Whoops

We all know that we changed clocks a couple weeks ago. The week before we did, a couple of us at school had a conversation about what was going to happen with daylight. The confusion was over whether it was how changing the clocks was going to affect sunrise and sunset. After much discussion, we finally realized that the sun was going to rise later in the morning, and set later at night. Whoopie.

So on the day we changed the clocks, before I went to bed I made sure that my clock was right. Triple-checked it. Made sure the alarm was set right. I had adjusted my alarm the previous Friday because a student was meeting me early at school to make up a test. So I reset the alarm to 5:30, and went to bed, confident I'd be up at the proper hour.
Monday morning I woke up feeling quite refreshed. I got a good, long in-bed stretch, and thought, "Wow, I feel great! What a great night's sleep I had! AND I woke up before my alarm! What a great way to start the day, and the week!"
So I open my eyes, roll over, and then I realize that it's light out.

Waaaaiiit a minute here... I pull focus, and my brain realizes that no, I'm not dreaming. I quickly turn towards my alarm clock, and note the time: 6:55AM.
School starts at 7:30. It's 40 minutes away. And I'm in bed, unshowered and unclothed. The number of times I said "shit" in the next 30 seconds might have been a record.

I call my department chair, Mary. A raspy male voice picks up her cell. Odd, I thought. "Hi, can I speak to Mary?"
The raspy male voice responds, "Hi David, it's Mary."
"Holy crap Mary, you sound awful!"
"Yea, I'm out sick today."
I very quickly tell her the situation, and she recommends I call JT (who happens to have first period off). I do.
"Hey JT, you at work?"
"No man, I'm out today."
"FUCK!"
I tell him the story. It's now 7:02.
Hang up with him, and it took two more phone calls to get in touch with someone in my department who was actually going to work. I tell her there's a worksheet on my desk, already copied, to be done by my kids first period. OK, first problem solved.

I leap into the shower, get rid of bed hair and wash the important parts, and get out in record time (at most, 2 minutes). I get dressed by grabbing the first things my hands reach, not caring at all if I wear something completely clashing, and grab my briefcase (thankfully, I had packed it the night before) and run to my car. 7:08.

I FLY down the road. Seriously, once I hit the highway, I was doing 80-85 (90 at times) through morning rush hour. Not really the smartest move. As I was laughing at myself the whole way down, I did think that getting pulled over by the cops would not have been a good thing to add to my morning. Thankfully, they were all busy with something else, and I made it to school un-ticketed.

I finally pull in to school at 7:45, and rush though the building to get to my classroom. I walk in, adrenaline pumping, getting smirks from the couple teachers who knew what had happened, and see my first period class completely bored out of their minds.
Another math teacher, who also has first period off, was teaching my class. Apparently her lectures are dry and boring in general, and so first thing Monday morning, they're pure torture. So the scene was set: completely eyes-glazed-over students on a cloudy Monday morning with a super-adrenaline-amped teacher. The glazed-over looks gave way to looks of "WTF happened to you??" If only I could catch my breath to tell them.
I figured that during second period (when my students were taking a test), I'd be able to calm down, catch my breath, and go about my day as normal. However, I wasn't able to. I was pacing the entire class. Not really helping the test-taking environment.
As it turned out, I wasn't able to calm down until the end of the day, and so when I finally got home, I did a face-plant on my couch and laid motionless for a couple hours.

When I finally came to, I made my way to my bedroom to took a look at my alarm clock to see just what had happened.
Time set properly? Check.
Alarm set properly? Check.
So wtf happened? Then the light bulb goes on over my head - I never turned the damn alarm on.

What a way to start the week... and what week it turned out to be. (to be continued)

On Being Young

Being a young teacher is a dual-edged sword. There are several teachers under 30 on staff at my school, and I've spoken with most of them about the ups and downs of being young educators.

A vast majority of them, simply due to the fact that they are teenagers, want to be older than they are. That's completely natural and understandable, and I remember feeling that way when I was in elementary, middle and high school. But they are so overfed with the MTV definition of "older" and "cooler" - namely, drunk, naked and partying all the time, that they don't have adults who show them that, "Hey, you know what? You can be adult, and cool, and not have to be a wastoid." It's been remarkable to be of late how much they feed off my reaction to situations. The word "shit" slipped out of a student's mouth earlier this week, and I counted 5 heads (out of 8 in the room at the time) who immediately whipped their heads around to await my reaction.
It's beneficial to have strong familiarity with the internet, cell phones, and all the other techno-devices they seem to be handed the day after they come out of the womb. The kids know I'm good at picking out the ones who are texting in class, and daily I hear, "Oooooh! Sniped!" after I ask someone to put away their phone.

