The silence after “Bro, fuck off”

What gets decided in the few seconds when a teacher doesn’t answer

First day of lessons with a first-year class. We are still taking each other’s measure: I don’t know their names, they don’t know who I am.

A girl is sitting with her back to me. I ask her, kindly, to turn round and not to stay facing away while we’re having the lesson.

“Bro, fuck off.”

For those who don’t spend their mornings in school corridors: “bro” comes from “brother”. Among teenagers it’s a familiar way of addressing each other, almost a verbal tic. Aimed at a teacher you’ve only just met, and followed by those two words, it becomes something else. It closes the distance and strikes at it in the same moment.

I didn’t answer straight away. I stayed silent for a few seconds.

It is those seconds I’d like to write about.

A sentence said in front of everyone

An insult received one to one can sometimes be allowed to drop. In front of a class it’s different, because a class is an audience, and an audience waits. A sentence like that seems to demand an answer, and to demand it at once.

At moments like this, the possible responses all present themselves together. Raising your voice. Answering back, perhaps with a quip that brings the class back onto the adult’s side. Opening the register and writing a disciplinary note. Calling someone.

None of them is absurd. Some, in other situations, are the right ones. But they have one thing in common: they arrive before you have looked.

What I looked at

In those seconds I watched her, and I watched the class.

I won’t try to describe their faces. I know how memory, in stories like this one, tends to arrange the details in favour of whoever is telling them, and I don’t want to turn her classmates into a chorus that proves me right.

What I can say is what I was trying to understand. Whether that sentence was aimed at me or at the others. Whether it had slipped out or had been ready for a long time. Whether behind it there was anger, fear, boredom, or a kind of courage that at that age sometimes looks a great deal like arrogance.

The questions outnumbered the seconds available. The silence wasn’t there to answer them. It was there so as not to answer too soon.

What happens inside

It would be convenient to describe that silence as inner calm. Anyone who teaches knows that, at moments like this, a lot is stirring inside.

An insult is still an insult, even after eighteen years of school and more sentences heard than I could count any longer. The role feels the blow and asks to be defended. And then there is pride, which is less noble than the role and often dresses up as it.

Silence doesn’t remove any of this. At most, it keeps it from speaking for a few seconds.

A silence doesn’t stay empty

There is something else those seconds reminded me of: a silence is never neutral. It is filled by whoever is listening.

For her it could have been coldness, a challenge, a threat, even weakness. For the class, I don’t know. I have no way of knowing how it was read, and the fact that I am writing about it now doesn’t entitle me to decide.

Then I spoke. I asked her, politely, to leave the classroom. As she was going out, I reminded her to take her phone, “so she wouldn’t get bored”.

Of the whole scene, this is the moment I have most doubts about. It can be read as a way of taking the drama out of her leaving, of making it clear that it wasn’t a condemnation. It can also be read as irony. And the irony of someone who has the power to send you out weighs more than the person using it imagines. That remark probably held both.

After ten minutes or so she asked whether she could come back in. I answered, in the same tone, that by now she would be spending the rest of the hour being bored in the corridor, and I offered her a coffee from the vending machines as a peace offering. She turned down the coffee and stayed sitting outside the classroom until the end of the hour.

What a few seconds are worth

I don’t know whether that silence did her any good. Writing about it, I suspect it mostly served me: to keep the first response from being the most instinctive one, to keep that hour from turning into a contest over who could shout the loudest.

It isn’t much. Those seconds made nothing about her clearer and settled nothing. The choices that came afterwards remain open to question, and I question them.

A few seconds don’t decide a relationship. At most, they decide what the other person will hear from you first.

That day, the first thing she heard from me after her insult was nothing.

Even now I can’t say whether it was the best gift I could have given her, or only the most cautious one.

On this blog I write about school from the side of those who spend their mornings there, including the doubts that remain afterwards.

Keep reading: Generations in dialogue.