RIP, Mrs. Gates

On March 11, 2018March 11, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn Stories, Teaching1 Comment

image-29403_20180310.jpgx I got a text from my mother just now, while I was eating dinner, that my second grade teacher had passed away, at the admirably ripe old age of 92. Mrs. Gates is one of the several teachers that my book Searching for Malumba is dedicated to, one of only two from my elementary/primary school years.

I had found myself wondering about her many times over the years. My second-grade recollection of her was that she was one of my older teachers, but that could have meant she was 40; kids are terrible at pegging how old adults are, right? As it turns out, she was nearly 60 when I had her, so she was probably nearing retirement at the time. I remember her as being probably the best example I ever had of the “strict but fair” teacher, which was something I always tried to emulate in my own career.

The funny thing is that when I try to unearth specific memories of what she was like as a teacher, I can only come up with one or two of them, and the clearest memory probably counts as educational malpractice, to the point where I almost feel disrespectful for talking about it. Mrs. Gates was always big on cleanliness– keeping the room clean, and in particular, keeping our desks clean. She’d actually inspect them from time to time– I have no idea how frequently; this could have been a daily or weekly thing for all I remember, or it could have been more frequently than that.

I am still in touch with literally no one who was in my second grade class, but I can think of perhaps four or five kids who are no more than a quick Facebook search away. And I guarantee each of them remembers the day Mrs. Gates got tired of Jonathan W. (I remember his full name, but why let him Google this?) having a sloppy desk for like the nine hundredth time in a row and in a fit of frustration dumped it out on the classroom floor in front of everyone. Objectively, with thirty-some-odd years of hindsight, this was probably a terribly humiliating thing for Jonathan and was not the proper way for her to have handled the situation. I certainly can’t imagine dumping a kid’s desk out on the floor in front of the whole class. And yet, I think for most of us, it made us more fond of her– and make no mistake, strict as she was, the kids in that class loved Mrs. Gates. Because this lady wasn’t taking any shit, and chances are most of our moms would have done the same damn thing in similar circumstances. I stayed friends with Jonathan until he moved away, I think in middle school sometime, and that story was still getting told at slumber parties years later.

For whatever it’s worth, I suspect he’d probably still laugh at the story. I dunno; maybe I shouldn’t have told it.

Rest in peace, Mrs. Gates. I hope wherever you are, all the desks are pristine.

Let’s talk about #assaultatspringvalley

On October 29, 2015October 29, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics15 Comments

I’m going to start this with something I said yesterday.

What will be painful: they’ve got CNN on in this damn waiting room, and they keep going back to that poor kid getting her ass beat by that cop in South Carolina the other day. Having to watch/hear the footage is rage-inducing enough; I swear to God if I have to listen to some fucking Hoosier conversation about it I’m gonna go to jail today, and it’s good that we’re already at the hospital.

I have a new policy, and I’m sticking to this motherfucker: if I am ever in public where a 24-hour news station is audibly playing over a television set, and I’m in a situation, like a waiting room, where I literally cannot get away from the TV, I’m unplugging the goddamned thing, and to hell with the consequences.

I had to spend several hours in a waiting room yesterday because my mother was having her hip replaced (as of last speaking to her, around 6:30 PM last night, she’s doing astonishingly well; I’ll see her again this afternoon after I get my son from school.) CNN was on on the television in the waiting room. It was on multiple TVs, so there was nowhere in the room I could have gone to get away from it, and I’d neglected to bring earphones with me– not that I really could have used them, since my aunt and my dad were both with me and that would have been kind of rude.

CNN kept lying, or putting people on the TV who were lying for them– like, for example, the police chief, who insisted that there were no complaints against “Officer Slam” despite the fact that he’s the subject of a lawsuit right now. And the chief kept blaming the kid for starting the altercation, and the fact that she’d hit the police officer kept coming up.

Note that, at that time, I had not seen the “third video” that showed her hitting him, so I was just going on faith that it had happened and that it was more or less as those describing it said. CNN wasn’t showing it.

I was managing to keep it together. I’ll be fine, I remember thinking to myself, so long as no one around me starts a conversation about this bullshit that I can hear. And here’s the thing: shit woulda been the same even if the people talking had completely agreed with everything I think. I cannot tolerate this kind of evil any longer, and my blood pressure meds and mood-altering drugs are not enough to overcome the rage. I don’t know that anything is.

So naturally the old white lady sitting across from me had to start yammering about how Kids These Days and how everything was the girl’s fault.

It… did not go well. Now, on my end: I am actually trained in crisis intervention, and I’ve been in dozens of situations over the years (read Searching for Malumba— I talk about a bunch of them!) where keeping an absolute lock on 1) my emotions; 2) my language; 3) my tone of voice, and 4) my physical stance and presence were absolutely critical to keeping things from going very south.

I referred to her solely as “ma’am” during the entire conversation. I did not raise my voice, I did not so much as lean forward, and I kept my laptop in my lap and my hands on the keyboard during the entire conversation.

It began with me pointing out that I have been involved in urban education for fifteen years, and during that time I have had literally dozens of situations where it was necessary to remove a student from my classroom, and at not one time during all those years was violence, much less that level of violence, necessary to remove the student from my classroom.

“That man should be in jail,” I said. “He has committed assault against a child, and he should be in jail.”

She tried to tell me– I swear to God this is true– that I didn’t understand what kids were like “these days.”

That didn’t go too well either.

Yammering about how she’d hit the cop.

“So what? That’s a sixteen-year-old girl sitting in a chair. He’s a grown-ass man in body armor who can bench press 600 pounds. Who cares if she hit him? What difference does it make?”

