Nothing But The Truth

This is a great story about how quickly things can spiral out of control. One self absorbed teenager manages to cause a stir by acting out in class. I was astounded by how poorly the adults acted in this story. Everyone seems to just want to be done with it quickly, and not want to take the time to get to the real story. I read this because my daughter will be reading it with her eight grade class, and I can see where this would lead to some heated conversations. It did feel a little dated (there is a fight to “install” computers in the school) but real topic is still very timely. Great read.

This book is an exploration of how quickly a conflict can spiral out of control when the parties involved do any kind of fudging the truth to present themselves in a more favorable light. In Phillip's case, he lied that he was humming the national anthem in order to be patriotic when he was really just trying to annoy a teacher who wasn't tolerant of his clowning around. In the case of his teacher, she exaggerated the volume at which he was humming. We see how misunderstandings rapidly balloon as school administrators fail to effectively communicate with each other and people outside the school—a prospective school board candidate, newspapers, and a conservative-leaning talk show akin to the O'Reilly Factor—get involved.

I really enjoyed the description of the school administration internals and how from the beginning, the poor communication between administrators set the stage for what turned into a national incident. It's very clear that neither Phillip nor the teacher Ms Narwin were given an opportunity by others to sort out the conflict before it was too late. And although Phillip becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the positive attention from strangers who believe he's a valiant patriot whose freedoms are being threatened, it's beyond his control by the time he realizes he shouldn't have lied. Likewise, Ms. Narwin has been harmed by those same strangers and by the time Phillip tries to talk to her, she is so unwilling to consider the possibility that Phillip doesn't condone the threats to her career that she deliberately closes herself off from him out of self preservation.

I really appreciate the ultimate message that everyone's somewhat in the wrong: Ms. Narwin for exaggerating the disruptiveness of Phillip's humming, Phillip for lying that he was being patriotic instead of trying to annoy her, the neighbor Ted for further embellishing Phillip's lie, Ms Narwin's superiors for not listening to her ideas for how to resolve the situation without making Phillip more bitter. By the time the first newspaper story is printed, it's already too late to go back. Any possibility of respectful discourse gets nullified as more and more people make assumptions about what happened.

I felt like this is the kind of thing that could have happened in my high school, though I was in high school more than a decade later. The story has a timeless quality where it will continue to be relevant with only very minor updates to the references to technology.