When authority becomes power abuse

For some reason, I assume through catalog orders or bills throughout the years, my parents get a few random magazines addressed to me that I never subscribed to.  These have included Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and currently, Cosmopolitan.  My mom puts them in my room, and when I visit, I tear out the smelly perfume strips to sniff and throw away the rest because I have to admit Cosmo isn't really my kind of reading material.  But in the last issue I flipped through while smelling lovely flowery fragrances, there was an article that caught my eye about sex abuse in the gymnastics world.  I did gymnastics when I was a kid for a few years before I chose ballet over it, and I have on-and-off stayed up to date with its competitive world -- so I was surprised to find that the article mentioned an exposé I'd never heard of a few years ago by my home-town paper, the Indianapolis Star, about all the sex abuse occurring in the sport.  Male coaches, trainers, physical therapists and the like were taking advantage of their absolute power (made so absolute by a highly competitive and dangerous discipline where parents tend to push their kids, and those kids are taught that the coach always knows best because winning is what's most important) to molest the young girls, who often were highly isolated, spending hours in the gym after school and rarely having close friends outside of their sport.  I was stunned to read about how prolific the abuse was and how infrequently the young gymnasts were even aware they were being abused or mentioned the odd "training techniques" or "physical therapy treatments" to their parents.

I thought back to my own gymnastics experience, which, unlike in ballet where I had women instructors until high school, was made up entirely of male coaches.  There was absolutely nothing inappropriate about any of those coaches' behaviors.  The only betrayal of trust any of them committed was a substitute coach one day when I was six or seven telling me he'd give me an assist on an element I told him I needed assistance on, and he didn't, resulting in me nearly landing on my head, because, he told me, "I knew you had it."  I refused ever to do any element with him on which I needed spotting again.  But though it was a potentially deadly mistake on his part, I never mentioned it to an adult as being wrong.  That was just how gymnastics was, which was not a small part of why I chose ballet over it.  Still, had an adult in any other job told another adult at work that he would do something and then purposely didn't because he was lying all along, he'd be in trouble.  It's just wrong.  But not when done to a kid.  And kids know that. Adults have the authority to do what they want.

Thinking about my squeaky clean gymnastics experience, however, made me think about another adult teacher who was both inappropriate (with the "cool girls," of which I was certainly not one) and a bully (to me).  Let's call him Mr. West.  Mr. West was the only teacher I've ever had whom I would call deliberately cruel.  He was the subject of a rather vicious indictment tangent in a post about bullying that I never posted.  But I figured it's time for him to get his moment on this page now.  Because there might be other Mr. Wests out there, and I really hope that if there are, they get held to the same standard any child bully would.  Because being an adult doesn't make it okay.  Being an adult makes it worse.

 

Mr. West was my fifth grade gym teacher.  I think he was in his mid 20s when he was my teacher.  And he flirted with all the popular girls (we're talking about ten-year-olds).  Gym class would start late after we changed into our uniforms because he'd be sitting on the benches flirting with them and teasing them.  He was a swimmer and shaved his legs, and he'd stretch them out and show his smooth legs to his gaggle of ten-year-old favorites, running his hands down his legs and then letting the girls run their hands down his legs too as they giggled and teased him for shaving.  Give you the creeps reading this?  Yeah, me too.  He also bullied the nerdy kids, assuming we couldn't be athletic because we were academic.  He was the reason that when we did timed sprints to place us in competitive heats for field day, I had to go in a slower heat than the one I tested into because he assumed it was a mistake (On field day, I outran the rest of my heat by about a second).  He always singled the "nerds" out in gym class, making the distinction clear between us and the rest of the kids, so if there was any chance that the cool kids might have passed us the ball, that was quickly squashed by his automatically grouping us like we were athletic dunces.  His mother was a ballet teacher and had a small ballet ensemble, and when they came to perform at our school, he used his daily flirt time with the popular girls by making fun of dancers.  He put his hands up in the classic "mocking ballerinas" pose and twirled and said, "Can you believe my mom thinks they're actually athletes?!" while cracking up at his antics mocking them.  "She says it takes strength to do what they do.  She says it's as hard as any sport!" he exclaimed, in stitches now at how funny that thought was and how silly ballerinas are. 

 

Mr. West didn't limit his mocking to groups of students or disciplines, either.  Despite being extremely athletic (aside from ballet, gymnastics, ice skating, roller blading, and regular bike rides, I was also the girl who played soccer with my mom on the sidelines during my brother's practices and used my dad's Huskies basketball with our hoop regularly), I hated gym class at school, especially in the fifth grade.  I never got to do anything, and it was essentially forty minutes of teacher-sanctioned-and-encouraged bullying.  So I got nervous changing into my uniform before gym every day and one day in the middle of the school year simply forgot my locker combination.  It went up in mid air.  I racked my brain trying to remember the combination I'd been using twice a day since the school year started, but I couldn't come up with it.  Eventually I had to go tell Mr. West.  I'd like to think that most teachers would respond by quietly going to the office to look it up without making a big deal about it.  Not Mr. West.  No, Mr. West had to exclaim loudly in front of everyone with a a laugh, "You forgot your locker combination?!  How does that happen?!  How does someone do that?!  Haven't you been putting it in every day?  You must know it," making me repeat that I couldn't remember it.  By now everyone was looking, encouraged to smile and laugh by his own laughing at me.  He made a few more laughing exclamations of disbelief to ensure my face was beet red before making a show of going to the office to look it up.

 

That school encouraged a bullying culture in general, especially against the "nerdy" kids, and my brother and I left at the end of that year, but there was no individual teacher I thought was intentionally worse than Mr. West.  He was a disgrace to the teaching profession and to the authority and leadership of adults.  He's now teaching Advanced English at a respected high school.  Makes sense for a teacher who bullies the academically-focused kids, right? 

 

Talking with my mom about Mr. West after I read the Cosmo article a couple weeks ago, I realized I had never mentioned the whole flirting/leg-caressing thing to her.  My mom was of course appalled, and I suspect that if I'd told her about Mr. West at the time, he might now be washing cars or delivering pizzas someplace.

It's a tricky line to walk teaching a child the discipline and respect they need to learn (of which I have seen far too little in my work in NYC public schools) while also teaching them to respect that queasy, questioning feeling they get in the pit of their stomach when they feel something isn't right -- even if that something is an adult they've been taught to respect.  I was in a ballet class last week where there was a young, adult woman who had no business being in that class.  She didn't know proper ballet etiquette, couldn't remember the combinations, and was not only putting herself at risk for injury but also getting in the way of others.  The teacher came down quite hard on her in class in front of the other students, and the young woman clearly thought it was undeserved, that she had a right to be there, and that it was the teacher who was out of line -- though the teacher was totally in the right.   Several months ago I was in a different ballet class where a different teacher was berating an adult woman, giving no attention or corrections to any other student.  The corrections he gave to the young woman were in no way constructive -- they were emotionally abusive and designed to make her feel small.  She took them like it was just par for the course, though he was completely and totally out of line and inappropriate.  How can we teach children to distinguish correct use of authority from abusive use of authority when even adults have trouble with it sometimes?  I know there is no simple solution to this problem -- but hopefully there is, with a lot of care, a right one.