harassment – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

Random, before I start: my neighbors have big (thirty feet? I’m bad at estimating distances) columns supporting a portico (or are the columns part of the portico? I’m also bad at architecture) in front of their house. There’s an honest-to-god woodpecker at the top of one of them; I heard the bastard when I got out of my car after getting home this afternoon. He’s ~~wailing~~ whaling (bad at homonyms!) away up there. Is that something I should tell them about?

Anyway. It’s bullying awareness week, or some such bullshit. Or maybe it was last week; I’m not aware enough to be sure. Here is how most people think bullying works: A bunch of children mercilessly pick on one poor bullied student, causing him to be very sad and blah blah blah. Here is how bullying actually works, most of the time: everyone involved is an asshole and a bad actor and everyone involved is doing their best to make everyone else involved miserable as best they can, and the ones who are either the sneakiest or the quickest to file paperwork get to be the “victims” while everyone else gets to be the “bullies.” Oh, and every time the word gets used I have a legally-mandated two days to “do an investigation” and a bunch of complicated paperwork to fill out, only to find out that Suzie told Allie that Shelly said that Sammi said that Sharon said that Allie said that Sheryl was a slut, only it turns out that Shelly didn’t actually say that, Sharon said that Allie said that to Shelly but Suzie is dating Sammi’s ex-boyfriend and Sharon’s mad at her because of it so Suzie actually said that Sammi was a slut because she was defending her on Facebook and today this is a world-ending crisis and the very second I’m done with the paperwork they’ll all be best friends again and oh never mind we worked it out until they hate each other again next week.

If you think I’m exaggerating, you’re not a teacher. I have been doing this job for twelve years and I can count the number of unambiguous instances of clear bullying that I have witnessed on one hand. Everything and I mean everything else has been mostly-mutual teenage bullshit of some kind or another.

That said, one of the events I’m about to describe so far may actually be pretty clear-cut, but I haven’t done my investigation yet.

Keep in mind, by the way, that these are seventh-graders. Thirteen-year-olds.

My third and fourth hour got wrecked because of some vile combination of the following events: 1) One student suggesting to another student that she’d be open to a threesome with her ex-boyfriend and one of his friends; 2) That student reporting to the ex-boyfriend and the buddy that said threesome was a possibility; 3) Upon being asked about the possibility of said threesome via Facebook message (I’ve not seen this message, but other staff members have) the original young lady replied “No… well, maybe… LOL” and then was 4) surprised somehow when the two young gentlemen in question told everyone they knew that this was going to happen. And then during art today there was apparently 5) an attempt to get the threesome bargained down to some oral sex for the non-ex-boyfriend while the ex-boyfriend, apparently, watched. Throw in a different ex-girlfriend of the same dude doing her best to keep her nose in their business and one of the two guys deciding to try to get everyone to ostracize the second girl in the first conversation and you have eaten my entire day, as all four of the principals involved are in my third and fourth hour.

Note that, legally, this isn’t bullying, and I know this because we just had a meeting where we went over the legal definition of bullying in great detail. And also note that none of it took place in school and yet it destroyed not only my entire day but at least two other staff members’ days as well. (And while we’re noting things, note that this still qualifies as sexual harassment and it’s not being ignored.)

I’m leaving the school counselor’s office after spending the first half of my prep period with her and one of my paraprofessionals hashing all this out and making sure we’ve written down everything and notified everybody we need to notify. I’ve done no actual preparing during my prep period. I never do any preparing during prep; that’s Fireman Hour.

I walk to my room, sit down at my desk, and start composing an email. The teacher next door walks into my classroom with another kid in tow– a student who I had in sixth grade two years ago who I just last week had referred to a risk-assessment psychologist on account of she’s cutting herself. The student is being disruptive and making her job impossible and can she stay in my room for a bit? Sure, why not, this email’s gonna take me a few minutes and I’d prefer to have a good excuse to stay in my room if I can have one.

Less than five minutes later, I’m taking her back to the nurse because she’s started shrieking and ranting about how ridiculous it is that anyone thinks they can stop her from hurting herself because it’s her body and she’s gonna hurt herself if she wants to. Well, fuckin’ great, let’s go talk to that psychologist again. I go get the counselor (whose office, remember, I’ve just left) again and that eats another fifteen minutes of the only break (to do everything else I have to do but teach) that I have each day. I have just enough time to run down to my room and get something that I need to have photocopied by the morning; I make it down to the photocopier as the bell is ringing and discover that the photocopier is broken.