She asked me what I would have done “if that ever happened to you,” apparently not having heard anything I’d said.

I pointed out again that it had happened, repeatedly, as well as any number of other situations far more dangerous than a moody child sitting in a desk, and that I had resolved those situations without resorting to violence.

“Well, I suppose you’re just an expert, then, aren’t you?” she sneered.

Eye contact.

“Yes. I am.”

She wasn’t expecting that response, I think.

At that point she started babbling about relatives who used to be teachers and a friend who used to be a cop and blah blah blah I cut her off. Pointed at the TV. “That’s your child,” I said. “Right there. That’s your little girl being dragged across the floor by a grown man who can bench press six hundred pounds. If you can seriously look at that and place any of the blame on the child, ma’am, you very badly need to examine your soul.”

At that point, my dad leaned forward a bit, holding a hand out toward me; I think he thought I might be about to get up. Nah. I got this.

At some point she shut up. Interestingly, the guy she was with– he didn’t vibe husband or boyfriend, but they were definitely together– only spoke about three times during the conversation, and only did so to agree with me.

A few minutes later, once the press conference was on, CNN had some sort of ed person– maybe a principal, maybe a Ph.D researcher, I dunno– on, and the anchor asked him what the proper reaction to that situation should have been. The man went on to more or less exactly repeat what I had said, which was gratifying.

I didn’t speak. I did, however, point at the TV.

It is good for everyone that I had not seen this video prior to that conversation. This is the magical “third video,” the one that shows the girl “hitting” the police officer. Basically the whole thing is repeating the first few seconds in slow-motion over and over again, so once you’ve watched the first fifteen seconds or so you’re probably good.

Trigger warning. This fucked me up for most of last evening. I suggest you not watch the video, and just trust me that I’m describing it accurately. If you’re human, this will enrage you.

That’s “hitting” to these people, and if you click through to YouTube you will see that the headline appears to have been written by someone who may be wrapped in human skin but almost certainly lacks any actual humanity.

“Officer Slam” has grabbed this child around her neck with one hand, and with the other he is reaching underneath her legs. She flails backwards at him with both hands.

There is literally no way for this to be any more clearly self-defense than it is. Furthermore, given the angles of the two, and the fact that he’s got her by the neck, the risk to the “police officer” is minimal at best. And let’s not forget, either, that he initiated the contact.

I had thought, from the media reports, that she had punched him before he went after her. No. Not even close.

If you can watch that, and you still think that the actions of the child are in any way relevant to what went on, there is something terribly, terribly wrong with you.

Furthermore: watch carefully the reaction of the other teenagers in the room. Think carefully about that. There is just about nothing kids like watching more than somebody else getting their ass beat. In damn near any classroom in the country a scene like that would have produced pandemonium. Half the kids would be doing their best Chris Tucker impressions and a handful of them would be screaming at the cop. They’d be out of their seats and running around. A couple of them would be standing on desks to watch.

Not one of those fucking kids moves.

Because they are terrified.

That kind of fear has no place in a school, ever. This man should not only be fired (granted, he has) he should be jailed, and it is abundantly clear that he should never have been allowed inside the walls of a school to begin with. Any of the bullshit charges filed against the two students who were arrested should be dropped immediately, and the young woman hurled to the floor should at the very least have her college tuition paid for by the police department.

I’ve said this before, and I have to remind myself of it every day: I have liked every police officer I have ever personally known, and in particular the three SROs I’ve worked with over the years have all been professionals who were good at their jobs and worked to build rapport with their students instead of ruling by fear and intimidation.

But that reminder is mattering less and less the longer this goes on.

America’s police officers need to patrol their ranks, they need to eliminate the deep, deep, deep rot that exists within their organizations, and they need to do it right now. Because the police are, more and more every day, looking less like a group of people whose job is to “serve and protect” and more like a mercenary army who are not only allowed but encouraged to kill and injure the rest of us as they see fit without any chance of consequences.

This must stop. Now.

In which you don’t need to know this about me (again)

On February 9, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching8 Comments

I stopped at McDonald’s for coffee on the way home from work today, if that tells you anything about my day.

You may recall this post about my issues with the bathrooms at my current place of business. If not, I recommend reading it; it’s funny, in a terrible godawful why did you tell us that sort of way. If not, allow me to quote myself, if I may:

There are two adult bathrooms at my new place of business. One of them is a one-seater and is effectively a private men’s room for the office. That bathroom has two problems: 1) it is directly outside the principal’s office and 2) I am one of only three men who might ever use it, and one of the other two is frequently not in the office, so not only is there a theoretical chance that my boss might hear me in there but if I power bomb the place everyone is going to know it was me. This cannot stand.

It is my prep period. I am in my office frantically trying to get some of my own job done before I have to go do someone else’s for a while. I have, as it happens, already had a cup of coffee this morning. Now, for most people, coffee is a diuretic. For me, it has rather more… substantial effects, if you know what I mean and I hope you do.

…

Coffee makes me shit, is what I’m trying to say here.

So, yeah. As it works out, both of the other men in the office are not currently in the office, meaning that I can basically do whatever I want in My Other Office with no worries. I become aware of Impending Pressure and head off to do my business.

Meanwhile: the assistant principal is next door. We have recently had a very serious bullying issue on one of our buses that she’s been straightening out, and she’s been using varying levels of severity depending on the level of insistence of the various children involved that they had nothing to do with it. As it turns out, there is video. Fairly a lot of video. So each and every one of these lil’ motherfuckers is busted; it’s just a matter of how long they’re gonna lie before a hammer gets dropped on their heads. The kid currently in her office is being very insistent that he’s done nothing and said nothing and at the moment the AP is simply sitting there calmly categorizing his lies for use later.

