A Little Payback

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Mrs. Sigaty, my 4th grade teacher, was my favorite. Having endured Mrs. Paulson’s nebulous presence in second grade, and having survived Mrs. Jensen’s personal vendettas in third grade, I felt like Mrs. Sigaty was pretty much the coolest lady ever. She simply didn’t carry the weight of 25+ years of teaching and South Dakota meals as my previous teachers.

Every week Mrs. Sigaty would scrawl a kid’s name in calligraphy on a piece of construction paper, and everyone else in the class would write two nice things about him or her. The trick was, you had to come up with something that was particular to the kid – you couldn’t just write “I like your shirt” or something like that; you had to be specific. It was a very efficient and clever way of making even the farm kids feel liked.

Now, I wasn’t a bad or mean-spirited child by any stretch of the imagination, but I learned early on to solve problems creatively. In this case, I didn’t really feel like coming up with something new and nice to say about every damn kid in the class. I simply didn’t have the energy for that, but try telling that to Mrs. Sigaty. What was needed here, I realized, was a line to write that was nice enough to make the kid believe I’d thought about it, but also vague enough to be true for everyone. Since chances were slim that my classmates would actually compare these things with each other, I could just use that line for everyone and call it good.

Thus the phrase “You don’t brag and you’re easy to get along with” was born.

I must have written that on at least 15 classmates’ papers before my turn came up. That Friday I got home and read over the sheet, hungry for compliments. I read that thing over and over; top to bottom; bottom to top; only the girls; only the boys; the whole thing one more time. As I did, my stomach lurched.

My classmates had read my soul. One said he liked my stories. Another said she liked my drawings. Another said he liked how I was always nice to him in the lunch line. And on, and on, and on. Every one of those kids had done exactly like Mrs. Sigaty had asked; they’d given some thought to their classmate and written what they truly, genuinely liked about him. And I hadn’t. For all of those kids before me, I hadn’t.

———-

Fast forward 25 years. My 10th graders are learning about the forces that shape our identities, and for the introductory lesson I had them all draw their personal crests. I handed them the outline of a coat of arms; they filled it in with designs that represent how they view themselves. The next step was to sit in a big semi-circle and – you guessed it – pass the sheets around so they could write two nice things about each other.

In the process of explaining why it was important to look at how we see ourselves and how others see us, I told the story from 4th grade.

“Folks, whatever you do, don’t write something shallow and lame. Make sure it’s meaningful and genuine,” I said. “That phrase I wrote in 4th grade has stuck with me all of these years, and it totally sucks that I was shallow and lame.”

Being nice was really hard for some of the kids, and in fact some of them simply couldn’t do it – when was the last time you asked a 15 year old to say something genuinely nice about his best friend? – but overall it went pretty well. As we were winding down for the day one of the students piped up.

“Mr. P., are you going to pass your sheet around?” T. is a band kid and a really funny guy.

I’d been working on a coat of arms, too, but hadn’t spent too much time on it. I’d only drawn my last name and a soccer ball; I’m still trying to come up with some badass-sounding Latin phrase that sums me up.

“Well, I can, but I haven’t been writing on yours,” I said.

“No, but you give us all birthday cards and you write stuff in those,” he replied.

Fair enough, I thought. I gave him my sheet and started picking up the room as they passed it around the circle, giggling a little more than usual. The bell rang as the last kid wrote his note to me, and he slipped it onto my podium on his way out.

I flipped it over, eager to read something – anything – nice about me and my hard work and how awesome my classes are. Written over and over again, by the smart kids and the slower ones, by the nice ones and the hard ones, by the brains, jocks, and metal heads, was:

“You don’t brag and you’re easy to get along with.”

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