Sticky

On moral development

Artist’s recreation of “The Stool”

In the back room of my middle school woodshop class, there was a stool we used to glue shit to. It became a game between my friends and me, a competition to see who could find and adhere the most outlandish objects to the seat without the shop teacher noticing: a toothpick, a mallet, several strips of sandpaper. By the end of eighth grade, the top of the stool was teeming with random supplies and pieces of wood, like a stump sprouting mushrooms.

If any of the adults at the school were aware of these shenanigans, they gave no indication. The shop teacher himself, a spry seventy-something-year-old named Mr. Luigi¹ was either unbothered or completely oblivious. (It’s possible the stool was replaced or cleaned over the summer, which would seem to imply some adult awareness, but I can’t remember.)

The school being a small, independent one that ran K through 9, most of my friends left after eighth grade to attend other high schools in the area; my friend Nate and I stayed the extra year, and swore to continue the great glue tradition.

One day in ninth grade, Mr. Luigi left us alone in the woodshop to retrieve some supplies from upstairs, and Nate and I recognized a golden opportunity: Unsupervised, with free reign of the woodshop, we could dream much bigger than a mere stool hidden away in the back room; we could glue anything our hearts desired! In a creative frenzy, we ran around the room and—these details I remember clearly—sealed a cabinet shut, cemented a bucket of paint brushes to the back counter, and adhered a single tissue to the wall next to the door. (Nate suggested gluing Mr. Luigi’s laptop to his desk, but I drew the line.)

At this point, you may be wondering why Nate and I would have done such a thing, what was going through our teenage brains. The answer, I think, is not much. At fifteen, we probably would have said we thought what we’d done was “funny.” (I kind of still think it is funny, in the “weird” sense of the word, or the “what the fuck were they thinking?” sense: I.e., it remains an entertaining story, without being a remotely clever prank.)

I also believe—though I certainly would not have conceded this at the time—that our petty vandalism was an expression of being the oldest students, and two of very few boys in a very small grade in a very small school; that we felt, perhaps, a bit left behind by our peers who had moved on to high school and were no doubt beginning to experiment with sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. Nate and I, meanwhile, were still showing up every day in a building with kids as much as ten years younger than us—but at least we could assert our adolescence, or rebelliousness, or some bizarre approximation of masculinity, in the form of flagrant, indefensible stupidity.

In any event, Nate (who, you won’t be surprised to learn, was not exactly known for his discretion) soon blabbed to his cousin about our woodshop exploits, and word got around. The next thing I knew, we were sitting across from the head of the upper division, learning what the consequence of our actions would be: For our sticky sins, Ms. Gracey told us, Nate and I would have the sticky privilege of staying after school the next day to scrape gum off the underside of as many desks and chairs as we could in two hours.

I distinctly remember my outrage at the revelation of this punishment: It felt strangely anachronistic, almost nun-like, in its use of exegesis and manual labor toward moral instruction. I protested that while what we’d done was stupid, it was ultimately “harmless” and not “destructive”—an argument rejected by Ms. Gracey: It had taken Mr. Luigi forty-five minutes just to reopen the cabinet we had glued shut—was that not evidence of destruction? Did the resources and effort it would take to repair the woodshop count for nothing?

Well, yes, I conceded, this was an unfortunate byproduct of a hilarious prank—but that was beside the point. It was obvious that what we’d done was a joke. And scraping gum? That was ridiculous—humiliating! Why couldn’t we just help Mr. Luigi get the glue off? (Because, explained Ms. Gracey, that would just create more work for him. And besides, he’d already done a lot of it.) I saw clearly then that this woman was beyond reason, committed to a tyrannical punishment.

So the next day after school, seething but resigned, Nate and I accepted our plastic scrapers and began crawling around on classroom floors.

Of the actual gum removal itself, I’m sorry to say I don’t have much memory. (If anything, I seem to recall that we had difficulty finding much gum at all.) But I definitely remember that it happened, and how pissed I was the whole time I was doing it. It’s for this reason, I believe, that the event has come to take on an outsized role in my moral imagination.

It’s important to note that this was by no means a typical disciplinary measure at the school—which was, on the whole, as kind and progressive a place as an affluent, predominantly white suburban private school could be! Frankly, I’m not sure it’s a punishment that would be dispensed today, if only for fear of weird optics. Nor, I think, would it be appropriate for all children in all contexts. (For a student caught in a cycle of misbehavior and low self-worth, or in a more generally draconian environment, I could imagine it being a genuinely dehumanizing experience.)

But for me, I believe it was an apt, if unconventional, response: I was a strong student with little history of acting out, and this was a clear-cut case of me being an asshole. Having me scrape gum might seem old-fashioned, but it was unlikely to cause lasting psychological harm—and it communicated an important message to a boy not yet capable of contrition: What you did was not acceptable.

I’ve been reading a bit about apologies lately for an upcoming post, and one idea that emerges is the importance, in effective apologies, of a transgressor doing something costly or being brought low. I was, at time of scraping, largely unrepentant—but I was certainly brought low (literally) by my punishment. And in time, I would come to feel genuine remorse toward Mr. Luigi—all the more so because he never once reprimanded Nate and me, or gave any indication he was upset by the damage we had wreaked in his classroom. (As an end-of-year gift, I even gave Mr. Luigi a papier-mâché sculpture of Horton the Elephant I’d made in his class.)

Did scraping gum cause the remorse I eventually felt? This is a difficult question to answer, but I think probably not. I believe the crucial ingredients were simply being made aware of the impact of my actions, and some kind of consequence (even a more banal one, like a forced apology).

Yet now that the details and raw emotion of the event have faded, I’m left with only the broad contours of the story: I glued; I scraped; I felt remorse. Whatever the true catalyst of internal change was, these are the facts on record.

And it seems to me there’s something about the specificity of scraping gum that has caused it to incubate and evolve over the years—from an injustice imposed upon me, into a rightful penance I’m now strangely grateful to have offered.

Here’s what I do know: that a full conception of our humanity must somehow reconcile our deep need for justice with our high hope for mercy; and that sometimes, the experiences that have the greatest impact are not even the most profound ones, but simply the ones that stick.

1. For this post, I have changed the names of all people involved other than me.