This will, as it turns out, not go well for him.

So, back to me: I’m doing my business. I’m doing quite a lot of my business, as it turns out, and it occurs to me partway through that I ought to be really glad that there’s no chance anybody else is gonna be trying to get in here anytime soon.

I finish. I wash my hands.

Thank God I washed my hands.

Because when I open the door, my assistant principal is standing immediately outside the bathroom, with the student, who has clearly spent my entire time in there bawling his eyes out. I do not know how long they have been waiting.

“Go on in there and clean yourself up,” she says to him.

I have two choices at this point. This bathroom ain’t fit for human habitation, and there is no escaping the fact that I am the one who has ruined it. I can either admit it and suggest that the boy use the ladies’ bathroom (which, much like ours, is a locking one-seater) or I can just shrug and let this boy enter into the bowels (see what I did there?) of Hell, where the sulfur in the air will surely blind him before he’s able to wash the tears from his face.

Instead of doing either of those things, I just died of shame on the spot. This will be my final post; it is being typed by my spirit, which will remain bound to that bathroom for all eternity once I hit “Publish” on this post.

You gotta do what you gotta do sometimes, y’know?

On why I will never be a principal (pt. 2 of at least 2)

On October 4, 2014June 17, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching5 Comments

When I left you, I had just turned around in the hallway to find two high-school age girls standing behind me, wearing street clothes (all of the high schools in South Bend but one require uniforms, and that one is not close to my current school) and requesting to use the bathroom. This is a confusing enough situation as it is, because there are many places that are not middle schools where one might use the bathroom, but it was made massively worse by the fact that I recognized one of the two girls.

And I do not like her very much.

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Hmm. What to call this young lady? Eh. It doesn’t matter. I had her for at least three years, one of which she was actually in my classes, at my other building. During that time she was expelled twice; she is horrible. She ought to be a sophomore at this time; why she isn’t in school is beyond me.

I made some sort of why are you here and why are you asking kind of sound at them; I’m not generally the type to refuse someone access to bathrooms, but there’s something to be said for she whole wait what the fuck reaction I was having at that time.

Now, by this time, Shithead and Shitheel were both in the office again, and sister-mother is sitting out there with them for some reason. The girl I don’t know nods toward the office and says “That’s my sister.” They’ve apparently been waiting in the car all this time. Okay. Doesn’t explain why neither of you are in class, but I suddenly feel better about letting you use the bathroom. I raise an eyebrow at the one I know.

“I got a baby by his brother,” she says. She might be sixteen by now. She fails to specify whether it’s Shithead or Shitheap’s brother who impregnated her; it occurs to me that one of the two grandchildren that sister-mother has been talking about is probably her kid, which explains why she’s trying to get custody, because a live, hungry alligator and a thousand angry bees would easily be better parents than this child is going to be. I wave them toward the bathroom and go check on the kid in the nurse’s office who got punched in the throat.

And I immediately fall in love with the kid, who is the sweetest kid I’ve ever met, and by the end of hearing his story about what happened I’m ready to plant the other student underneath the building. I tell him and the nurse that he can go back to class when he feels ready to, because he’s not in trouble, find out whether the nurse is going to call his parents (that’s my call; I tell her I’ll do it) and go back to the office, where I discover a conundrum has presented itself. Sister-mother can take her son home. However, inexplicably, she’s not on her brother’s emergency card, which means we can’t legally release him to her. We tell her if she can get ahold of her/their mother and get verbal permission from her for us, that will work just fine, because everyone realizes that the policy is in this case a bit of an unnecessary inconvenience.

Oddly, she excuses herself to the hallway to make the phone call, because “the office is too loud.” She comes back in and hands the phone to our attendance secretary, who types a few words into her computer and then, in a rather pointed tone, asks the person on the other end of the line what Shithead’s birthday is.

“No, that’s not it. That’s not it either. Sorry, bye.”

And she hangs up and hands the phone back to sister-mother. Sister-mother, you see, has just called the two girls in the parking lot and told them to pretend to be their/her mother, only they don’t know Shithead’s birthday. Our attendance secretary has apparently spoken to Shithead’s mother before and she has a very distinct voice, so she knew from the jump that that wasn’t her on the phone.

So sister-mother has to leave without Shithead, who is returned to ISS, but takes Shitheel with her. Why their mother is unavailable is never explained.

My assistant principal finally returns! It is noon! Note that it has taken nearly four thousand words to get to noon. I take some time to fill her in on everything that has happened, which takes a very long time, especially since we keep getting interrupted.

We hit the point where I send Swingyfists back to class. She blows up, stunned and horrified that I would do such a dumb thing. I point out again that that’s where he already was, at which point she blinks and realizes that no, she’s not mad at me, but she is really mad at our social worker. I’m going to deliberately omit details of the rest of the conversation but let’s make it clear that she was not happy about that particular turn of events.

At some point it occurs to me that I still have Student A in ISS and Shitheap in my office. I am, amazingly, quickly able to get ahold of Student A’s grandmother, who tells me she’ll call his mother at work and have her get back with me about whether they’re going to come get him or just let him walk home at the end of the day. A few minutes later, a young woman in nurse’s scrubs who looks a lot like Shitheap walks into the office. It’s the sister! At the exact second I wave her over, Student A’s mom calls, and I have a brief moment of shit which one of them do I talk to first. I choose the person who is physically present over the person on the phone and ask for her to leave a number and that I’ll call her right back. I explain the situation to the sister, who luckily understands what her brother is and does not argue or fight, even when I mention the high likelihood of an expulsion. I take her to my office. Shitheap is curled up in a chair, where he’s been for the last couple of hours, asleep. She wakes him up with a rather impressive roundhouse slap to the back of his head, hitting him hard enough that she has to be hurting her hand in the process, and just about drags him out of the office.

