Behavior issues in high school and a father’s reaction

Student behavior today is a bit different than when I was in school. Kids would fight occasionally back then. No knives or guns, though. We skipped school, cut study halls, smoked in the bathroom, put tacks on each others’ seats and unscrewed the salt or pepper shakers in the cafeteria so the tops would come off on someone else’s plate. We thought we were cool.

High school had worn on me quickly, and after I’d been there awhile, I’d sit in class dreaming about being anywhere other than where I was. My grades were barely good enough to play basketball and football and keep my parents off my back. I never took a book home and usually did the minimum to get by on assignments and tests. In study halls, I’d read newspapers and try to read the novels I wanted to read, both of which, in my mind, would transport me outside the school to where I wanted to be. I’d stay out of trouble as long as a teacher didn’t take a book away from me that wasn’t approved. I remember Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road” was one I lost that way. I had dreams of joining the Marine Corps and seeing the world.

By the second semester of my senior year, I’d been to the principal’s office so many times that my father had to take me to a school board meeting for a hearing about my behavior. The principal started telling him about me skipping school, cutting study halls and being a bad influence on a couple of other kids who were always in trouble for something.

Image: Phil Roeder

“Now don’t start blaming him for what other kids do,” my father said, interrupting the principal. “I know how he is and will deal with that. You’re not tellin’ me a thing about him. But I don’t want him takin’ the blame for some other parents’ kids. That’s their problem.”

And my father did take care of me when I got in trouble at school. The board suspended me for three days, so I went home looking forward to some time off. But that changed the next morning when my father came to the bedroom door and told me to get up.

“I don’t have to go to school today,” I said and started to roll over and go back to sleep.

“No, you don’t have to go to school for the next three days,” he said quietly. “But you’re goin’ to be cuttin’ brush in a fence row.”

“But it’s only six o’clock,” I said.

“Your mother is cookin’ breakfast, packin’ a pail, an’ fillin’ the water jug,” he said. “Get out of bed now. We’ll eat breakfast, an’ I’ll take you by the fence row an’ come back for you at five o’clock. I’m haulin’ lime all day.”

So I crawled out of bed, ate breakfast and we headed to the fence row. When my father let me out of the truck, I took the pail and the water jug. He tossed the ax across the ditch into the field and said, “You keep at it until I come to pick you up. I’ve cut a lot of fence row in my time an’ know how much a feller should be able to do in a day. You’d better keep at it or you’ll wish you had. Just stack the sprouts up, an’ we’ll burn ’em later.”

That’s the way it went for the next three days. I was so tired when I got home each day that I ate a little supper and headed off to bed. By the end of the third day, I was ready to go back to school and try to get by until I graduated. I was ready for that, too. Anything was better than spending the day all by myself and cutting sprouts in a fence row.

I quit the basketball team, had to sit in the back of all my classes away from everybody else, was given double assignments, sat in an empty room for study halls and had to eat lunch with the principal. My grades improved dramatically. I made the honor roll the first quarter, high honors the second quarter and graduated on time. Not all of my friends had gotten that far.

The help and discipline I received from my father and my mother helped improve my behavior. I graduated and joined the Marine Corps that summer.  I wasn’t perfect, but I was ready to take on some more responsibility.

I’ll never forget what my father said with a grin as he was gassing up his truck to take a load of cattle to Indianapolis the day before I was leaving for boot camp. “I’d like to be a mouse in your pocket for the next three months,” he said when he shook my hand.