Miss Behaviour

At Monkey's school they have a traffic-light system for discipline. Everyone starts on green each morning. A small infraction moves you to yellow, and "something awful" (his words) gets you a red light. You can work your way back up the light to green during the day with good behaviour. The children colour smiley faces on a chart in the appropriate shade to bring home and show us how they did, and presumably after a certain number of greens they get a reward, like tickets to buy something in the school "shop".

Yesterday, Monkey brought home his first yellow. This was because, as he explained to me with excitement, he and his friend across the desk came up with a great new game: pencil jousting.

Yes, I can imagine that would get you a yellow, all right. Unlike his friend's mom, who seems to take these things very much to heart (with the result that her son was afraid to tell her about it), I'm sort of, almost, pleased by this development. I think it's a sign that Monkey is really, truly, settling in happily.

Of course, if he comes home with a month's worth of yellows, I might have something to say about it, but for now I'm not worried about him being a Bad Seed. I just said I hoped he'd be back to green today, and he agreed that he hoped so too.

The episode got me thinking about times I remember getting in trouble at school. I was a horrible little goody-two-shoes for the most part, and when something did happen (note my use of the past exculpative) I always got the disappointed look and the pointed, "I thought you were more mature than that," speech from the teacher.

In sixth class, roughly analogous to sixth grade, at 11 going-on 12, and the last year of primary school, a certain level of decorum was expected of us young ladies. (There were no young men at our school, of course. Perish the thought.) Standing at the window en masse, yelling in a clearly derogatory way, as your teacher comes up the path from the staff car park, does not count as decorous behaviour.

Let me back up a bit. Our teacher that year, Miss M__, while a very good teacher, was somewhat arty and farty, airy and fairy, and not blessed with America's-Next-Top-Model-like beauty or svelteness. She was large, bumpy, and anemic looking, with very pale blonde hair and very pale blue eyes. In Ireland in the 80s, it was probably hard to dress what I imagine was a plus-size figure - and I'm talking probably closer to a 20 than a 12 (either UK or US sizing). So Miss M__ favoured knitted skirt suits - she had invested in a selection of them and pretty much rotated them all year. (The Irish climate allows you to do this, with addition or subtraction of warm undergarments as appropriate.) There was the blue one with a wide white stripe, the dark green with red trim, the fireman red, the red and white, and the bright pink with a flouncy skirt. They are seared into the second tier of my memory and it took a few minutes pondering to dredge them back up, but here they are, in their stretchy, elastic-waisted, unforgiving glory.

On the morning in question, around 8.55 am, someone looked out the window of our upper-floor classroom to see that Miss M__ had left her car and was approaching the building. It was a pink flouncy day, evidently. Something possessed us, and within seconds almost all the girls in the room had gathered to observe her progress.

We were children, and children are cruel, and do not stop to think that even adults can have their feelings hurt. Here was a large, unattractive woman with blonde flowing locks in a big pink dress, and it occurred to us all simultaneously that she looked like nothing so much as Miss Piggy. In a moment, we were shouting (something, I don't know what, probably nothing witty), and quite possibly belting out the theme tune to The Muppets. We assumed she couldn't hear us through all that thick glass, but, you know, she quite possibly could. Either way, it must have been pretty obvious that we weren't just mentioning in polite undertones that the teacher was approaching and we should probably sit down and read a nice book of poetry.

We all got into trouble for that one, and a lecture on peer pressure to boot. I remember being asked if I, too, had been with the group of girls at the window, and shamefacedly admitting that I had. There may have been a note sent home; there was probably some sort of general punishment. I don't remember that, I just remember feeling that for once, I was one of the ones in trouble instead of one of the ones looking on. In a way, it wasn't so bad.

But don't tell that one to Monkey.