47 pages • 1 hour read
Carla ShalabyTroublemakers: Lessons in Freedom from Young Children at School
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Forest School”
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary: “Lucas: On Being Pigeonholed”
Six-year-old Lucas adores Mo Willems’s series of picture books about a pigeon who is constantly told he cannot do things he wants to do. Shalaby suggests that Lucas’s affinity for these books stems from identification: He too has strong likes and dislikes that often bring him into conflict with others. While visiting the school counselor, for example, Lucas becomes attached to a plush toy and responds angrily when the counselor refuses to let him keep it. Lucas’s mother says that Lucas’s personality was evident even in the womb, when he sat on his twin’s neck.
Shalaby attends one of Lucas’s first days in first grade. Though impatient for the teacher, Mrs. Norbert, to begin reading during story time, he quickly grows bored; he fixates on a spot on his pants and then gets up to retrieve a different book. Mrs. Norbert scolds him, and Shalaby herself is surprised that he absorbed so few of the school’s “rules” during kindergarten. Upon reflection, however, she realizes how complex those rules actually are—particularly for a young child.
Lucas also struggles socially because his desires are so all-consuming: “[H]is tendency is to meet his own needs—to sit on other people’s necks” (52). He has a hard time adopting others’ viewpoints, even though his own seem self-evident. Moreover, he tends to take rejection of his interests as rejection of him. His two closest friends are Sam and Stella, but he and Stella consistently compete for Sam’s attention, and Stella is good at winding Lucas up. However, if Lucas is insensitive at times, he also demonstrates empathy and care for friends and family: He comforts a student he accidentally injures through rambunctious play, and he urges his mother (with characteristic bluntness) to accept the death of her own mother. His social skills generally improve over the course of first grade, which Shalaby attributes in part to a few tactful interventions from fellow students, one of whom urges him to make peace with Stella.
In the classroom Lucas entertains himself through highly disruptive jokes and acting out fantasies to momentarily alleviate the tedium of schooling. His wit is often charming—Mrs. Norbert quips, “I can’t help but love him” (64)—and it appeals to other students. Shalaby sees injustice in the fact that those who join him in laughing do not receive the same corrections from teachers, though Lucas often seems unbothered. However, he does have a strong sense of fairness, and his exasperation flares up when he perceives rules as being broken.
Both Mrs. Norbert and Lucas’s mother, Corinne, believe Lucas must learn to adapt. Although Corinne also believes Lucas’s school environment has put him at a disadvantage—she cites the unusually large class size his incoming year—she feels he cannot ultimately expect allowances for his “internal issues.” Shalaby, however, feels that those issues may in large part be a byproduct of the unnatural school environment: “the culture of obedience, conformity, rules, and requirements” (64). Assessments for special education services begin for him in kindergarten, and ADHD medication starts soon after. By the end of first grade, he has absorbed many of the school’s rules, although he continues to “negotiate” with teachers in an effort to fulfill his own desires.
Shalaby reflects that teachers track child development through their ability to draw realistic rather than imaginative artwork. Noting that reality is often unpleasant, she holds out the art of Mo Willems, Lucas’s favorite author, as an example of the rewards of cultivating one’s own inner world.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Analysis
Shalaby’s portrayal of Lucas uses the narrative of his early behavior—“Lucas was the active baby” (43)—to emphasize the importance of understanding children as whole beings. Children are humans whose classroom behaviors express their intrinsic personality, but Shalaby’s core contention is that their needs remain unmet within an overly restrictive education system.
Lucas’s portrait further develops this theme of Imposing Conformity Through Exclusion in School Culture. Lucas persistently attempts to assert his preferences, interests, and needs against the inherently rigid structure of school. The anecdotes with which Shalaby begins the chapter—Lucas’s fondness for Willems, his behavior in utero, etc.—all figuratively establish the stakes of this fight: As Shalaby puts it, Lucas is a child whose interests are unusually “urgent,” so he has particular difficulty subordinating them to those of his teachers. However, Shalaby resists the impulse to understand Lucas’s uniqueness in terms of pathology (ADHD and autism both surface as possible diagnoses). Such diagnoses, she suggests, are often themselves a means of enforcing conformity. She implies that Lucas faces demands to medicate his fiery spirit into a state of obedience not for his own sake but for the sake of those around him, as when she quotes Mrs. Norbert’s comment that she “would not want to see [Lucas] without [medication]” (66).
Shalaby also suggests that Lucas’s difference from other students is more a matter of degree than kind. Her self-avowed surprise at Lucas’s failure to learn school’s norms illustrates how widely and even unconsciously accepted those norms are, yet she goes on to note that they are in fact not merely artificial but actively at odds with the typical temperament of young children: “[School life] require[s] that children—even very young children, whom we know to be active and impatient—wait a whole lot, get denied their own choice of work, get interrupted from their own play” (68). This harkens back to Shalaby’s argument that “troublemakers” like Lucas are akin to canaries signaling dangers to the student body as a whole.
In Shalaby’s telling, much of Lucas’s “problematic” behavior explicitly seeks to expose the injustice of assumptions undergirding school. For example, she recounts a math class in which he stands up and asks the teacher whether they haven’t “wasted enough time on this” (60). When teachers refuse to engage with the literal meaning of such questions, Lucas leverages humor and fantasy to withstand the tedium of regimental schooling. He entertains himself and classmates by drumming pencils, beatboxing during videos, cracking jokes, and concocting elaborate pretend scenarios. Though disruptive, his playful behavior communicates a need for liveliness and delight disallowed during the long sedentary hours in his classroom—another example of Disruption as Communication and Resistance.
As with Zora, Shalaby contrasts Lucas’s experiences at home and at school. Among his family, Lucas moves through his day egged on by internal urges, imaginatively acting out scenes with toys when bored and requesting activities aligned with his desires. His mother celebrates his goofiness and humor, but she also tries incentivizing greater “flexibility”—e.g., greater ability to set his desires aside, at least momentarily. Similarly, she supports Lucas’s ADHD treatment and (more broadly) the context of medicalization in which that unfolds. While Shalaby’s opinion on this is clear, her depiction of Corinne is sympathetic. Parents, Shalaby suggests, face pressure to conform as well; she notes that Lucas’s mother can use Lucas’s diagnosis to preempt criticism of Lucas’s behavior from other parents. However, without a familial environment that strongly advocates individuality, it is unclear whether Lucas can retain his magical and defiant world of joy.
Ultimately, Lucas’s story serves as a call to make space for child-centered expression in classrooms. It insists that one of two things must change: toxic environments or children’s spirits.
