I got punched in the head today

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I’ve been writing angry emails since I got home. There is a planned sick-out happening tomorrow that I have made it clear I’m not endorsing or participating in, we had to cancel a field trip today because there is no one to chaperone it, and we not only lost another teacher on Monday but we’ve had at least three leave mid-day and go home in the last two days. The building secretary wasn’t in the office at the end of the day either and I’m trying not to panic about that.

Also generated this document based on a secret meeting of the teacher leadership team this morning. There is supposedly a Big Meeting tomorrow morning with the principal– it is not going to go well– and this is what we’ve come up with to present:

Members of the TLT team met Wednesday morning to discuss the behavior and staff morale issues that we have been having lately.  As a team we make the following recommendations:

  1. That our highest staffing priority right now should be someone to cover ISS, even if that means pulling someone from downtown or a member of the administrative team, and at least one if not two social workers, possibly also pulled from other buildings with less severe needs and on a temporary basis.
  2. That we determine if any of our most disruptive, disrespectful or violent students are from outside (school’s) district, and promptly return those students to their home buildings.
  3. That swearing at a teacher be treated as a suspendable offense.
  4. That a parent conference be required for any suspended student prior to being allowed to return to class.
  5. That any student referred to the office on a disciplinary matter spend at least the remainder of that class period in ISS and not be returned to the teacher’s classroom.
  6. That the uniform policy either be enforced or abandoned.
  7. That the “four level ones” policy in the Shared Rights and Responsibilities document be abandoned, as well as any other language impeding our ability to keep our classrooms and building under control, until such time as the building is under control.  The only thing this is teaching students is that there are no consequences for their actions.

We’ll see how any of this goes. I’m not kidding about getting punched in the head; I broke up a fight and it led to me taking a couple of wild shots to the head as the kid I was holding back tried to get to the other kid. Saw the nurse, got my bleeding hand bandaged up (didn’t even feel that happen) and filed a police report. Then got an email from the dean of students that that kid’s dad was insisting that we all provide her work for the next five days by the end of the day tomorrow.

You can probably imagine how well that went over. I haven’t had a prep period in over a week because I’ve been covering classes and I’ll be fucked dead by Asmodeus before I try to pull together five days of lessons for the kid who started the fight. Fuck you and fuck her, Dad.

I’m back on the job market; fuck this.

On the news

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I don’t know, as I’m typing this, whether this will end up being a thousand-word post or two paragraphs, because I really don’t know how much I want to talk about this and I won’t know until I start typing. So here we go: I do not intend to watch a single second of the hearings about the January 6th insurrection tonight, nor do I plan to watch them in the future, and in fact I’m not even sure how many days of hearings are currently scheduled. There is nothing– nothing— that these hearings can actually teach me about what happened that day; as near as I can tell all the committee has managed to do is confirm stuff that was perfectly fucking obvious from the day it happened. Of course the shitstain knew what was happening. Of course the highest echelons of the Republican Party were involved in planning it. The closest thing to a surprising detail I’ve heard in the last six months was that Pence’s staff knew that he was in danger, and Pence is such an indescribable coward that he has continued to cling to this wretched creature anyway.

Fuck it. Fuck all of it. I spend all day every day angry and I’m not going to deliberately add to it. I’m just not going to do it.

What I will do, of course, is keep an eye on fucking Twitter, which will no doubt keep me appraised of everything happening in the most anger-inducing manner possible. Or maybe I’ll just turn everything off and shoot Nazis all night again. I am a hundred percent not alone in this, but I would love to find a way to balance knowing enough about what is going on in the world to be able to consider myself an informed citizen with shutting off the absolute fucking fire-hose torrent of horror and evil the world has become. I can feel myself becoming Col. Kurtz over here, y’all, and no one needs that. Least of all me.

I’m going to shoot Nazis to bleed off some stress and then I’m going to watch the first episode of Ms. Marvel, and hopefully I’ll be able to do that without thinking about how fucking awful most of the people who share my hobbies are. We’ll see.

75 minutes on a Friday

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Holy cow, the stock photos you find when you Google “School fights” are totally hilarious.

There’s a lot that isn’t stock photos, of course, but I feel like taking a picture of somebody’s baby about to get their ass beat and putting it on my stupid little website maybe isn’t the move.

Let’s talk about my Friday.

I basically eat school lunch every day. It’s fast, it’s easy, it’s relatively inexpensive– the entree they give the kids costs the teachers $4 and I typically buy two, so $8 a day– and shut up, everything generally tastes just fine. Plus I don’t have to think about it (at all) or go anywhere, and I only get half an hour for lunch so anything that cuts out bullshit from that time is just fine. I walk my kids down to the cafeteria, grab my lunches, precariously balance one atop the other, go back to my room, and eat there, alone and in peace.

(Weird thing about this building: every other school I’ve taught at, the teachers generally eat together somewhere. Not here. Everyone retreats to their rooms. I generally don’t mind the quiet, but it would be nice to have someone to talk to once in a while.)

