It’s that time of year again. Students are realizing that high school is not easy, but that their grades often do matter. That is, if their grades are not up to a certain standard of performance, some adult — parent, teacher, coach, administrator, probation officer — will make their lives uncomfortable until the situation is remedied. Understandably, most are not exactly thrilled with this revelation.
Some deal with it and move on. Some lash out, haphazardly, in any way they can. And some test deliberately, methodically, to watch how we react.
It’s a little like this [note: gore]:
Only, you know, with more surreptitious cell phone use and less raw meat.
So I was not surprised to have a student hand me an in-class essay that was one and a half sentences long. Nor was I surprised that, in the fifty minute class period allotted to him to write, he used approximately ten of them — and most of that finding and sharpening his pencil.
Similarly, I expect he was not surprised when I took it, read it, handed it back, and quietly said, “I expect your best work. This is not it.”
It did not surprise me when he slowly slid the paper across the desk toward him. “You don’t have to be such a bitch about it.”
That got me a little, I admit. I don’t think a student has called me “bitch” to my face since my first or maybe second year of teaching.
Now. It doesn’t bother me that a single student called me a bitch. My adolescent years were full of more than their share of impulsive and ill-advised comments, most of which I would regret if I heard myself say them today.
It does bother me, however, that he has this cultural silencing technique available to him. Because even if he cannot yet consciously call upon or manipulate this phenomenon, it is clearly not the first time he’s encountered it.
It bothers me because it indicates that a woman has not been properly subservient, properly deferential to the wants and needs and poor little fee-fees of others. It bothers me because it seeks to shun, shame, and silence a woman with confidence, standards, or opinions.
It bothers me because supposed action — my socially prescribed reaction — is to recoil in horror. To be shocked and shattered that anyone could think such an awful thing of me. And then, of course, to capitulate — or at least compromise. (Conversely, I can shriek and wail like a harpy, lending credence to the epithet.)
It bothers me because, when I mentioned the remark to a colleague (who has the same student in a different class), the colleague’s response was to ask what I’d done that had led to such a response. Even though I’m sure they didn’t intend it, the implication was an assumption that my behavior was out of line.
Bitch bothers me because it is too often insidious and too often a threat.
“Regardless of whether you dislike what I say, that’s not an okay name to call me,” I told the student after I asked him out into the hallway. “It doesn’t make my request unreasonable. And it will not keep me from making it.”