Well, great.

Off to the gym, where I make the seventh and eighth graders sit where they’re supposed to and call off buses as they arrive. I spot one of my (7th grade) homeroom girls, normally the sunniest, biggest-smiled kid you’ve ever seen in your life, sitting in the stands, bawling her eyes out.

No goddammit don’t ask this can only cause trouble what are you doing jesus this day is long enough don’t you NO GODDAMMIT YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW WHY ARE YOU WAVING HER OVER JESUS STOP IT NO NO

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

I consider simply replying “Bullshit” and don’t; there are a few buses gone by now and there are a bunch of other teachers in the gym, so I can pull her into the hallway without officially abandoning what I’m actually supposed to be doing.

We go into the hallway.

“Let’s try that again.”

She takes a deep, shuddering breath. Sobs again.

“Sweetie, there’s absolutely no way I’m letting you get on the bus like this. Tell. Me. What. Happened.”

“(Eighth-grade dumbfuck) won’t leave me alone. He asked me out yesterday and I said no and he just keeps asking and he’s been bugging me about it all day. I can’t get him to stop.” And she starts bawling again.

Which: again, not bullying. But is, again, at least at first blush, a pretty damn clear-cut case of sexual harassment. By some sort of divine providence, the dumbfuck in question is part of the reason that the wrist-cutter earlier got put into my classroom; the two of them were feuding about something too.

I note that he’s already left and ask her if he has her phone number and if she thinks he’ll be calling or texting or Facebooking or anything like that tonight or if he knows where she lives or if she will be quit of him until school starts tomorrow. She confirms that he has no way to get in touch with her and I tell her that we’ll talk about this tomorrow morning. I reflect that she has many older brothers (like, seriously, at least four, plus at least one sister) and consider simply making sure that they have this kid’s address.

I put her on the bus and stop in the counselor’s office on my way out, asking her if she has any room on her lap left, and (as I am mandated to do by law whenever I encounter instances of sexual harassment or bullying) notify her as to the content of the conversation I’ve just had and that I’ll be following up with my official within-two-work-days investigation during homeroom.

At least I know what I’ll be doing during seventh hour tomorrow.

OH WAIT SHIT I FORGOT THIS PART edit: I end the conversation with the counselor early because there is a parent in the office who is screaming at the attendance secretary so loudly that I can hear it halfway down the hallway through two closed doors. As it works out, both the principal and the assistant principal have been out of the building all afternoon at different meetings and so there is really no one in the office who the secretary can refer her to.

“Yeah, I’ll talk to you tomorrow, I’mma go deal with that,” I tell the counselor, and leave her office, attempting to summon my Calm Face. Luckily for (very likely) everyone involved, by the time I got down there another teacher had intervened already and maneuvered the lunatic into the hallway and out of the office. As it turned out he was apparently who she was looking for anyway; I hung around for a minute until I decided he didn’t really need any help (turns out that kids who are angry psychotics tend to have angry psychotic parents; who knew?) and went down to my room to get my stuff, the music of her discontent accompanying me the whole way.

The end.

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Mostly depressing, at least; one of them is sorta funny because I’m an idiot and one of them has a tiiiiiny ray of humor that will force you to cackle and then feel bad about it if you have a really twisted sense of humor and are a bad person. Which: you’re reading this, so… yeah.

My lovely wife has not been feeling well these last couple of days, so I was asked to pick the boy up from day care on my way home from work. Normally this is her job; she drives past day care on the way to and from work so it makes a lot more sense for her to do it than me. She also physically pays the bills for day care so the office staff knows her from that.

Me, I’m around there much less often. I generally only pick him up or drop him off if she can’t do it, which works out to about once a month. Lately they’ve had some turnover in their staff and apparently a couple of people who worked elsewhere at the day care have moved into his room, so my face is even less familiar to everyone than usual. Also: I’m a big fat bearded bald guy, and I tend to scan white supremacist until my not-quite-as-obvious nerd nature takes over.

Included in the text from my wife to pick him up was the important detail that he had a box of snacks in the refrigerator and a jacket that I needed to remember to bring home. Okay, no problem. The jacket will be underneath his cubby. Cool; I can handle that. What’s the door code again? New text with that; I’m on my way.

