Bad To The Bone

Clairelight's excellent post mentioned something rebellious she did at age ten. It reminded me of all the rebellious things I did as a kid, and how narrowly I often escaped real punishment. I wasn't a bad kid— I've just always been mature for my age, and I've always had an acute, innate hatred of injustice, so as a child these things often led me into trouble, either because I shocked adults with my insistence on doing things the right way or because I refused to do things just because grown-ups told me to. An incomplete list:

Grade: Kindergarten
Punishment: Staying after school
Infraction: Teaching the other kids about where they came from— and it didn’t involve a stork, either. I’d recently gotten a new baby sister, and between Big Sister classes, my own research at the library, and my mother’s no-nonsense approach to parenting, I’d learned that, well, when a man and a woman love each other very much…

Grade: 1st
Punishment: No recess
Infraction: Running away and hiding in the bushes outside the school. I never liked being told what to do even by my mother, so when strange people started trying to boss me around, I was so over elementary school.

Grade: 1st
Punishment: Serious teacher talk
Infraction: Having boyfriends. My teacher, disturbed by my propensity to hold hands with boys, force them to buy me gifts, and insist that they kiss my hand at recess, my teacher told me sternly that “age six is too young to have a boyfriend. Do you know what having a boyfriend even means?” When I managed to prove to her that I did in fact know what it meant, she became irate, telling me that I was forbidden to hold hands with a single boy at my desk. I responded by holding the hands of TWO boys at the same time. Needless to say, she was not amused.

Grade: 1st
Punishment: Banishment to another classroom during reading time.
Infraction: Shouting out the reading word of the day right after the teacher wrote it on the board. My school used phonics to teach reading, and so every day the teacher would write a word on the board and then we all had to sound it out with her until we could read what it said. I had learned how to read around age 3, though, so I enjoyed making my teacher angry by yelling out whatever the word was she was trying to get the other kids to learn.

Grade: 2nd
Punishment: Staying after school to clean the chalkboards
Infraction: Referring to a particularly mean teacher as “a witch.” Silly grow-ups thought I was euphemizing the word “bitch,” but no, I really thought that she was a witch. She had a crooked nose and a large wart on her cheek.

Grade: 2nd
Punishment:  Staying after school
Infraction: Refusing to sing the proper words to “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” in choir class, and instead inserting the word “girl,” as I thought it was silly to sing about being a boy if I wasn’t one. They never did get me to sing it correctly, and I proudly belted out “girl” at the spring concert that year, much to the music teacher’s chagrin.

Grade: 3rd
Punishment: A stern talking-to
Infraction: Writing an angry letter to the President. In class we were supposed to write letters to President Clinton, and I think my teacher kind of expected us to write things like “Do you like the White House?” and “You are a very nice President.” Instead, I wrote a three-page diatribe on the United States’ treatment of civil unrest in Serbia. Go figure.

Grade: 5th
Punishment: After considering suspension, the principal let me off with a demerit.
Infraction: Telling my art teacher to go f**k himself. I was the smallest kid in the entire school, and he was constantly making cracks about my height, calling me a “shrimp,” a “dwarf,” and a “midget.” Consequently, he got what he deserved, the bastard.

Do you have any stories of rebellion from your childhood? Post them here!