Friday, 1:00 PM. I have my lunches and am preparing to exit the cafeteria when I happen to glance to my right and see one of my students stand up, lean across the lunch table, and punch another one of my students directly in his jaw. There’s some power behind it, too; the kid’s head snaps back and I can tell he’s hurt. Amazingly, he doesn’t stand up or attempt to retaliate.

Shit.

Without putting my food down, I manage to get the hitter to take his own ass to the office and check with the kid who got punched, who, unsurprisingly, wants to see the nurse. Who isn’t in her office, so I need to find her, still with the kid in tow. I find the puncher trying to leave the office already and usher him back in, explain what happened to the secretaries, and tell them that the security guard also saw it (which is true) and that I’ll get it written up as soon as I find a place to put the hit kid, who for the purposes of the rest of this post I’ll call Hosea.

I find the nurse and get the kid taken care of. He’s in my fifth and sixth hour, which is right after lunch, but at this point I’m assuming I’m not going to see him. I get the office referral written. I have sixteen minutes left in my lunch. I eat. I do not have time to piss.

I get down to the cafeteria to pick my kids up and they start lining up when I perceive a ruckus taking place behind my line. I investigate to discover several of my 8th grade boys holding back another of my 8th grade boys. I look around for the other fighter and can’t find them, but it’s clear this is serious– if they let go of this kid he’s going after someone, I just can’t immediately figure out who it is that he’s mad at. At one point he gets loose and then I get to hold him back for a minute, but mostly these two particular kids have him under control while a bunch of others hoot and holler and generally make asses of themselves. I dismiss my line of kids with a wave and holler at one of the custodians to radio somebody— I don’t give a fuck who, but I need somebody higher on the totem pole than me down here, or at least the security guard, who is in the hallway.

We eventually get the other kid calmed down, and figure out who he’s so pissed at– a student who has, wisely, disappeared from the cafeteria– and I bring the holder-backers up to my classroom so I can write them passes to class, since they’re good and late by now but I figure it was for the right reasons. I discover the principal in my classroom; he heard about the ruckus on the radio but was already on the second floor and so, wisely, realized that I wasn’t going to be up there to cover my class so he sat in until I got back up there.

I like my boss, have I mentioned that?

A class period passes, and during passing period between 5th and 6th Hosea comes back into class. He doesn’t have a pass with him, but it’s not like I didn’t know where he was, and besides, it’s passing period, so I figure the nurse or whoever just held onto him until passing period and sent him up to me. No big deal; I explain what we’re doing. A few minutes later we take a bathroom break (due to the continuing saga of Devious Licks, we’re still on annoyingly modified bathroom policies) and I, as usual, am having to monitor kids in three different places.

I walk into the boys’ bathroom to see Hosea– Hosea, this time– punch an entirely different kid than the one who he had issues with previously, in the face. Hosea has his back to me and the other kid sees me come into the bathroom and witness everything, so once again, magically, I have a kid not fighting back and just letting the adults handle bullshit acts of violence. Which I appreciate; the kid he’s punching was suspended last week for fighting, so this is a minor miracle.

(As an aside, my building is not nearly as violent as this post is making it sound. Today is absolutely an aberration. This situation in the cafeteria is the first time all year I’ve had to put my hands on a kid during a fight or a lead up to one.)

Hosea, of course, denies everything. There’s a whole other post with this kid that I don’t want to get into; needless to say he is 1) one of the most consistent and 2) one of the worst liars I have ever met. He has never done anything wrong in his entire life and he will literally deny anything. The pencil in his hand? Not his. The website on his computer, which is open in front of him? He didn’t go to that website. The water bottle in his hand that he’s taking a drink from? He doesn’t have a water bottle, and he’s not drinking. Frankly, I’m willing to bet that his getting punched in the face by the other kid earlier was completely deserved, as he also lies on the other kids with astonishing regularity(*) and they all hate him. I spend as much time defending them from him as I do him from them, and it’s fucking. exhausting.

Anyway, Hosea didn’t do anything, and he won’t go to the office because he didn’t do anything; he’s not even in the bathroom, much less punching kids in the face, and the rest of them are sort of just standing there because they know good and well I was right there and saw the whole fucking thing. I hand him over to his paraprofessional (he’s also special ed, because of course he is) and get everybody else back in class and within a degree or two of functioning.

Fifteen minutes later, his para brings him back into the classroom, which, no, he punched somebody in the fucking face, I told you that, he doesn’t get to come back in the room. I glance at the clock and there’s about ten minutes left in class. I spend a brief moment contemplating whether this bullshit is worth it– a quick glance at the kid he hit shows that the dude doesn’t appear to care that Hosea is back in the room– and then, suddenly, the principal is back in my room again.

“Have you seen Hosea?”

“Yeah, I did, he’s right there. Did you see the referral already?”

“What referral?”

