. After pages and pages of "he was always there for me" and "I've never known someone more supportive of kids" and the like, I had to return to the article to make sure we were talking about the same person. That didn't describe the Doctor Alexander I knew at all. The Dr. Alexander I knew was a jerk.

Please keep reading. It's going to end nice. I promise.

Seriously? That was my first thought. I don't remember endless support of students. The Laurens High School of my day was a relic that I hope to all the higher deities no longer exists, even in the South. Dr. Alexander ran a school with the idea that adults were smart and kids were dumb and the amount they talked should match that philosophy. He oversaw his kingdom where segregation wasn't the focus, but wasn't a distant memory by any stretch of the imagination.

I remembered the day a whole bunch of us were caught skipping school and dragged back. I remembered that many kids got suspended while my parents weren't even called. I remembered in school suspension being handed out like candy to some, while no teachers even saw the point of asking me for a hall pass. But what I remember the most is the one day I DID get in trouble. Big trouble. Trouble that would reverberate throughout our town for what seemed like a long time in my 16 year old psyche.

To give background: I went to high school from the fall of 1986 until the Spring of 1990. For most of that time, I was heavily involved with my school newspaper. Those were the years when the Supreme Court ruled that student journalists did NOT have a free press, even if they paid for 100% of their newspaper production costs.

Here's the case: 
http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=2391207692241045857&q=hazelwood+v.+kuhlmeier&hl=en&as_sdt=2,30&as_vis=1

Here's the Cliff Notes version:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazelwood_v._Kuhlmeier

I was proud of my work on the school newspaper. I might have wound up on the staff because scuffles with a terrible band director (that's a whole different post) left me searching for Fine Arts credits, but from the moment I stepped in the door, I was home. The staff became my best friends, and the whole process probably turned me from a Queen Bee to more of a Floater (granted, with QB tendencies). We did good work, for scholastic journalists.

The Big Problem came because of an article I wrote on some of my fellow students who were being beaten by their parents (don't worry. I said I would take your names to my grave. I will take your names to my grave). This was the first time I had a meeting in Dr. Alexander's office. He told me I wasn't a good writer, and I lacked sensitivity in handling difficult matters. He threatened to suspend me if I didn't give all the names so he could contact their parents (seriously?). Long story short, I was put on notice. Everything I even thought about writing was going through the filter. He threw the Supreme Court case in my face with more glee than I think is becoming in an adult even now.

That article had already been printed, and it eventually won an award as the best feature story from any school newspaper that year. Seriously. It wasn't just me.

Something about that meeting sparked something in me. I became better read on that court case and other legal cases involving student rights than probably anyone in SC at the time (it was the days before Google: cut me some slack).

Thinking about all of this this morning sparked something else. I remember walking out of that office knowing my life was turning a corner. At that moment, I stopped believing people who were older than me necessarily knew more than me. Dr. Alexander was wrong. He used his position and his authority to say hurtful untrue things in order to get his way, but I had held my ground and defended my principles. I was determined at that moment to be more than almost all the people in my tiny town dreamed of being.

I'm aware that when famous people write things like this, it packs a heavier punch.

But I also got to thinking about how one 15 minute meeting turned me from a fairly apathetic and miserable kid stuck in a town she hated into a young woman with an increased sense of compassion for others (who would reveal the names of people who had shared their heartbreaking stories, especially knowing it would mean they were ratted out?) and a finely honed sense of the lack of justice in the world and the importance of working against that injustice. I like to think these are the principles that guide me to this day.

I was also reminded of one of my favorite kids' novels, Frindle by Andrew Clements. I won't go into the whole plot, but, in the end of the novel, the hero, now a college graduate, receives a letter from the villain of the story, his 5th grade teacher. She writes the letter when he is in 5th grade, and makes the hero sign the envelope without reading the letter so that he will know she had written it when the story unfolds. In it, she explains that she has always known she had to be the villain. That sometimes, to become great, a hero needs a nemesis. She says we must all accept our role in the journey of those around us.

I don't know if Dr. Alexander knew the role he was playing. I read the pages of support for him and his time as principal, and I think maybe he did. Maybe he saw me as I was: a kind of bratty, self-involved teenager who desperately needed something to believe in and something to show her a larger purpose. As a teacher now, I know that both the punishment AND the accolades often have to be adapted to best suit the individual child. I'd like to believe he knew showing me injustice would make me want to battle it wherever I saw it.

No matter what, that's what he did, and I thank him for it.

Farewell, Dr. Alexander. You played your role well, no matter what it was, and I thank you for playing it.

"But time is our friend as well as our enemy. In that great sea of memory, time collapses and we are all together in that place where time doesn't exist. We can be quiet and see our worlds collide. The old become young again; the children grow up and have new children. The dead return to hike and fish. Our grandchildren go crawling into the laps of our great-grandparents. We are all at the table. We can see everything. We can talk to one another. The lake is calm."

                --Mary Pipher