Thanks to everyone who hoped I would get better. Things are coming and going out of all my orifices in the correct direction and at the right consistencies now, and “Feeling uncomfortable after eating at Hooters” has taken on a whole new meaning for me.
Yesterday, I was working in a 9th grade science class. An interesting thing about 9th graders and 6th graders is that they drop about 5 years in maturity during that year before rebounding to normal age-appropriate maturity the next year. There’s something about coming to a new school and being the youngest ones that sends about half of them barreling into full retard. An average 6th grader is a lot less mature than a typical 4th or 5th grader, and an average 9th grader is about on par with a 7th grader. I don’t know exactly what causes this, but it happens.
Anyway, the teacher I was working for warned me that in his last class of the day, a lot of the students were kind of goofy and he had two special ed. kids in there. One of them would start dropping F-Bombs if she was angry, and the other one would bang his head into the table if he was frustrated. He said that it was not uncommon for the kids in the back to try and antagonize the girl so she would start yelling fuck, which would frustrate the other student.
He told me about a day when the kids in the back had been screwing around while one of the special needs kids was slamming his head into the table and the other one was yelling “SHUT THE FUCK UP!” at the kids behind her.
Needless to say, I was a little bit nervous about 7th block.
I immediately started scoping things out when they showed up to class. The students in the back were, indeed, goofballs. The special needs kids were sitting in the front row next to each other. The girl was kind of quiet and slouched over with a scowl that made her look kind of like a clean shaven Phil Anselmo.
Seeing that someone looks like Phil Anselmo is awesome news if you’re looking at the lead singer at a Pantera concert or if it’s the attorney general (See below), but under the circumstances I was in … well, it was actually still pretty awesome.
Will Ferrell - Bill Clinton and Janet Reno
I doubled my resolve to make sure that nobody fucked with this girl.
And honestly, they didn’t try very hard. One guy whispered something to her when she walked by her that pissed her off a little bit. I saw her bristle at whatever he said, so I just glared at him and said “don’t” like I was talking to a disobedient pet. He made a half assed attempt to make up an excuse about how he had actually been talking to someone else, which I replied to with another “Don’t.” After that, either nobody bothered, or I didn’t pick up on it and the girl was just feeling calmer than usual that day (Which seems unlikely, because, like I said, she totally looked like Phil Anselmo.)
Later, one of the kids wanted to go to the bathroom. I let him. What can I say? I’m a generous guy. twenty minutes later, he still wasn’t back, which didn’t really surprise me. Kids do that all the time. The solution is to only let one person go at a time. When other kids ask me if they can go, I tell them that as soon as the other student is back, they’re welcome to. It seems to work reasonably well, because when the person who was wandering gets back, the students that want their turn to go slack are pissed off, and the people that go after tend to be quicker.
One of the guys in the back started half joking that if the guy who was out didn’t come back soon, he was going to just go in a trash can. We went back and forth for a while, and I ended up having to semi-seriously talk him out of peeing in a trash can, not really because he had to go, but because he thought it would be funny. I can respect that, and as anyone who took physics in high school with me knows, I can also relate, but it seemed like a bad idea to let someone do it in class. He grudgingly humored me and waited until the other guy was back.
So, I survived. It wasn’t the best day class that I’ve ever had, but nobody was slamming their head into anything, nobody was screaming “Fuck” at anyone else, and nobody took a dump in a trashcan.
(I just had a moment where I realized that those are the things I use to gauge how successful my day was. This is a strange job. Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe everybody does that. Maybe, when a doctor comes home from work and his wife asks him how his day went, he says “It was pretty rough. We kept getting more and more patients, we had this one guy that we couldn’t diagnose, and we lost a woman in surgery today.”
His wife nods and puts her hand on his shoulder.
“It’s not so bad, Sweetie,” she coos, “At least nobody took a dump in the trash can.”)
As I was packing up and leaving, the teacher who is in the classroom after me asked me how my day went. I told her that it was fine.
“Really?” she asked, giving me a skeptical look.
I told her that the last block had been a little bit wild, but we made it through in one piece.
Then, she told me a story about 7th block. Apparently, the last time the teacher I was there for had a sub, when she had come in and asked how the day went, the sub had showed her the right side of the room, where students had poured vegetable oil all over the floor and were sliding back and forth on it.
So actually, my day was really fucking excellent and I did an awesome job of classroom management, I guess.
Which reminds me: I don’t remember who, but I think that someone mentioned Phil Anselmo earlier. It would be a crying shame if I didn’t put a Pantera video in here somewhere. This song is 15 years old and still rocks far harder than most “hard rock” that I hear now. I’m looking at you, Nickleback.
You fucking pussies.