But being young also means that the kids don't necessarily give you the automatic respect they give my colleagues with gray hair and wrinkles. It means that some seniors, and even some juniors, who have been in the building for a longer time than I, feel they own the place, that they are the Big Men On Campus, and that they own the place more so than the rookie teacher. That has certainly caused some friction between me and several students throughout the year.

But that above paragraph relates to me, being a male. The junior and senior boys give me a whole lot different crap than they do the young women teachers. To me, they feel the need to testosterone-up, and show that they are tougher, meaner, and stronger. If they only knew what "strong" really means.
The girls, by contrast, really don't give me much sass. I think that the female equivalent of the male testoneroning-up is to be catty and bitchy. So that's the shit they give the young female teachers.

The young female teachers, unfortunately, get it from both genders. There are plenty of boys who make inappropriate and chauvinistic comments to them on top of the attitude they get from the girls. But there are certainly those boys who have crushes on these teachers, and the teacher can say, "Well, I'm really disappointed in you," which is far worse than anything I could ever say.

"Wait until your third year," a colleague advised me. He argued that at that point, I'll have been in the school as long as any of the students, and that I would have interacted with (either in class, in the hallways, or on the sports fields) with a vast majority of them. I'll have a reputation in the school, and while there will always be those boys who try to show me up with their excessive displays of testosterone, those numbers will most certainly decrease.

Overall, though, I'd say the pro's definitely outweigh the cons when it comes to being close to the age of my students. To be an adult figure in their life who they don't mentally clump together with their "out-of-touch" parents is of great benefit to getting them to succeed through the tumultuous years that are high school.

Weather Or Not

So it turns out there is a far better weather-detection system than if you were to put together all of the Dopplar 9000s in the world. It is the student body.

Even the most slightly aware person can vouch for the fact that their moods are affected by the weather. And that the average teenager experiences (and expresses!) their emotions very vividly. Put those two things together and voila! you have an amazing weather prediction system.

When it snows, students act as if they've never seen the stuff before. Clouds and rain bring out the moody, depressed sides of them all. And the couple days spring has shined its head through the winter doldrums, the kids have been off the friggin' wall.

I had a conversation with the principal today, and he mentioned that March is his least favorite month of the school year. He went on to say that most of the knuckleheads seem to pull all their stunts this time of year. That March is when all the idiots seem to shine, and make their worst decisions. Given that March has the nuttiest weather of the year (60 and sunny one day, 32 and snowing the next), that makes a lot of sense.

Everyone gets antsy for spring to arrive. February and March are long months as we await the warm spring weather, colors, and clothing. When the sun finds a moment to peak through the clouds, and tease us with the coming attractions of April and May, everyone (student or not) gets naturally excited. Put that in the mind and body of an emotional (and often unstably so) teenager, and that's when you get students damn near impossible to settle down, limit their jokes, pranks, and other wonderfully immature actions.

I feel for the principal, vice principal, and other administrators who have to deal with the mess left behind by the impending vernal equinox. Certainly I alone have given them several students to deal with - in the last week alone, I have sent 5 students to them for various offenses. I think in the 4 weeks prior, I had sent a total of 3 down.

Ahhh, March. Weather isn't the only thing that acts like a lion these days.

I must say that as crazy as the students are acting these days, I can't say I'm all that excited about when we're faced with beautiful weather in May, and the kids are restless, and mentally suction-cupped to the windows.

To React Or Not To React

So often things happen in school which require a teacher to step in and say, "Quit it." As a first-year teacher, I am often conflicted whether or not I should do that. In an attempt to be as honest and sincere with the kids as possible (and a most earnest attempt not to be the stereotypical out-of-touch old geezer of a teacher), I am often unsure whether a situation requires me to step in.

The things that transpire in school mimic those that happen in real life. If I am in the grocery store, and I hear someone curse, for instance, or get impatiently angry with the cashier, I can turn a deaf ear or a blind eye. In the case of cursing, I rarely even bat an eye, unless someone unleashes a litany of expletives. However, the school's rule prevents cursing, so I frequently find myself saying, "Watch your mouth," when someone lets slip a "shit" or a "fuck."

But I have yet to answer what the big deal is if they curse? They are expressing anger or frustration, or placing extra emphasis on their comments.

Of course there are degrees to this. If someone (and this happened twice to me last week), openly says to me, "That's fucking retarded," when asked to do some work, or stop tapping on their desk, their ass is getting sent down to the office. However, a more benign example is when a student asks a classmate, "Hey, when can I come over and grab my shit I left at your place?"

