I taught fourth grade students for a brief moment in time. I loved the principal of the school and she did many things to help me grow as an educator. I had friends at the school and I was lauded for doing a good job with the children but it was not a good fit for me in spite of all of the positives. The basic problems was that nine and ten year children tend to tattle and bicker with one another. Most of such behavior was benign and I was even quite good at tamping such situations down, but after a few years I grew weary of having to constantly put out petty fires. At one point I mentally considered making it a punishable offense to tattle which of course was only a pipe dream rather than a real possibility. Instead I moved on to work with older students who not only did not tend to tattle but worked actively not to let me or any other adults know about their private spats.
It is a childish and immature behavior to constantly accuse others for our shortcomings or to bully other people into bowing to our needs. Sadly there are adults who never seem to outgrow the immature need to portray themselves as martyrs who are constantly harassed by terrible people rather than owning up to their own failures. The blame game in adults too often begets violent abuse that is both psychological and physical. Such people can attempt to lay so much guilt on someone that the accused actually begin to believe that they are the tormentors rather than innocents locked in a toxic relationship.
I still saw a few instances of teenagers who had never matured enough to outgrow their childhood tendencies to blame everyone but themselves for their mistakes. All too often such individuals were violent with their words and ways that they treated the people around them. Sometimes they frightened their own parents or abused their fellow students. They were difficult, often arrogant and difficult to control. As a teacher I would hear about such bullies from frightened students or parents who outlined stories of the cruelty that they imposed on souls that they believed were weak. Most of the time it became obvious that their bravado was actually hiding their own low self esteem by masquerading as being strong and confident . Sadly their horrid behaviors did grave damage to their targets.
Of course I mostly wanted to protect the innocents who were being frightened by a protagonist, but at the same time I understood that the seemingly evil students needed help as well. All too often their behavior was briefly punished and then mostly ignored when they obviously needed deep counseling. Without an intervention I knew that they would simply continue to wreak havoc on others and ultimately on themselves.
I can’t say that I ever discovered how to successfully change a person who was so broken. Perhaps there is some truth to the idea of a bad seed, someone born so psychologically damaged that nothing will help them. Instead I think to this day that there has to be a way to positively change even the most egregious behavior if it is caught early enough to keep it from becoming a lifetime habit.
When I was teaching in that fourth grade setting I had a set of identical twins in my classroom but they were anything but the same. They came the closest to being a real life Cain and Abel that I have ever witnessed. One was shy, hard working, polite and genuinely kind. The other seemed like a young sociopath. He beat up not just other students but his own brother. He stole, lied and was easily angered. His own mother was so afraid of him that she left home one night and never returned. She left a note begging her family not to try to find her because she could no longer take the pressure of dealing with her frightening son.
I suppose that with such situations there has to be a dire collision of nature and nurture creating an individual whose behavior is vile. I don’t know what the father was like but the mother was frightened and weak. I have no idea about all that was actually happening in that family but I learned years later that the violent son eventually crossed a line with the law was doing time in prison. I was not surprised but it still bothered me that he was not given therapy while he was still young in an effort to change the trajectory of his life.
We have so much to do when it comes to discovering how to fix a broken soul. If we never make an effort to help such souls to be better we will have to deal with the kind of bullies who grow up to be criminals or maybe even tyrants who manage to take control of nations. We see these difficult individuals when they are young and all too often look the other way or wash our hands in frustration allowing them to just move them along. Somehow I believe was can do better.
All It Takes Is A Little Love 