Today was exhausting. We had a snow day yesterday for what turned out to be damn near no reason at all, and I kinda needed yesterday, as this is one of my Busy Weeks, so today was even more nuts than usual, especially since the AP began my day by handing me a stack of referrals from the last hour of Wednesday and asking me to deal with them.
For reasons that I can’t get into, I had to call a couple of seventh grade girls out of class and into my office toward the end of the day today. I picked them from a list of kids I could have chosen because I know both of them fairly well, relatively speaking, and because as near as I’ve been able to tell they’re both relatively smart and honest kids. They both happened to be in the same class and so came down together.
They walk into my office and one of them asks if they can shut the door. “I don’t want to talk about this with the door open,” she says.
I raise an eyebrow. There is literally no way that she can have any idea what I want to talk to them about. It’s flatly impossible.
“You two are in so much trouble,” I say. I am doing this to fuck with them. They’re not in the tiniest shred of trouble, but I know they’re both good kids and they’re going to temporarily freak out if I tell them I’m mad at them.
And they don’t react.
Um.
“So, uh, why do you think I called you down here?”
“The Ellie Mae thing,” one of them says. Now, I don’t know who Ellie Mae is, and that’s not her name, but it’s close enough in a way that entertains me.
I look at the other one. “You’re both involved in this, right?” She nods.
Note that I didn’t even know they were friends. This is hilarious.
“Tell me your side of the story,” I say.
Two minutes later, having been led through a dizzying shitstorm of names and social media accounts and a web of cousins and aunts and uncles so thick that I halfway want to start drawing a map, I halt the conversation and tell them why they’re actually down in my office. “We will deal with this other thing afterwards,” I say, parts of my brain screaming at other parts of my brain to run. Because this has every sign of a Sally told Sherry that Susie told Sammie that Sharon saw Shayna say to Shalynn that Sally’s sister’s boyfriend’s third cousin was a slut, and I want nothing to do with it.
But, because I am a rockstar, I sort everything out and issue instructions for what is to be done on Monday. Only problem is that what was supposed to be a five-minute conversation ended up taking 25.
But I love it when they accidentally rat themselves out like this.
I walked into the building in less than a fully chipper mood this morning, said “good morning” to the first several students I saw anyway, and was rewarded with nothing but sullen stares for my trouble. Well, fine, fuck ’em; I went into my office and started working on paperwork that had been building up over the last several weeks.