Well, okay, bye.

I call Student A’s mother back. Her main concern is whether her son was fighting. I say that he did not actually land or throw any punches to the best of my knowledge and make it clear that he’s been in ISS for starting the confrontation. As it turns out, they live nearby, and after making sure that the other student is out of the building and can’t chase him home or anything she tells me that he can go home on his own. Okey-dokey.

I go to McDonald’s, buying a triple cheeseburger and a large fry. On the way back, I manage to cough up an enormous wad of phlegm, which is rather unpleasantly in my mouth now. True fact about me: I don’t spit. Which means that I don’t know that if you spit a huge loogie out of a car window at speed, it’s going to bounce off of the moving air outside the car and end up all over the expensive sport jacket you’re wearing and yes you just managed to spit on yourself while driving back to work.

So that happened.

(Oh, I forgot: at some point early in the morning, the secretary made a run and brought me coffee. We had to pull the lids off to figure out which coffee was mine and which was hers, and in my brief conversation with Shitheap, I had taken the first sip from the nearly-cold cup of coffee and spilled half of it all over myself, because we hadn’t put the lid on right. This is thus the second time that something connected to McDonald’s has led to foreign liquids on my clothing.)

I get back and eat in a hurry. It suddenly hits me that we never contacted the parents of the two boys from earlier in the day, the ones who were involved in the bullying issue and the threats to the other kids. Then it hits me that I don’t remember talking about them with the assistant principal. I stick my head in her office and ask if she remembers talking about them. She doesn’t. I look through the stack of write-ups she has.

They’re not in there. Neither is the note.

What the fuck.

Me and my co-principal tear my office, his office, the main office itself, and the conference room apart looking for these write-ups and, most importantly, that note. Nowhere to be found. I have been being very careful over the course of the day to keep track of all of my paperwork, so this is insanely aggravating that I can’t find the documents that I most need for my boss to see at this point.

So pile some extra aggravation on everything else at this point, with a nice little dose of incompetence. I really do not like feeling incompetent.

For reasons that aren’t interesting, our building is dismissing today in a different way from usual, one that demands that all the televisions in the building be tuned to the same channel and that all the VCRs be on. We do not have time for there to be technical glitches while this is going on, so my co-principal and I have been planning all day on going around to the classrooms and pre-testing everything before crunch time. It is now way too close to crunch time, and we abandon the search and rush out to get the classrooms set up properly. At some point we get dragged into the sixth grade team meeting, and they spend time I don’t have interrogating me about some details about our testing and data collection process, details that I only barely have to begin with.

We are down to our last grade hallway when I get a call over my radio that there is a parent to see me in the office. The parent wants to talk about “the bullying issue from this morning.” I spend a moment thinking how does he know about that already, thinking they’re referring to the boy who was being picked on shit I lost that paperwork and we haven’t found it.

Nope. Remember Phone Girl, my second conference of the day, 21000 hours ago? I was talking to her grandmother. This, now, is her father, who is telling me that he’s going to keep his daughter out of school until “this is resolved.”

I’m still, at this time, not entirely sure what the fuck “resolved” even means, because it’s been two weeks and the girl’s phone hasn’t been found and I can’t just snap my fingers and produce the damn thing, nor can I tell her to stop thinking that this other girl has stolen her phone because her thinking that makes the other girl’s parents upset. There is, in short, really not a thing I can do about this, short of magically producing the phone. I nonetheless promise to do some investigation tomorrow, having correctly predicted to his mother earlier in the day that I would not have time to deal with it during the day today. He says he is not sending his daughter to school tomorrow. Fuck it, it’s Friday, I think, and tell him that’s fine. I promise to call him after I talk to the other girls and send him on his way.

I walk out of the office to go back to tuning televisions and VCRs and discover that the father of Neck-Punch is outside, collecting Neck-Punch for a previously scheduled doctor’s appointment.

Fuck I never called him and told him his kid got punched in the neck.

(I predicted Thursday night that this story would take 5000 words; at some point in the last few paragraphs we crossed that line.)

I am in the middle of asking him if he has a few minutes to talk to me about his son when my radio bleeps. There’s a fight in ISS, or there’s about to be, and they need security. Shit. I give him the most apologetic look I can muster, ask him to hold on for a few minutes while I deal with this new bullshit, then race off to deal with ISS. Luckily, by the time I get there, the principal and a couple of other staffers have already gotten it under control. Guess who was fighting? If you said Shithead, you win. I don’t know who he was going after, though.

I mentally mark that Not My Fucking Problem, come back, apologize profusely to Dad, and explain the situation from earlier in the day to him, continuing to tell him how sorry I am for not getting in touch with him earlier– my meeting with the AP had completely driven his son out of my head and I’d forgotten about it. Luckily (again) he is as wonderful as his son, and after I bring up another couple of (unrelated) issues that my talk with the boy had brought up and explain what our options are for dealing with them, dad thanks me (I take a risk and reply “shukran,” which gets me a big smile from both of them) and they leave.

My compatriot comes to me with a huge smile on his face. He’s found the paperwork! He’d set it down in the AP’s office while looking for something else; entertainingly, it was in the room it was supposed to be in, just on a different shelf. Unfortunately, at this point, there’s no time to talk to the boys any more, much less call their parents, before dismissal. It hits me that we also haven’t done anything about the neck-puncher other than sock him in ISS for the day. All these, as well as official suspension decisions for the various other things I’ve dealt with throughout the day, will have to be finished after school.

