Dayzed and Confused

The last period sixth grade class went off the rails today. Within the first half hour I'd sent a third of the class to complete behavior reflections in Student Support. There was a lot of street drama; girls were fuming and threatening to get their crews and stomp someone or other. I was breaking up a fight between 4 foot 2 inch boys when the Big Cheese strolled in my room just as another fight was breaking out behind me--a girl grabbed a boy by the hair and pulled his head down while kicking him viciously in the shins.

After school I was commiserating with some other staff in the math teacher's room. We shared horror stories. "All I accomplished with the sixth graders today was getting them to copy three questions on a piece of paper. That took an hour and 15 minutes!" the math teacher said. Another teacher, from Cameroon, had been called a "black African monkey" by a young African American who threatened to kill this wonderful human being. The Big Cheese walked into our impromptu gab fest. "Take a big breath y'all. It's the long stretch between Xmas break and Spring Break, it was a delicious warm day, and the kids are bonkers. It's totally appropriate at this time to step back and hand out workpackets if they are not available for learning. You have my support!"

To complicate things a semi-autistic student of mine found a dime bag on the floor of my room after school as I was cleaning up. He and another student were marveling at it and saying "I think it's weed" when the autistic kid turned it over to me. A bunch of thoughts burned through my head, primarily among them the idea that both of these students had very active PTO parents who were going to hear about this immediately. So instead of ditching the evidence, I had to turn it in to the Big Cheese, who was like "just flush it--or smoke it," until I told her the kids who'd found it, and then she was like "OMG I have to file a police report just so I can tell those parents that I did something!" Baltimore's finest were bemused. "You should have just flushed it," they said. And then I had my formal observation debrief, which went swimmingly.

Tomorrow the Gov is visiting our school. I'ma hug him for signing the Gay Marriage law in MD!