Go Ghoti

If Steven's mother had come up to the school this morning and demanded that her son be taken out and put in a place where he wouldn't be bullied and threatened, I would have handed her the appropriate forms and helped her with the process. I could not imagine an uglier scene than I saw today on our playground.
Let me begin again: I was in the office just before eight o'clock, preparing myself for another day of herding cats, metaphorically speaking, when Steven's little brother and sister ran in and told me that, "the boys are beating on Steven!" Past experience has informed my reactions, and so I hustled outside to see exactly what was going on. Sure enough, there was a mob of boys (if any number higher than ten can be considered a mob) chasing Steven across the yard. From a distance, it looked like it might have been a game of tag or keep away, but since there was no ball in sight and all the attention seemed to be focused on one kid, instead of one kid chasing a group, I moved to cut off the main pursuit.
When I yelled from across the yard with my best teacher voice, some of the less intense kids fell away, but it wasn't until I got between Steven and the gang of a dozen or so boys chasing him that the mob pulled up. I picked out the ones I recognized immediately as mine, and then started picking out the ringleaders. By this point, Steven was growling and snarling and was not listening to anyone. He ran away. I chose to stick with the mob.
Once the details began to filter through, one of my students had been pushed into fighting Steven, and when he turned out to be capable of defending himself against one, the instigators rallied the tiny brains and they set on him as a group. They jumped on his back. They pushed him. They kicked him. They beat on him.
Why? Part of me wishes for some practical explanation: the hyenas going after the wounded gazelle. Part of me wants some measure of frontier justice, where the idiot that shoved my student into the fight in the first place should have a chance to go mano a mano with Steven without all his minions around. Mostly I just wish it never would have happened. What happened to Steven was uncomfortably close to moments in my own childhood. For the first time in thirty years, I remembered a film I loved from The Children's Film Festival on CBS. It was called "Skinny and Fatty", and I spent many lonely afternoons recalling the swarms of elementary school bullies who made my life so much like a movie that I wanted to cry.
And that's how I felt this morning, but I remembered a moment from yesterday: Steven was answering a comprehension question in our after school tutoring program about fish. When I leaned over his shoulder to look at what he was writing, I saw "We have to clean ghoti before we eat them." I started to correct him, but then I realized that he had remembered the anecdotal lesson about the challenges in learning English. "Enough" gives us "gh" as "f", "women" gives is "o" as short "i", and "motion" gives us "ti" for "sh". That's why we spell "fish" g-h-o-t-i. Steven remembered. When I think about that, it makes some of the bad stuff from this morning go away. But not all of it.