Dismissal happens.

I have a few more conversations with my AP and then head home. You may recall how the rest of my day went since I’ve talked about it already.

There will, believe it or not, be a third part to this. But I think it’ll wait until tomorrow.

On why I will never be a principal (pt. 1 of at least 2)

On October 4, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching12 Comments

Thursday.

My day starts at 6:00 AM. I wake up and, as I do every morning, grab my phone off of my nightstand and check my messages, notifications, and other digital distractions while I’m waiting for my wife, who gets up earlier, to get out of the shower.

I discover that my principal and AP are going to be out of the building for the morning, and that myself and another staff member have been named designees for the day– basically, it means I’m the principal until they get back. (Important note: for the majority of this story it is necessary to remember that there is another adult who is working just as hard as I am for the entire morning. At times we are together and at times we are dealing with different stuff simultaneously. In other words, even though this post is going to be a mile long, this isn’t everything.)

I make sure to dress nice.

I get to work around 7:15 AM. The office is already full. There are already two parents with kids in tow, two or three kids at the counter, and another kid with his fists clenched and breathing heavy standing over in the corner with two staff members surrounding him and trying to keep him calm. I point at him. “My office, now,” I say, because he’s making a spectacle of himself. The other staff members usher him away. I speak with the secretary for a moment and determine that one parent is there because of a bullying issue and the other is needing a re-entry conference for a student who has been suspended. These will be the day’s first tasks. The three kids at the counter are there because of something connected to Swingyfists McBreatherson.

By the time I get to my office to drop off my laptop– a journey of perhaps 25 feet– it has already been determined that DCS needs to be called for Swingyfists. Our social worker is called from his other building (which he hasn’t even gotten to yet) and another staff member with an administrative license and a counseling background is called down to help with him. They’re in my office with the door locked.

I try to unlock my door– which has never been closed with me outside of it in the entire time that I have had this job– and discover that I was given the wrong key when they were handed to me and I never noticed. I have literally never locked or unlocked my own door.

My assistant principal waves me over. You’re not supposed to be here today! She tells me that she is not, in fact, actually there and that I’m imagining her, and that she’s just picking up some stuff for the meeting she and the boss are going to spend the morning in. She hands me a stack of referrals from the day before. “These kids have been spoken to and just need to be told about the consequence of whatever they did,” she says, showing me where that information is recorded. I need to call them down, tell them what’s happening, and then, depending on the kid and the consequence, inform parents, ISS, or our lunch detention supervisor to expect the relevant kids.

I get someone to let me into my own office. Swingy is crying; everyone else is congregating around him.

Five hundred and sixty-five words in, and I’m just now putting down my bag.

I leave more experienced staff to deal with the DCS issue and call back the parent with the re-entry conference so we can get that kid back to class. These are pretty simple; we go over whatever got the kid suspended, make sure everyone understands our behavior expectations, and outline consequences should behavior continue. They are supposed to be fast.

Dad comes back with his two kids. Two? Sister is with the kid I have a folder on. Whatever, I think, and go through the conference. It’s pretty straightforward, actually; without context it appears that the kid either mouthed off to the principal while he was originally dealing with the issue or the referral itself is being understated. My spiel basically boils down to “You’re being a shithead in class. Stop.”

Dad does not say a single word during the conference.

I finish my bit and ask if either of them have any questions. They do not. I give the kid a paper he needs to give to his teachers to prove he had the conference (he can’t be readmitted to class without it) and send him off, expecting Dad and sister to get up too. Neither of them move.

“Huh?”

Turns out sister was suspended too, this time for hitting somebody. They didn’t tell the office staff they were there for two reentry conferences. So I gotta go find her paperwork. On the way, I run into the 7th grade special ed teacher, who tells me that she’s pretty sure that the kid I just talked to isn’t actually supposed to be back until tomorrow. I stop him before he leaves the office and double-check; she’s wrong. I have the same conference with sister, except a bit more severely, because her suspension involved violence. Dad still does not say a single damn word. Off to class.

I call back the parent with the bullying issue and her kid, who turns out to be her granddaughter. Here is the entire story: 1) Two weeks ago somebody’s phone was stolen; 2) That person thinks granddaughter stole her phone; 3) She didn’t; 4) other kid isn’t convinced. At one point she threatened to call the police about it but didn’t.

Anybody in the same classes together? No. Are you being harassed about it by either the other girl in class or online? Other than this Facebook message from a week ago, no. Anybody threaten to hurt you or beat you up for stealing the phone? No. Are you getting hassled about it by other students? Sometimes they ask if I stole the phone. What happens when you say no? They go away. What happens when you walk past this other kid in the hallway? Nothing.

I am going to spare you the bullying rant. This is manifestly and clearly and obviously not bullying in any way. Note that grandma isn’t prodding the kid to give me additional details; it’s not like she’s clammed up. This is the whole story.

It takes half a damn hour to convince grandma that I’ll look into it but right now this is not a bullying issue in any way that I’m aware of. Off to class!

By this point, Swingy and his cohort are out of my office; I know not to where, and I figure it’s not my business.

Eleven hundred twenty-six words; it’s probably just barely 8 AM.

We start calling the kids from the previous day down. A few of them go smoothly. “You fucked up. Lunch detention.” “You fucked up. Go to ISS; stay there today.” That sort of thing. The few who I have to call parents for have no numbers that work in the system; the kids give me phone numbers and they don’t work. (This is a major issue in schools in poverty-stricken areas, by the way; there’s a post that’s been rolling around in my head for months about phone service as a civil rights issue that I keep not writing.) I can’t get ahold of goddamn anybody.

