suspension – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

Sitting on the couch in the living room right now, watching Hank Azaria do his impressions of Grover and Cookie Monster and Elmo, and really really hoping that as the Jimmy Johns in my belly digests it’s going to take some of the stress away. I don’t know how likely that’s going to be.

Things that happened today, or in the last few days: (this will format poorly. I will fix it later when I’m on a computer.)

It seems like about a third of my kids are suspended right now for one reason or another. At least one, a kid with a seriously nasty past who was pulling As for most of last quarter, has gone from being a student in pretty good standing to up for expulsion in something like two weeks, for two rapid-fire instances of theft (an iPad from another student and then some food from the cafeteria) and then beating the hell out of the kid who snitched on him for the cafeteria theft and then cussing the assistant principal out when he got busted for it. Note that each of these incidents took place on the day he returned from the previous suspension. He was only at my school because he got expelled from another school last year; it seems highly unlikely that I’ll be seeing him again.
A full-scale meltdown from one of my BEST kids (I don’t know what “BEST” stands for and somehow in seven years in this district have never learned; it basically means crazy kids and criminals, and should not be taken to refer to anything positive) involving having to be physically restrained by somebody about four times his size in the hallway and then causing no manner of destruction on his way down the hall– for, apparently, the second time in a row. This happened prior to my class; I don’t know exactly what triggered it.
I’m getting another new BEST kid in that same class tomorrow; apparently the two I have aren’t enough and someone downtown figured that if the first kid was getting expelled I deserved another disaster behavior student in that room. Occasionally these kids aren’t actually that bad and I can’t figure out why they’re in the program; this kid is coming to me after being kicked out of another school so I don’t have high hopes.
Meanwhile, my favorite student is moving to Arizona on Friday and another top-tenner is transferring to another school, also on Friday.
No less than four three-day ISS suspensions for girl drama related stuff; I’ll give you three guesses who might have been involved in that and the first two don’t count. If you said the blowjob-denier from a couple of weeks ago, give yourself a cookie.
The two Kids Who Are Suspended All the Fucking Time are both suspended again; note that these two kids aren’t the kids mentioned above. One of the two has still not made it through a single week of school (this is week… eleven?) without at the very least a day of ISS and for most weeks there has been out-of-school suspensions involved. Apparently he grabbed somebody’s tits in ISS. His mother continues to insist he’s a misunderstood angel. This also happened on Friday while I was out. I’m not sure what happened with the other one.
I wrote up one of my Algebra kids this morning for a situation that he could have ended at any of half-a-dozen points up until the point where I lost patience with his bullshit and wrote him up. There were something like six or seven other kids involved; all of the rest of them saw the wisdom of managing to go a few minutes in the morning without being idiots until they were no longer under my direct supervision. This one… did not. He spent the day in ISS; I found out from the assistant principal that afternoon that she’d been subject to a long harangue from his father about how all I ever do is pick on the kid and it was my fault he was written up. This student, by the way, is only in my Algebra class because we’re trying to keep him out of trouble; I am overstuffing my Honors class to keep this kid away from the shitheads he hangs out with who would otherwise keep him in trouble even more than he is. I made the point to him, and I’m happy to make the point to his father, that if he wants to transfer to a school where he will be allowed to hit anyone he wants, no one will stop him. If his father is foolish enough to pull this move with me instead of with my AP I’m going to take his damn fool head off.
(One of these things is not like the others, one of these things is not the same) I bought a Fitbit Force. I’m wearing it right now. Thus far it entertains me but I’m not convinced of its utility in the long run (which is shitty, because it was expensive) and you should expect a longer review after a couple of days.
OH RIGHT: Fleas. Everywhere. Mutant apocalypse indomitable indestructible fucking fleas, because I’m a fucking peasant in a hut in the English countryside circa 1658 and not a middle-class twenty-first century American in a goddamn six-figure house.
That line came before I added the video.
I just found a recipe for egg drop soup. I didn’t know I wanted egg drop soup. I’m startled at how happy this makes me.

It’s Thursday, right?

I have about 32 more hours as a vegetarian before I can go back to eating meat. When I first thought about doing this there was a real question in my head about whether I’d be able to pull it off or not; that fact is no longer in doubt at all. There is basically no way that I’m going to either accidentally eat meat or be forced to eat meat tomorrow, and I’m all done eating except for a stray snack or two for the day now, so I’m going to pull off a week without meat.

Do I want to try and go for a second week? No. No, not at all, thanks. At least not during the school year. Weirdly, it was lunches that killed me– as a teacher my lunch hour is a) extremely short and b) geographically constrained; I have to either bring my lunch with me, eat food from the school cafeteria (my usual choice) or race at top speed to one of several fast food/ grocery deli options in the area and hope there aren’t red lights or lines in my way. I tried to leave work for lunch once this week and the kids were like zombies outside my classroom door by the time I got down there. I just don’t have the time to leave the building, especially if I’m not racing. And cafeteria food is almost always meat-centered, and when it isn’t it’s rarely something I actually want to eat. (Generally, I don’t rag on our cafeteria food. But it’s terrible if you’re a vegetarian. Just not feasible at all.)

This means that I needed to bring my lunch, and I never really hit on anything that managed to keep me full for the rest of the day. Seventh grade has first lunch, meaning that we eat at eleven, and if I walk out of the building before 3:45 or 4:00 it’s a bloody miracle. So afternoons are long, and I need to make sure my lunches are filling enough that I’m not scavenging the corners in the hallways for scraps by the time I go home. I’ve been snacking a lot. Too much.

I think if I wanted to I could pretty easily shift to a plant-or-fish based diet for dinner five or six nights a week without it being that big of a deal. I do not think right now that I can include lunch in that. If I had a different job, it might be a different story, but with the way my lunches work right now it’s just too much of a pain in the ass to be including arbitrary restrictions into what I’m willing to eat.

Today was exhausting, by the way. My kids weren’t the problem; thinking was at as high a level as it ever gets and I didn’t have any particularly egregious examples of kids trying to pretend they’d never heard or math before or giving up on shit they know how to do. It was just one of those days where every time I thought I’d gotten something done or accomplished I turned around and there were five more things, Hydra-like, waiting where I’d cleared something out. Charmingly, the day ended with me and the security guard and both of our administrators investigating a stolen iPad in one of my classes; I’d not even been aware the thing was in the room, but the thief managed to convince the kid he’d stolen it from that I had confiscated it. The kid came running up to me at the beginning of last hour, practically in tears, begging me to give it back to him and not wait for his parents to get it and I had literally no idea at all what the hell he was talking about. It was lovely.

Oh, and one of the thieves (turned out there were two working together) was seven plus two kid from yesterday. So there’s a few more days where he won’t be in my room learning math. Meanwhile, the other jackass I discussed yesterday didn’t bother showing up for school today, meaning that he still has to serve his three days of in-school suspension when he gets back– so I’ll have him for a maximum of two days next week, and I don’t doubt his ability to do something on Thursday that will get him suspended again on Friday.

I think I’m glad it’s a weekend.