I’m confused at this point, because there’s no point in the principal being in my room to collect this kid if he doesn’t know the kid did anything, at which point I find out that Hosea wasn’t supposed to leave the office in the first place. He tries to play the “I’m not going downstairs” move with the boss for all of two seconds and I’m pretty sure the boss leans over and tells him that his ass is going to be in the office in the next five minutes whether the rest of him is attached to it or not(**) and he makes the decision to go. And I give the fuck up on class for the rest of the fucking day, because Jesus, this is enough bullshit for one Friday.

(*) AN EXAMPLE: Hosea is also in my advisory, and the kids eat breakfast during advisory. In homeroom on this same Friday, moments after the bell rang, I walked in and was informed by Hosea that a group of other students threw an apple at his head. The other kids immediately begin vocally denying that this has happened. I am by the door, and glance in the trash can; no apple. There is one (1) apple in front of one of the students he’s accusing; it is in pristine shape, with not a mark on it, which is not something you would expect from an apple that had been thrown at someone’s head. Nor is there any sign that an apple– an object with a lot of water inside of it that tends to splat when thrown at a hard surface– has bounced off of 1) Hosea’s head; 2) the whiteboard behind him; 3) the wall below the whiteboard; 4) the floor. I ask Hosea where the apple they threw is. He doesn’t know. I look around. No apple. He’s lying through his fucking teeth, for no clear reason at all. This happens every single day, except for the part where because Hosea is such an asshole to the other kids all the time, sometimes he’s telling the truth, because they do actually both 1) pick on him unprovoked sometimes and 2) frequently respond to his provocations. For example, it’s not at all beneath him to see the kid’s apple sitting in front of him and claim that the apple was thrown at him so that the other kid would pick up the apple and throw it at him.

(**) Probably not his exact words.

Welp

Luther M. Siler

Ended my day by breaking up a fight today, in the closing minutes of the school day, when either of the two idiots involved could simply have gone home and not had to see the other kid until Thursday, but then I guess we don’t expect good decisions out of people who are still, after all, children. That said, I pointed out to one of them after breaking them up that it was the second time in the not-quite-two-years I’ve known her that I’ve had to put my hands on her to pull her off of somebody.

…and I just sort of greyed out for a few minutes, and found a recording on TikTok of a teacher trying to enforce a dress code over Z0om, and now I kind of just hate everybody and I’m going to go play video games. I may need a day away from idiots myself.

On silence

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At some point during the school day yesterday, some young-dumb-full-of-cum dipshit (or, hell, maybe it was a girl, so just young and dumb) decided that it would be a good idea to scrawl an unspecified (as in I don’t know details, and frankly wouldn’t share them) “threat” against the building in one of the bathrooms. Whatever the threat was, it was apparently going to happen today. A letter went out to all the parents and, unsurprisingly, attendance was abysmal today.

Did I take it seriously? Not really. School shooters and teenage bombmakers (and, again, I have no idea what the details of the threat are) are wealthy white boys whose parents don’t secure their guns, and that’s not the demographics of my building. My wife asked why they didn’t simply switch to e-learning for the day, and the answer is frankly that if we were to do that we’d start seeing these things weekly, and that’s not a thing anyone is interested in. I remember when I was in high school a neighboring district that did quite nicely match the “we have school shootings” demographic went through a similar thing– their kids learned that bomb threats meant they got to go home, and they were averaging a couple a week for a while there.

At any rate, nothing happened. If they know who made the threat (and they probably have a good idea, as there are cameras near every bathroom entrance in the building) I haven’t heard about it yet, but nothing happened. No real surprise.

I have to say, I could get used to the idea that my classes are only nine or ten kids. One of my students commented to me on my second day back that he thought I must hate him, and when I asked him why he said that he was so squirrelly and talking all the time and had such a hard time focusing. And, like, first of all, no, I’m not even remotely close to “hate” for any of my current students and I think there’s only maybe three or four in my entire career that I’d apply that word to, and second of all: dude, yeah, you’re a handful, but there’s only one of you. The rest of the kids in that class are fine, and I can deal with one kid bouncing off the walls if he’s not one of half a dozen. That’s no problem at all.

(Truth be told, I genuinely like all of my kids this year, or at least the ones I know. That doesn’t happen terribly often, but I can manage a kid I just don’t click with just fine.)

At any rate, I didn’t get the impression that the kids today were especially scared or nervous, although I did send an email to the boss before school started suggesting that maybe they think about rescheduling the planned fire drill to next week sometime, a piece of advice that was followed. What I got was six class periods of silence. Maybe not the entire period, but definitely once they got settled down, each of my classes today had at least 10-15 minutes of complete and utter quiet. Which would make most teachers happy. Not me. I actually really don’t like quiet from kids that are working, although I need it during instruction. I prefer a low buzz, where I can keep half an ear open at all times and have an idea what everyone’s doing. It was too quiet today, spooky-quiet, and it’s interesting to think that this year might be the last time I have in my career where something like that happening again is likely.

And now, having dodged spoilers all day successfully, I’m off to watch The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. See y’all tomorrow.