One pair of knuckleheads is brought down by their teacher, who gives me a note from a third kid about how the pair of knuckleheads and another kid have been threatening to beat him and his cousin up after school. Knucklehead A and B are already in ISS for the day; that’s the reason we brought them down. We speak with Knucklehead C and determine that he is only tangentially related. We read the riot act to A and B and send them off, but– importantly– do not call their parents, because our thought is that the bullying issue (and this really is a bullying issue) changes the game a bit and we don’t want to have to call them twice. We table this until after the real administrators get back.

MEANWHILE: While I was dealing with the three parent conferences, Shithead and Shitheel have gotten to school, half an hour or so late. Shithead and Shitheel are both eighth graders. Shithead is Shitheel’s uncle. Shithead, at fourteen, has gang tattoos on the back of both hands and up and down his arms.

They have arrived at school high as fuck, which is clearly apparent to everyone who interacts with them for more than a minute or two. My counterpart has been waiting for our SRO (basically, the building cop) to get back to him about what to do while the kids cool their jets in ISS. At some point around now, the SRO gets back to us: the kids are both to be searched for contraband. If drugs are found, the police are to be called; if no drugs are found, the kids’ parents are to be contacted and the kids are to be sent home.

We pull Shithead and Shitheel from ISS and have them dump their pockets and their shoes. Shithead is clean; Shitheel inexpertly attempts to hide two lighters in his hand. Lighters, by the way, are an expellable offense all by themselves. They are not drugs, though, so we don’t call the cops, but it does mean we have more paperwork to do. We start calling parents and get ahold of Shitheel’s mother, who is Shithead’s sister. She is with Shithead’s mother, who is also her mother. They need to come get the boys. They’re in Elkhart, apparently, so it’s gonna take a minute. Fine; S&S go back to ISS.

Right around here, somewhere, is when we got the “SECURITY TO THE ART ROOM RIGHT THE HELL NOW” call over the radios. My compatriot, who is in better shape than me, runs. I do not.

The story: there has been some back-and-forth “your momma”-ing between two kids, which was started by Student A. Student B, who I’ll call Shitheap, has knocked Student A out of his chair and started kicking him. The two students were separated and pulled into the hall by the teacher and a para, at which point Shitheap broke away from the para and punched Student A once or twice more again.

Now, I know Shitheap. Shitheap is one of the most cold-bloodedly remorseless kids I’ve ever encountered, and is badly in need of a psychiatrist. I’ve watched staff members walk him though the consequences of his life decisions right up to the point where he gets killed in jail and he just shrugs. This kid cannot be in school. On a better day, I have sympathy for him. Today– both in the sense of the story and right now as I’m typing it– is really not that day. This kid has been enrolled in our building for something like fifteen days and has been suspended for over half of them, all of those suspensions for fighting. He’s about to be put out for five more and this time I’m now pretty sure we’re going to expel him.

It might be 10 AM by now; this is the second expulsion-worthy offense of the day.

I cannot put Student A and Shitheap in ISS together, because Shitheap will attack him again. (Remember, Student A started the verbal altercation and the insults; he just picked an incredibly bad person to insult. He got his ass kicked, but that doesn’t make him innocent.) Student A is bleeding from his hand and is complaining about rib and chest pain, so I send him to the nurse first, with instructions to the nurse to refer him to ISS until I can get ahold of a parent. Shitheap is planted in my office. I ask Shitheap if there is any point to talking to him about what he just did.

“Nope. He deserved it. Go ahead and expel me.”

Okay!

Another factoid about Shitheap: he came to us after being kicked out of– wait for it– an online homeschooling program. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine how such a thing is even possible, as these things are notorious for being nothing but cash grabs that give no fucks about actually educating anyone. His mother works at the closest Subway to our school, and has made me many sandwiches.

I try several numbers on his emergency card and his little sister’s (sister, incidentally, is an angel) before deciding fuck it and just looking up his mother’s work. It’s close enough to lunchtime that she’s probably there; she seems to always be working whenever I go get lunch from there. Weird fact: the Subway website has no idea that that restaurant is actually there! When I call the number listed at another address on the same street, that number is dead. I cannot get ahold of anyone for any reason today.

I don’t have time for this right now; I put our attendance secretary on the task of getting ahold of his mom and finding the number and go deal with something else that, right now, I can’t actually remember. She finally finds Mom. I fill her in. She sighs, explains that she can’t leave work right now, and says that she’ll send his older sister to pick him up, but it may be a bit. I say fine. He’s already sleeping in my office. Whatever, fuck it.

(Mom, incidentally, has eight children, only one of whom is causing her any trouble, and again: the sister is an angel. Left as an exercise to the reader: how to support eight children on a job at Subway.)

Right around now two different things happen at about the same time: one, sister-mother shows up to pick up Shitheel and Shithead. She goes back to a conference with my compatriot that leads to forty-five solid minutes of weeping and crying about how awful her life is and how she’s the only one in her family with a job and how awful it is that she can’t trust her brother to be around her son because of what a bad influence he is.

Again: A better me has an enormous amount of sympathy for and empathy with this woman, who is younger than me and has mentioned her two grandchildren, one three months old and one a year and a half, several times. She’s apparently trying to get custody of them. She’s in a godawful situation to be in. I am, at this moment, unfortunately not that better me. Luckily, my compatriot is better at this than me and he handles the majority of this conference, which includes referring her to our social worker to see if he can get her some help.

Right about now, a teacher drags down… Swingyfists McBreatherson! He’s gotten into a verbal altercation with a girl in the hallway and she’s dumping both of them on us. No punches thrown, just a bunch of yelling.

