Here's one for the analyst's couch

When I was in the third grade, we went to live in Cincinnati for a year. The schools in Cincinnati were not as good as those in my little home town, and the year was mostly review for me. My mom had to come down to the school and obtain special dispensation for me to check out books from the fourth-grade "section" of the library.

I was a very shy child, so making friends in a new place for a year was hard, and it wasn't made easier by being ahead of everyone in class, the only kid with security clearance for the fourth-grade library books. It really didn't help that I had a teacher who picked obvious favorites. I would have loved to melt into the back row, but alas - front and center, constantly held up as having the best test scores. (I was happy to keep my mouth shut and my hand down, but I drew the line at intentionally throwing a spelling quiz, dammit.) Nonetheless, I managed to make enough friends, and it was a happy year, most of which I spent exploring the two-acre back yard of our rented house, complete with a creek and a stone bridge and tadpoles and snakes. Snakes!

There was a boy a few doors down who was, I would say, "troubled." A year younger than me, he was in a special ed class, and had behavioral difficulties of some sort. This boy (I'll call him Todd, I don't remember his name) used to bully me on the way to and from school, and I was baffled as to why he had taken such a vigorous dislike to me, although with adult hindsight I can see that it had nothing to do with me personally. This went on for some time, and one day the teacher called me out into the hallway, where I saw Todd and his teacher. My teacher asked if it was true that Todd had been hassling me on the way home from school. Surprised at how she knew this when I had told no one, not even my parents, I nodded.

"Slap him," she said.

I looked at her, stunned. Surely a teacher - two teachers! - were not telling me to hit another child? She repeated herself, explaining that because he had harmed me, I got to hit him. I hesitated, then gave him a light slap across the cheek, ready to turn and run back into the classroom. Harder, she instructed me, slap him harder. I gave him a good whack, and then (as ordered) one more, and it was finally over. He never bothered me again.

I can vividly, vividly recall the shame and guilt I felt at hitting that poor boy across the face, knowing it wasn't right, no matter how mean he'd been. I can honestly say I felt no satisfaction at seeing the fear and humiliation on his face. I remember my confusion - my brain simply couldn't compute, couldn't reconcile the trusted authority figures with the instructions that I knew to be wrong. As an adult, I've told this story to parents, and a few teachers, and they are always dumbstruck. Of course, this was a school that still actively used big wooden paddles for discpline, which was a bit of a throw-back even in my day.

It turned out that two boys in my class - boys I scarely knew - had seen the bullying and reported it to the teacher. Despite the bizarre events set in motion by this act, the act itself demonstrated such decency from a couple of eight-year-old strangers that, to this day, I am astonished and touched to think of it. It's at least as astonishing as the poor judgment of the two teachers. The whole memory, the good and the bad, comes to me from time to time when I think about what we know about right and wrong, and violence, and how we learn it.