Meeting Raymond
I disliked Raymond* the minute I met him. He was the 10-year-old bully who had beaten up my son, Barrett, on the school playground. Barrett, who was nine, had come home from school in tears. He told me how a scuffle had escalated into an attack by five or six other boys led by Raymond. Barrett had ended up underneath a pile of kids with his arm bent backward.
The next day I walked Barrett to school. We found Raymond in a corner of a classroom doing artwork. He wore a hard and aggressive expression on a pinched little face. I knew that many of the teachers were uneasy around Raymond. There seemed to be a tacit agreement to stay out of his way and tolerate him until he graduated. He wouldn't listen to them, and any discipline doled out was usually nothing more than tentative talks or time sitting in the hall.
"Raymond," I said firmly, "I'd like to speak to you about what happened yesterday out on the playground." Colouring furiously, he turned his back on me. I walked around to face him. "What you did was wrong, Raymond," I continued, trying to remain calm. "You could have broken Barrett's arm. If that kind of thing ever happens again, I'll be visiting your parents to discuss it."
Raymond grabbed his artwork, leaped to his feet and headed for the door. "You can't tell me what to do!" he shouted, then chanted "No one can! No one can! No one can!"
In disbelief, I looked over at the teacher, Mrs. Berg*, who still sat at her desk and made no attempt to keep Raymond in the classroom. Judging by her helpless expression, matters concerning Raymond were beyond her control. When we followed him out to the hall, she confessed that no one knew what to do about Raymond. "He can't handle confrontation of any sort. If he behaves inappropriately, we have to approach him carefully and discuss it in a roundabout way. If we accuse him of anything, he just loses control and storms out of the room."
Another teacher chipped in that Raymond was seeing a counsellor once a week during school hours to help him deal with his traumatic childhood. She wouldn't elaborate, but simply said that Raymond's mother was having so much trouble coping with her own life, her son's behaviour was the least of her worries. As I heard more about Raymond's escapades of nastiness and bullying over the next couple of weeks, I grew even more angry.
But one afternoon Barrett came home from school and told me that Raymond had been asked to read aloud in front of the class. "It was a really easy book, Mom," said Barrett, "but he could hardly read any of it, not even the little words." Right then I knew what to do.
I would teach Raymond to read.
*Names have been changed.