What the hell is he doing in class? I think to myself, and then figure whatever, somebody higher up on the food chain than me decided to put him there, and put it out of my head. Keep in mind: other than knowing about a DCS referral, I have no idea what this kid’s story is, and I haven’t asked.

I am smart enough, though, even in my current massively misanthropic state, to realize when a kid is having a magnificently shitty day, and this kid certainly qualifies. I speak with him and the other girl. This doesn’t seem to be a big deal, just a flare-up from one kid that the second kid didn’t decide to back down from.

“You two pissed off at each other?”

“Nah.”

“If I send you back to class, are there gonna be any further interruptions from you?”

“Nah.”

“Are you sure? Because you’re going home if there are.”

I watch DCS kid very carefully when I say this. There’s a brief flash of fear in his eyes, but it goes away quick. I file that away for later.

I take them back up to class and talk to the teacher. She’s aware of the situation from in the morning, and I tell her that my theory is just that Swingy’s having a shitty day, flew off the handle, and that the girl didn’t back off, but that it’s not going to cause additional issues. I ask her if she’s okay with me just putting them back in her class and she says she is. Off you go!

Back downstairs! I see the same teacher from the bullying note in the morning outside the office. She has two more kids with her! One, a tall heavyset kid (a sixth-grader an inch or two shorter than me) is bawling. The other is a little shrimpy kid. He is angry.

Short version: big kid is a Jordanian immigrant, and neither speaks nor reads English very well yet. Little kid has been picking on him– making fun of the way he talks and reads, poking him in the shoulder, shoving him, bumping into him, all sorts of shit. The other kid finally snapped in the bathroom just now after the first kid shoved him while he was at the urinal and swung his arms behind him to push him away, at which point the little kid punched him in the neck.

The fact-finding part of the story takes twelve seconds, as everyone involved agrees that that was what happened. I tell the teacher to write up the little dude, send him to ISS, and send the other kid to the nurse. I turn around. There are two high-school aged girls standing behind me in street clothes.

“Can we use the bathroom?”

I blink a couple of times. Why do you want to use the bathroom in a middle school why the hell aren’t you in class what the hell is going on who the hell are you people anyway what the hell is happening oh wait I know one of you.

Incidentally: that’s 3000 words. It’s not noon yet.

And I have to go have birthday lunch with my mom, and that’s sorta a cliffhangery place to end the story, so this is going to be the end of part one. I’ll try and give you part two later today.

In which it wasn’t supposed to be a good day

On January 21, 2014January 21, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Teaching3 Comments

Here’s what was supposed to happen today: Spend all morning struggling with seventh graders fresh off a four-day weekend, who happen to have a test tomorrow, a test where I unfortunately am far more invested in their scores than they are. Immediately after school, have a data team meeting. At six– which gives me enough time to go out and grab something fatty and gross for dinner from someplace nearby– spend another hour at school for the seventh grade’s Parent Night, an event that historically has been impossible to project attendance for– that said, I am projecting an attendance of zero, which is embarrassing, and also probably means that attendance will be a hundred and I will look unprepared. I have a presentation and am running an activity. This will last until seven. I am doing this because I am a team player and I care about my building; I am really, really not looking forward to it.

Then go home, spend six seconds with my son, and basically go to bed, because I’m still all beat to hell from spending all day yesterday throwing cement board around.

During homeroom, my boss walks in and waves me over to the door. First, he tells me that our after-school meeting is cancelled in favor of the all-day thing we’re doing on Thursday this week. Then the awesome thing happens: “Thinking about postponing Parent Night, too,” he says. There’s bad weather coming tonight. I do everything short of literally falling to my knees in the hallway begging him to follow through with this plan. Hey, wait! Maybe this will be a good day after all!

Halfway through Success period Kid #2 of The Kids who are Always Suspended and are Now Both Expelled strides into my class and loudly announces that he’s back, thus literally managing to do something wrong and annoy me the very second I become aware of his existence. Jihad was expelled for the last month and a half or so of first semester; I had been told that he’d been strongly encouraged to go elsewhere and as of last Thursday my assistant principal was still telling me she was pretty sure he wasn’t coming back.

Really, universe? You give me my evening back and then put fucking JIHAD back in my classroom? You’re fucking kidding me right now, right? Whose Wheaties did I piss in this morning?

Fuck.

He needs to know what Success group he’s in; fine, go to Teacher X, just get the hell away from me. After Success ends I walk down to Teacher X’s room to let him know my reasoning for having done this terrible thing to him. By the time I get back to my room, Jihad– who has just missed something like seven straight weeks of school— is already making as ass of himself in the hallway with another kid whose behavior has been more or less on point since he got kicked out.

Relevant point: I have not written so much as an ISS referral in 2014. No detentions, no office referrals, no ISS time-outs. Nothing.

He managed to make it through math. That said, his influence was felt; first and second hour were the worst-behaved they’ve been in weeks– which is what Jihad does. Not only is he personally a shithead, he makes everyone else around him worse-behaved than they otherwise would be. He got put in ISS on a time-out during 3rd hour. I had to personally refer him to the cafeteria after third hour ended because he was trying to start some shit with some kids in the hallway, and after lunch he decided to run his mouth to one of the eighth graders (with thirty or forty kids, all hooting and hollering and expecting a fight, in between him and the other kid, which is the only way he ever runs his mouth) and I personally took his ass to the office. He, naturally, blamed me for the entire encounter– I apparently left my classroom, walked all the way down the hallway, then took him to the office for nothing more than putting his arms above his head. I have time for that! I do it every day.