I let myself in, nod at the front desk people (who don’t stop me) and walk into my son’s room. At first it’s obvious that no one in the room recognizes me and the boy is facing the other way; for some reason, rather than call out to him, I wait for him to turn around and notice me, at which point he comes running over with his arms up and the adults in the room appear to breathe somewhat of a sigh of relief. There are hand-painted leaves hanging on strings all over the ceiling; he points these out to me and I happen to notice his. These weren’t hanging up the last time I was in there and he seems really happy to be showing them to me.

This is the part where I’m an idiot, but keep in mind what I do for a living. The leaf has his name and 8-23 on it. In my line of business, when you put a date on something, that’s the date you did it. I remark, mostly talking to him, but loudly enough that the adults in the room hear me, that that’s been hanging there for a while and I didn’t remember seeing them the last time I was there. I then make eye contact with one of the minders and ask about the jacket. She points out his cubby.

There are two jackets on the peg underneath his cubby. I don’t know which one is his. This one gets me some serious side-eye and she grabs his jacket. Understand that I have a good reason for this: the jacket was unearthed from the basement like two days ago and I’ve never seen him in it– because I don’t take him to day care and the way weather in Indiana works this time of year is that you have the heat on in the morning on your way to work and then have the air conditioning on on your way home. The damn thing is effectively brand new, and since we pulled it out of a box of hand-me-downs as opposed to going out and buying it I have a perfectly good reason to be unfamiliar with it. Hell, it’s not like he could have picked it out.

I sign him out and turn to leave and my eyes happen to fall on another leaf. This one has a date in July on it. And it hits me: that’s not a turn-in date, it’s his goddamn birthday. I know my son’s birthday, goddammit. Even if I can’t remember exactly what time he was born anymore. Middle of the damn night, I can tell you that.

Point is, as far as these folks are concerned, I’m the shittiest parent ever, and as far as I’m concerned I’m not a shitty parent– at least not for this– but I may not be too quick on the uptake, so it’s not like I’m coming off well to myself.

(Sidenote: My wife and I do not have the same last name; she kept hers when we married. The only time I ever regret this decision at all is when we’re dealing with the boy. I don’t care if she has my last name, but I would like it if the three of us had the same last name, if that makes any sense. Him having a different last name from her makes me look like an absentee father and I don’t like that at all.)

Anecdote the Second, the more depressing one: I’m in the gym this morning when a couple of sixth graders, both girls, run up to me. I know one of them fairly well, at least for a kid who’s never been in my room, and know the other one not at all. They hand me a note that the one I don’t know found in her locker at the end of the day yesterday.

“I didn’t write it,” the one I know says, which is kinda weird because I’ve not accused her of writing it yet.

I read the note. It may be the most obscene, sexually explicit thing I’ve ever seen in a school before. It’s from another student– presumably, another sixth grader, who bills himself as this other girl’s secret admirer. It begins by talking about how much he’d love to put his fat dick right into her mouth and have her suck on it for a while, and by the end of the note he’s fucking her in the ass so hard the tip of his dick is coming out of her mouth. At the end it asks her to write back and put her response to this well-considered proposal into a nearby locker– which, as it turns out, is the locker of the second girl– thus the panic about me accusing her of having written it. She offers to show me a sample of her handwriting; I decline the offer.

Perhaps the worst thing about this is that I genuinely can’t tell whether this note is meant to be sincere or whether the writer is trying to make fun of the girl or hurt her feelings. It’s obviously horrifyingly inappropriate, and God how big of a fuckup as a parent do you have to be that your kid thinks it’s okay to write notes like this to someone– but what makes it worse is that I think he thinks it’s going to work. The kid’s not trying to scare her or harass her– he may actually think this is a love note. Which may be the most fucked-up thing I’ve ever encountered as a teacher. Honestly, I think if it hadn’t referenced the other girl’s locker I might never have seen it. The girl who brought it to me seemed a little grossed out but otherwise wasn’t as bothered by the note as I was.

Sixth graders. And sixth graders in September, which is important– this is a year with a lot of development happening. This would still be surprising in May but not nearly as much. And, again– this note is beyond the pale even compared to the other shit I’ve confiscated over the years.

I bring the assistant principal over and hand the note over to her. We both suspect that we can catch the culprit with the cameras; I haven’t followed up yet to find out if they caught anything.

I promised a funny part.

The last line of the note– before the “Please reply in locker blah blah” part, and right after the bit about the trans-abdominal reverse blowjob– is “If it’s okay with you.” One sentence. All by itself.

I’m going to fuck you in the ass, eleven-year-old, until my dick comes out of your mouth… but only if you think that’s okay.

Yeah.