I have a very distinct memory from grade school that I think about a lot. In the second grade, our school used a system to encourage good behaviour. If you did something the teacher deemed bad, you would get a behaviour log - think of a signed paper describing your transgression in detail, kept in a file with the teacher. If you got a large number of behaviour logs within a particular year, it would call for a meeting with your parents. That year, for some reason, I had 5 behaviour logs. This was considered a high number. I was sort of a goody-two-shoes throughout school who never liked getting in trouble, so I remember this number pretty vividly. I got one for reading a fiction book under my desk during English period (English grammar, that too). I got another for gossiping, and the others I don’t remember.

I want to talk about the one I got for gossiping. This behaviour log was given by our teacher to two or three girls (me included) for what was essentially a playground fight. The backstory for this was a long time in the making - we were into make-believe games as kids, and we had one in particular that went on for months. I don’t remember a lot of details too clearly, but I think the premise was that we were a family living in the wild. We cooked all of our meals using grass and leaves and bark found around this green area in the corner of the playground, had a make-believe shelter, role-played familial interactions, etc. Everyone who played was a girl between the ages of 6-7. I don’t really interact with a lot of kids in that age group now, and I’m not sure if this is considered a super weird thing to do or natural and expected for imaginative grade schoolers, but whatever. It was fun and we played every break period.

One day, we decided that we had some complaints about one of the girls who played. However, we didn’t tell her. A few of us spoke about her conduct amongst ourselves and then I guess we must have brushed it off. Considering the fact that this was a make-believe game with an entirely fictional premise, I’m sure she hadn’t done anything too serious. However, as the days went by, instead of resolving the issue, we decided that we didn’t really like her as much as we liked each other. And because we were 7 years old and didn’t know what behaviour would be considered civil in this sort of a situation, this hostility manifested in the way our game was played. We would leave her out of everything we could and be overly critical if she messed something up. Basically, we weren’t hiding how we felt very well, and for a few weeks, we treated her like an outsider.

I don’t think any of us felt any true malice, I think we were just ignorant when it came to communication. We didn’t know that this isn’t the way things get solved. However, the shocking thing is that I remember feeling slightly good whenever we did something to exclude her. Putting her down made me feel better. I was happy that I was a part of the group that had the upper hand, and that I wasn’t in her place. Of course, I don’t think I was aware of this reasoning at the time - all I knew is that it felt good, so I never thought of putting an end to it. I guess this was just tribalism and something every young kid probably experiences.

This festering conflict eventually broke into a full-blown fight. This girl was being ganged up on, and she (rightfully) felt upset about it, so she went to our teacher and complained about all of us. Our teacher sat us down and heard all sides of the story before choosing her response - she singled out all of us girls who had excluded our classmate as the wrongdoers, and all of us got behaviour logs.

I remember being kind of shocked since I didn’t realize I had done anything wrong. My parents never gossiped at home and this was the first time I had ever been engaged in a situation where someone was saying mean things about somebody else behind their back. I had participated in it, and it felt good, but before the behaviour log, I didn’t have an explicit frame of reference that would let me know whether what I was taking part in was right or wrong. Looking back, what I find interesting is that this behaviour log wasn’t for fighting with my friends or creating conflict or anything like that - it was exclusively for gossiping. When I say gossiping, I mean talking about people you know personally in a judgmental or malicious manner when they’re not around. Having neutral conversations about other people’s lives could also probably be categorized as gossip, but that’s not what I’m referring to here. I was given a behaviour log for malicious gossiping, and using that as fuel to put somebody else down - or using that to prove to myself that I was somehow better than them.

I think this whole incident had a bigger impact on me than I could have predicted. From that point onwards, I knew that gossiping was a bad thing. I knew that any pleasure derived from it was dirty. I think everyone knows this on surface level, but the shock of that behaviour log really drummed it into me at an early age. I’m not going to say I never meanly gossiped as I grew older - I definitely did. But I was never proud of it, or I never wanted it to be a part of who I was seen as. And as I grew older and came to college, I think it took up less and less of my conversations. If I had a problem with someone, I usually spoke to them directly (although how to do this correctly had a learning curve of its own). If I wanted to talk about somebody whose behaviour I didn’t like, I learned to do it in a way that was more compassionate, or that acknowledged their hardships and their ability to do better. I learned to center conversations around my experience with someone rather than my perception of that person.

At some point I also began to gravitate towards people who didn’t have a hateful streak, who didn’t take pleasure from having malicious conversations. I always felt better about myself when I spoke to them, so I spoke to them more often. What I learned was that less judgmental people always make better friends, because you know that they’re never going to judge you, even when they’re being honest with you. I learned that judgement is not the same as honesty, and you can be honest without putting others down. When you put someone else down, it’s only to pull yourself up - honesty is selfless, but judgment is selfish. And usually, you can catch somebody’s tone straightaway, and you know which side they spend more time on.

I definitely am not saying I am perfect, or I’ve never done these things. I think that I’m still much more judgmental than I would like to be, and I catch myself using it as a tool to feel better about my own life all the time - especially when it comes to those I don’t know personally. I have stuff to work on, for sure. However, I think my second grade teacher took away my enjoyment of dishonesty and judgement within friendships, and I think I owe a lot to her. I probably would have learned that lesson later on, but in my opinion, this was a pretty forceful and effective way of learning it when I was still really young and figuring out what friendship meant to me. I think this incident in the second grade led me down the path of seeking clarity and honesty in my friendships above everything. The person I am today hates politics and games with the people closest to me. I’m not sure if that aversion is something people have naturally, so I think it’s an important thing to teach kids. I’m just glad I got that lesson.