Junior high students can try men’s souls -- just ask a teacher

Last week I wrote about two 13-year-olds in the Tustin school district who were suspended for excessive shows of affection with their true loves. I made a reference to it being annoying to watch adolescents in the throes of puppy love but chalked it up to them being 13. Just because I delayed hugging until marriage doesn’t mean everyone else has to.

Later in the week, a Brea Junior High teacher was arrested for allegedly threatening to kill a seventh-grader if he showed up in his classroom next semester. I may be way out of line here, but I’ll take a wild guess the teacher doesn’t really plan to kill the student, identified only as a 12-year-old boy.

Still, you can’t help but take note of the rather wide emotional swings reflected in the two stories -- from hand-holding and hugging to alleged death threats.

Is there a common thread? Then, the light went on in my head, giving me the “aha” moment that all deep thinkers await.

For those of us who survived those adolescent years and then became adults, it all makes sense. As former budding teenagers ourselves, we understand desire under the elms.

But as fully formed adults, we have also come to understand the occasional desire to, shall we say, dial M for murder when it comes to our precious 13-year-olds.

A Brea police spokesman said the threat incident was reported as the teacher saying to the boy “something to the effect that, ‘Next semester you’d better find another teacher because if you’re in my class I’m going to kill you.’ ”

Sounds like emotions may have been running high that day. Of course, it’s junior high!

I phoned a longtime junior high teacher to ask if he could dig deep into his memory and possibly grasp why a teacher might flare up as the alleged threatener did.

He needed about three seconds to think about.

“Been there, done that,” he says.

He says he once had a student who treated the classroom as a public park in which he could stroll at will. So, the teacher says, he put a giant mousetrap next to his chair (“It would break fingers, literally”) and told the boy that if the chair moved, the trap would be sprung.

Obviously, no one would be hurt, but the point he’s making is that teachers sometimes have to get creative to stem potential disruptions.

One year, he says, he had a male student who repeatedly exposed himself to the girls. When school officials heard of it and questioned the girls, they replied casually, “Oh, yeah, he does that all the time.”

I ask the teacher if people wonder, as I do, why anyone in their right mind would teach at the junior high level. “I had people tell me that all the time,” he says. “Usually, I say it’s a challenge, but it’s not something that can’t be overcome.”

Aside from puberty issues, junior high is an age where kids are hearing lots of voices. Their friends, their families, the entertainment and advertising world. And they’re all trying to forge identities, some against incredible “social, family and psychological things put on them that no kids should have to deal with,” the teacher says.

OK, we know junior high kids can be quirky and exasperating, but how about redeeming qualities? Surely, they have some -- even if we adults don’t remember having any at that age.

“If you get these kids on a mission,” the veteran teacher says, “give them something they all believe in, they’ve got more energy and will do more work than you’d expect. That’s the great part about them.”

The good teachers -- or is it just the lucky ones? -- find a way to connect.

The 12-year-old Brea student and his arrested teacher apparently haven’t clicked yet.

Whether this remains a criminal matter or becomes an administrative one, might I suggest a sit-down between teacher and student? You know, get to know each other as people, each with his own particular behavioral traits?

To get things off on the right foot, dare I suggest they start with a hug?

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.