Conflict, Broken Alliances, And The Pains of Intervention

About a week ago, in the car, Ian was recounting to me the much-celebrated saga of yore concerning the Battles of the Sexes in the recess yard of his kindergarten class last year. I say "much-celebrated," because he was filling me in on the drama in real-time in regular installments last year, when the plot was still unfolding.

The gist of this troubling history is that, on a very regular basis, the boys and girls in his classroom would stage partisan combat in the recess yard, where the two warring factions would be distinguished by something as superficial as who had, or didn't have, a Y chromosome, much like the Star-Bellied Sneeches of Meister Seuss's stirring allegory illustrating just the same kind of senseless strife. Some tree-stump was "the castle," and I think there may have been a prison on the school-yard battlefield as well, and the two random batallions.

In any case, one reason why Ian had so much to say about the ongoing civil discord, at the time, was because he was more abjectly swept up into the conflict than anyone else, since, in the middle of the narrative, he had a radical conversion experience and switched camps. He perceived that the "boy" camp had more physical strength (allegedly) than the "girl" camp, which these males were exploiting in their endeavor to prevail, and he felt there was an essential injustice to this arrangement, so he turned coats, and went over to the enemy camp, embracing these exotic estrogen-bearers as his own brothers-in-arms. In spite of his own chromosomal constitution, he fought for the other side, and this made everything much more intense for everyone, but most especially for him.

But there was a nuance to the chronicles that I never knew until a week ago: in the course of all this excitement, presumably because there was some physical struggle of some sort taking place between him and his new adversaries, the teacher apparently stepped in and offered her own "input" as to whether such things should be occurring in the schoolyard.

But the best part of the story was the high-level insight that he provided leading up to the more mundane details of the teacher weighing in on the matter:

"It's not really nice to experience a talk with the teacher."

I think Ian is not completely alone in this perspective.

(January 19, 2011)