Apparently Momma decided to buy his line of bullshit– surprise surprise– and I put a quick end to it by pointing out that the entire interaction was captured on video. Which it was. And said video entirely confirmed my side of the story. Because, as it turns out, I do not leave my students to walk halfway down the hall to take a kid to the office for waving his hands over his head. I am, however, rather likely to go down the hallway to get a kid who is obviously trying his damnedest to instigate a riot and haul his ass to the office.

Momma did not enjoy our parent conference; Jihad managed to make it through barely half the day (there are four class periods after lunch) before being suspended for three days, and stormed out of the office insisting that she was withdrawing him immediately.

I feel compelled to point out that this is not the first time I’ve heard that. So we’ll see if he actually drops off my roster. But if I don’t have to go to my meeting, don’t have to go to Parent Night, and I’ve seen the end of Jihad? That’s a good day.

Speaking of scary old men…

On December 19, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching6 Comments

Tomorrow is the last day before Winter Break. I let my kids know on Tuesday that there were two ways Friday could go; they could behave well (or at least reasonably) throughout the week and we could watch a movie while I did one-on-one test talks in the back of the room, or I could give them an enormous stack of worksheets that they could do in silence while I did one-on-one test talks in the back of the room and periodically sent someone to ISS for catching my attention at the wrong moment.

My seventh graders chose… poorly. They will not be enjoying tomorrow very much. My 8th graders will be watching The Avengers during fifth and sixth hour. They’ll likely be obnoxious about it but at least that group is fun. It should go fine.

Then it becomes Actually Time to Deal with the Bathroom Time, which is redundant on purpose because Yes Really Dammit It’s Time Now. Which is its own entire set of things and by the way I still have no damn idea what the hell I’m doing.

Whee.

So, remember when Jihad got expelled and I was down to one of the Kids Who Are Always Suspended left in my room? The end of the day Monday featured a gym-clearing brawl that I’m half-convinced wouldn’t have happened had I been there, and now both of them are expelled. You would think that this would lead to my classroom becoming functional; evidence from the rest of this week suggests that to not be the case, but the week before Winter Break is always gonna be more chaotic than usual, so we’ll see if they’ve settled down at all once we get back in January.

Jihad, surprisingly, decided to go the Defiant Asshole route at his expulsion hearing, which was this week– I figured he’d go for Poor Maligned Misunderstood Little Boy– and while we only asked for a semester away they may actually expel him for the entire school year based on his attitude at the hearing, or at least mandate that he attend another school when he’s allowed to return. Apparently the reading of my statement was a high point of the hearing; the chair of the committee was my principal in fourth grade, and apparently told Jihad that if he’d pissed me off that much there wasn’t any way she was taking anything he said seriously after that. What makes me especially awesome is that I actually predicted in my statement the exact line of defense that he would attempt at the hearing and stomped it to rubble. There was apparently laughter among the committee members when they got to the “Jihad will probably insist that…” portion of the statement. I’d nailed it, practically word-for-word.

Which kinda entertains me.

One more day. I can do this. Honest.

Really.

I swear.

In which I dodge a bullet

On December 5, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn ParentingLeave a comment

Had a bad moment with the boy the other day.

He’s been throwing things lately. This, in and of itself, isn’t such a big deal; toddlers throw things. We encourage throwing when it’s a ball, so long as he’s throwing to and not at, and discourage throwing just about everything else. Generally, something along the lines of “Don’t throw things!” or “We don’t throw books” or “You’ll hurt the dog” has been good enough to get him to stop. Rarely– I mean, it, rarely— we have had to tell him twice.

He is almost 2 1/2, just for the record.

The other day, he threw his fork at dinnertime. This earned a sharper reprimand than usual as throwing a metal fork is somewhat more dangerous than throwing many other objects. We picked it up off the floor and gave it back to him and he threw it again. This time, he missed my head by maybe an inch.

I… reacted somewhat strongly. Verbally only, mind you, but more severely than perhaps he’s used to. He was done eating anyway, so we washed him up and then told him to walk around the table and pick up his fork and give it to me. Which he did– mostly. He walked around the table. He picked up the fork from the ground. I held out my had for him to give it to me.

And he gets this look on his face.

Oh hell no, boy. Don’t you even think what you’re thinking right now, because goddammit I’ve never spanked a kid in my life and I swear to god I may not be able to stop myself if you throw a fork at my face right now.

Out comes the teacher voice.

“Give. The fork. To me. Now.”

He very clearly spends a moment considering his options, and hands me the fork.

Which… good, because I really didn’t know where I was going after that, and heading into a potential You Really Need to Understand I’m Serious Right Now moment without a game plan is never a good idea, either in my classroom or in my house. I’m ambivalent about spanking right now; I don’t see that in general it’s going to do much good with a 2-year-old who wouldn’t know what “I’m going to spank you if you do that” even means, and in general I’d prefer to never hit my kid. But given a choice between hit my kid and have him believe that throwing sharp things in my face is okay… well, I’d prefer to dodge the issue altogether and not have to face that choice, actually.

I may need to spend some time reading up on discipline with toddlers.

You remember the tree that came down in the storm, right? Our insurance company estimated the cost to have it cut up and hauled away at $700, which doesn’t hit our deductible. The first estimate we got was two grand, and even getting that guy out to look at our shit was a huge pain in the ass because of all the much-more-important bigger jobs that were available all around the northern part of the state.

I’ve got a guy coming out tomorrow who will do the job for $575. Which is nowhere near $2000, and makes me very freaking happy.

Cue the normal concerns that you have when you get lowballed, of course, but if they do the job well I’m going to be recommending the guy to everyone I know. I may knock down other people’s trees to drum up more work for him.