Selling Is Bad?

“It has come to our attention that an alarming amount of students haven’t been eating anything at school for the past few weeks now because they are giving their lunch money to your son” said my 4th grade teacher to my mother in a disciplinary parent/teacher conference.

In 1989, that was all the information that my mom needed to be sure I was committing a crime, so she began scolding me immediately, which normally would have been the purpose of this kind of meeting, but the teacher interrupted her “no, no, he’s not stealing it, they’re paying him.” Again the scolding began for selling what undoubtedly had to be some sort of contraband, but the teacher interrupted her again “no, no, he’s not selling anything illegal or stolen”.

At this point my mom was out of incriminating assumptions that matched her experience of my antics and she was getting confused “He can’t be bullying them, can he?” and again the teacher said “nothing like that.”

My mom was trying her hardest, but the teacher wasn’t letting her play her role of the punishing parent in this cruel game of cat and mouse. She just needed to know what she was supposed to be mad at me for, and so she finally snapped “well then what? WHAT is he doing?!” The teacher was unsurprised by my mom’s frustration and blankly responded…

“He’s selling his drawings.”

I had already been in my fair share of parent/teacher conferences by that time, and to be fair to my mom, she was more upset about being called in and embarrassed in front of teachers, some of which were personal friends of hers, to discuss my behavior on such a regular basis, than any of the things I was doing. I knew the drill: say nothing, other than mumbling “yes ma’am” or “no sir”, while keeping your eyes down in an act of shame, which I had learned in my previous sentencings was the only way adults would ever believe you were remorseful. If you didn’t appear to think you were a bad person for your trangression then the meeting would never end and sometimes even lead to additional meetings to address your problems with authority. But enough about the 80’s. The point is we all knew why we were there and everyone, including me, would usually play our roles accordingly, but this meeting was different, and it felt good.

It wasn’t that the two authorities in the room weren’t upset, they were. But their uncertainty and discomfort with the ambiguity of what exactly they were upset at was fascinating and titillating. And I had caused it! I had never felt so powerful, not even from making all that money off my classmates, as I did when I watched these adults wrestle between their emotions and beliefs.

This is America after all, and if all this school isn’t for eventually using what you’ve learned to make a living, then what is it for?

I could have asked them, but as a 4th grader I wasn’t that aware or clever and like all good comebacks it didn’t occur to me until many years later. All I knew for sure was that “grown ups” didn’t understand good and bad any better than me (and I was only nine and a half years old!), so I stopped using them to gauge it, and let me tell you, they did NOT like that.