In accordance with prophecy, the post that instructed you to not read it if you respect me (which, in case it isn’t obvious, I wrote last night and delayed until noon today) has received a full day’s worth of traffic already.  I hate you all.

I spent all day today putting out fires, and right now I’m split between basically writing a short-ish “YAAR EXHAUSTION” type of post or going exhaustive and giving you a moment-by-moment breakdown of the horror that was my day.  I think I’m leaning toward exhaustive– after all, I’m at OtherJob, my lesson plans are already done, most of my grading is already done, and it’s been raining all day so there really isn’t much else to do.

It is entirely possible that this post will end abruptly with “fuck this, you get the idea” or something similar; please don’t hold it against me.  After all, you already got a post today, right?

BEFORE SCHOOL:  I wake up on time, but somehow going into the office to check and see if my paycheck came in and my union dues got paid takes half an hour.  I have no idea where the time went; I rush through my shower and manage to forget to eat breakfast before leaving the house.  I do manage to pack a lunch, which is an unimportant detail except insofar as it indicates that I was in the kitchen while I was forgetting to eat.  I manage to make it to work on time.

AT SCHOOL, BEFORE SCHOOL STARTS:  As I’ve mentioned previously I cover the gym in the morning.  There are a couple of other adults in there with me by the time the lion’s share of the kids are at school but it’s not uncommon for it to be me and two hundred kids.  Today, our assistant principal (new to the building this year) comes in and asks me in a rather pointed fashion what the building policy is on cell phones.  Note: she is fully aware of the answer to this question, which is that the kids basically aren’t supposed to have them, ever, and if they do they’re to remain in backpacks until such time as they are placed in lockers, and at all times they are to be off.

I explain to her that my policy on cell phones is You Don’t Want None There Won’t Be None; I ignore anything that is plainly related to listening to music, force phones to be put away when anything that could involve taking pictures is taking place, and tend to react reasonably, but harshly, to kids who are actually talking on them– which is rare.  The main reason is that every second kid in the gym has a cell phone with them and if I start taking cell phones away (which I am fully empowered to do by district policy) I will do nothing but take phones away and fight with kids every morning, all morning.  I fully understand why this is the policy in class but it is virtually unenforceable when the ratio of kids with cellphones to teachers doing something about them is literally a hundred to one.  I am not interested in that fight every day, and kids who are being reasonably discreet are going to be ignored.

She does not appear happy with this explanation until I look around and find five kids who are quietly listening to music and ask her which one she’d like me to take a phone away from first; that child will immediately find the other four and ask why I’m not taking their phones away instead of whoever I’m talking to.  They will then report to their parents that I’m picking on them.  No thank you.  This appears to clear the fog a bit and the conversation ends with no directive to change my policy.

The kids are on edge in a weird sort of way but there aren’t any fights or any real threats of one.  But there’s a weird vibe in the gym that I don’t like.

HOMEROOM:  The bright spot of my day, once the girls are done screaming about another spider in the hallway, which is quickly becoming the theme around here lately.  We do a Word of the Week; this week’s word was “ration.”  The kids are supposed to write a sentence for me; I select the best two or three and send them to the librarian, and he names a victor for each grade level.  One of my girls wins today.  If my name were Mr. Smith and her name were Charlie, this would be the sentence:  “Mr. Smith told me that he has a ration of Charlie that he is allowed every day, and I don’t get to talk to him again until tomorrow.”

I am beloved, obviously.

SUCCESS:  (It’s between homeroom and first hour, I didn’t name it, shut up.)  I’m ten minutes into my lesson when the teacher next door asks if she can borrow me for “a minute.”  There are two teachers in the room for Success so I have the other one take over and go into the hall.  There is an eighth grade girl who I only know by sight (new to the building this year) pacing and muttering angrily in the hallway with her fists clenched and tears in her eyes.  I get over my initial why the hell is this my problem bewilderment and ask her what’s wrong.

Here’s a thing:  Seventh and eighth grade girls are really fucking easy to manipulate.  I don’t know if you knew that but holy Christ is it true.  Some fifth grader– a fucking fifth grader— on the bus asked her if she thought she could beat up some other student, and now she’s angry because she has to fight this other student.  Who, as it turns out (and unbeknownst to the teacher next door) happens to be in my room at that very moment.  I spend a few minutes trying to calm her down and then call the other student into the hallway.  They are both saying stupid shit like “I don’t wanna fight her, but if she hits me I’m gonna kick her ass,” and pointing out that both of them are starting their sentences with saying that they do not want to fight is not doing the job it should of convincing them that, no, nobody’s actually going to fight here.

This conversation literally costs me the rest of the period.  By the end of it I’m reasonably convinced that I’m not going to have to break the two of them up at any point today and I’m ready to break the fifth grader’s head myself.  Then the teacher pulls another student out of her classroom who I have to convince that none of this shit was his business and he doesn’t need to threaten the first girl because nobody wants to fucking fight here so stop being a damn asshole.  I make a mental note to have a stern word with the fifth grader and bemoan the critical thinking skills of everyone under 30.  I do virtually no teaching in my first class of the day.

FIRST AND SECOND HOUR I have to spend keeping an eye on one of my autistic kids because he’s making his para insane and in general the kids are being weirdly dependent and pretending to not be as bright as they are.  This is an affliction that is not at all specific to them but they’re bad about it; I need to break them of this habit.  I have deliberately put a review packet together for my kids today because I have a crapton of desk work that must get done by the end of the day and my prep period was full before I even walked into the building.

(Note: this is something that most people don’t realize about teaching.  I have virtually no time to do anything during my day that isn’t teaching.  Any paperwork of any kind, including all of my grading, gets done on my own time.  It had piled up too much by this point.  It was time to have a work day.)

At any rate, this plan didn’t work out, because the kids had way too many questions.  I got a bit done but not as much as I wanted.

THIRD AND FOURTH HOUR was when all hell broke loose.  Third and fourth hour contain The Twins, who are several posts unto themselves and who I will talk about in more detail when I have the mental energy.  And if I’m being honest this is already a fourteen hundred word post and I haven’t even gotten to the stressful part.

So, yeah: I’m gonna abbreviate.  A lot.  The twins are, very soon, gonna get the shit kicked out of them, and it’s going to be their own damn fault– and that is not something I am prone to say about my students, particularly students who have obvious developmental issues (I suspect fetal alcohol syndrome; this is unconfirmed.)  But they piss off everyone they come into contact with, more or less deliberately, and then they tattle on the kids they’ve pissed off.

For example: if walking past the desk of the biggest gangbanger in the building, a kid who was in jail before he got expelled from his previous school and sent to us, maybe you don’t knock his shit on the floor on purpose.  Because he might literally kill you.

It’s happened twice.

The kids nearly caused two different fights today, and that’s not counting the number of students they got pissed off at them.  I ended up sending them out of my room with my coteacher for their own safety and not only arranged for them to not be in the halls during passing period for the rest of the day but literally created a security detail to get them to their buses at the end of the day so that they didn’t have to be in the gym with the rest of the kids.

I fully expect to find another article in the paper in a few months about how I didn’t do anything about the way they were mercilessly bullied, by the way.  I’m at 1700 words; this post would be twice as long if I actually talked about all the nonsense they created today.

And that was before my fifth and sixth hour got into my room.

God, I’m tired.