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“I'm German, and I'll kick your ass!”
Turning around from the chalk-board, I found Mark—seventeen years old, six-foot-one and fairly well-built—standing across a table from Sam, glaring at him.
“Try it!” replied Sam, a nice lad, but not one to back down from machismo.
As Mark started around the table, I got in between them, put my hand on Mark's chest, and asked him what was up.
“My dad's German, and people are always saying he's a Nazi!” A slight quiver crept into Mark's voice. This surprised me, for Mark presented himself as one of the most confident bullies in the school.
“I was just saying…,” began Sam unhelpfully, reminding Mark why he had stood up in the first place.
Quickly silencing Sam, I concentrated on Mark, taking him aside and eventually escorting him out of the room to settle down.
If you have ever worked at a high school, you will recognize this as an intense but fairly typical illustration of classroom aggression. It was brief and emotional, flaring up unexpectedly and burning out almost as quickly. At the time, I was working in the San Francisco Bay Area, at an alternative high school established for students who had slipped through the cracks in more traditional educational environments. The students often identified themselves as outcasts or rebels, and they sometimes manifested severe emotional swings in the course of a school day. This experience placed me in a variety of aggressive situations, ranging from frequent verbal criticisms—expressions of the high level of underlying tension in some students—to rare physical fights. My dexterity in responding to those situations depended on many factors, including my ability to predict and understand them. In this case, I clearly could have responded more helpfully; but I had not foreseen the sudden aggression and only wanted to defuse the situation.
When I moved across the country and began teaching undergraduates at a university in central New York, I expected the level of classroom aggression to be substant