There's also the do-i-or-do-i-not-say-something dilemma when someone sleeps in class. Or is late to class. When someone comes late to my class, or decides to put his head down on his desk and not pay attention, who's really losing out? The student will miss any notes given, any test or quiz announcements, any homework announcements, or any of the other things which go on in the class. So if he chooses to ignore these things, it's his loss, right? And he'll pay the consequences later when it comes time to take the test, or hand in the assignment, or do any of the required classwork. So why should I say anything?

But there's a part of me which feels as if I'm supposed to say something when these things happen. Am I? What do you think?

The Story Everyone's Asked About

It seems that the idiocy of teenagers comes in waves. They seem to share an internal "let's be stupid" alarm that is very well synchronized. There may be weeks without much ado in the school, and then one week where their alarms all go off, and their collective stupidity, laying silently dormant, explodes onto the scene.

There was one such week in October. On one Friday, I gave a test to my Algebra II students. Some of them thought it was particularly hard, and a couple stayed after the period to finish it. One of them, the main character in this story, who has been dubbed Giggity by my friends, has his stupid alarm go off early, and he decides it's a good idea to speak on his cell phone. Everyone knows that cell phones are not allowed on a normal basis, but during a test, any cell phone use is immediately considered cheating. I say, "Giggity, what the hell are you doing?"
Giggity looks at me and has a mixed look of honest "What do you want?" and indignant "What's your problem?" I say, "You know that any cell phone use during a test makes the test a zero." He angrily replies, "You gotta be fucking kidding me!" Clearly I take his test and refer him to the office.

Upon coming into work the following Monday, I found out there was a fight at a party that Friday night between two students that landed one of them in the hospital.

Then during lunch on Monday, there was another fight, this time in school. This one occurred between the school's star athlete (a major headcase, and the same all-around prick who challenged me in class the first day of school) and a really good kid who suffered an amazing tragedy right before school started, when he witnessed his twin brother drowning. I know very little details on that fight, but certainly both kids don't need much to put them in a throwing-fists state of mind.

After school on Monday, Giggity stops into my room, and apologizes for his compound idiocy on Friday. He and I have a conversation about what it means to make good decisions, and I left feeling as if we had made some progress in his overall growth.

That was Monday.

Tuesday morning, there was an in-school student-to-student blowjob. This was not subtly done in a bathroom, instead this was performed in a small out-cove of a hallway. And they were caught by another student.
Now, having had such a (what I felt to be) productive conversation with Giggity the day before, I was surprised (but, in retrospect, not really) that Giggity was the recipient of the fellatio.
The fallout of the BJ produced two more fights over the next couple days. The first of which happened that afternoon, and was between the girl who found herself on her knees that Tuesday morning and the (very recent) ex-girlfriend of Giggity. That fight happened to be broken up by the same teacher who broke up the headcase fight the day before, and left all the teenage boys drooling over the idea of a cat-fight.

That was Tuesday.

Wednesday afternoon, I'm teaching my sixth period class and I see Giggity walk past my door. Nothing abnormal about that, but given the past couple days' of activity, my radar was up. All of 20 seconds later, I see him walk back in the other direction, and stop. Very shorty after that, I hear shouting in the hallway. I stop myself mid-sentence and rush out of my room, leaving my class alone, where I see Giggity and this girl (the one who caught him receiving the BJ) standing all of 5 inches from each other's face shouting at each other:
"What the fuck is your problem?"
"Why the fuck are you spreading rumors about me?"
"Rumors? You know what you did!"
"What the FUCK?!"
"What are you gonna do about it, pussy?"
"I want to punch you in the fucking face!"
Poetry. Pure poetry.

Apparently what happened was that Giggity, when walking back to his class, caught the eye of Queen Tell-All, who was sitting in her class. She made a gesture as if to say, "What are you gonna do?" to which he responded by flipping her off. She immediately got up and bolted out of her room and the shouting commenced. They were both suspended (since no teacher caught the act, he was punished for his language, and not for receiving the other tongue-lashing).

The aftermath of this among teachers I found pretty amusing. Everyone remembers the days of high school gossip and rumors and "What have you heard? I 'know' this..." It turns out that the teachers are as bad (and in often cases, much worse) than the students are when it comes to spreading gossip. I had several teachers come up to me and say, "So what do you know? Is it true?"
Waaaiiit a sec here... aren't we supposed to be the adults in this situation?

But of course, behind closed doors, the blowjob jokes amongst the teachers didn't end for weeks. A while after that week had ended, we were sitting at lunch and the music director was going through some scores as she was trying to pick some songs for the choir to sing. Reading the title of one, she chuckled and without saying anything, tossed it on the table for all of us to view. It was called, "Mouth Music."

As I mentioned before, high schoolers are a never-ended source of free entertainment.