Hodgepodge

I know, I know, it's been a bit. For awhile I was not posting and had pulled a few down because Tom was afraid Wendy might be watching (i.e. TFA might come across my blog), but I've decided it's search proof and I'm safe. We'll see.

I went to New York last weekend, which was fun as always, except I caught myself a little cold. This was the worst possible week of school to miss because we didn't have school on Thursday or Friday, but yet I went home early on Tuesday and didn't go in on Wednesday. I felt guilty...but not really. We're learning to balance equations right now, which is going about as expected, but I assigned "helpers" - kids who really understood - to answer questions in class so I don't have to run around like a crazy person. I've also got Kaleb cleaning my room every day now for service learning hours. I wish I was able to relinquish control more often...

The real highlight of this week was on Friday when I was about ready to leave for work and got an IM from Michelle telling me we had a delay day. A two-hour snow delay for school...except there was NO snow, and there was no school! It was a great irony. I had a good chuckle.

Last week, Thursday brought utter insanity. In the middle of introducing the lab to my first period (this time we were mixing baking soda and vinegar and trapping it in a balloon to study the law of conservation of mass), Brown came in and told me he wanted me to hold a meeting between a parent and Ms. Queen. I got to be the boss because I'd witnessed the kid threatening Ms. Queen the week before ("I swear to God, if you open this door I'm going to slap the shit out of you, open the door you dumb bitch," etc.), so I was apparently qualified to serve as the administrator for the conference letter the kid had gotten. So we went to the meeting, made up, told the kid not to be a psycho, went on with the day. Everything else was moderately normal until just after lunch when I heard yelling in the hall. I walked out to see Ms. Land standing with Ms. Queen and this kid while the kid screams at Queen and Queen tries to talk to her. It escalated, and then the office answered in Ms. Queen's room... (apparently she'd hit the call button), "Did somebody call the office?" The kid ran back into the room and yelled "yeah, you better come get Ms. Queen because she's about to get the shit beat out of her." The rest is sort of a blur, but I remember Ms. Land trying to hold the girl back while she tried to attack Ms. Queen, and not really being able to (even being the short little Tyra-nasaurus that she is), and the kid being dragged off by 6ft something Mr. Williams, and then when even he couldn't hold her, being taken down by him AND Mr. Carter and being dragged down the hall on her butt, still screaming. I went back into my room to set down my popcorn (yes, I was eating popcorn during all this) and then to get the kid's phone number from Ms. Queen. While I was waiting for her to find it, one of my other kids (whose nickname is Chuckles) told Ms. Queen very politely that he thought she'd overreacted because really the girl hadn't done anything wrong at first. Ms. Queen then started getting pretty worked up, and though Chuckles never got confrontational, she ended up leaning across his desk screaming like a maniac and being almost physically removed from the room by Mrs. Stokes. It was...a show. Once she left I talked to the kids about acting sane so that you can be taken seriously, and about personal responsibility. I also discovered that a child who has not been to my class since the first day of school has been attending Ms. Queen's class for at least the last several weeks, and he rejoined us that day.

Ms. Queen, by the way, is the teacher who thinks that she and I are very alike. If that were true, I wonder why all of the kids would be telling me how crazy she is. Victor came up to me after this whole incident and said, "Ms. McCants, for real though, she is crazy." Apparently he'd been put out of class that day for asking if he could sit in a group because he was the only one sitting alone. According to Mr. Manning, Victor was put out of class another time for asking if he could borrow the transparency that she had taken down before he was finished looking at it. She put Ricardo out of class for asking her about a grammatical error she made on the board. She is a total nutjob!

So that's the drama. Oh, wait, that's not it. Thursday afternoon, right after the bell rang, Mrs. Stokes was in my room talking to me about the situation, and one of my kids, Unique, came in and said, "Mrs. Stokes, there is a fire on the wall upstairs." She just turned around and looked at him, so he elaborated, "You know, right outside Mr. Brown's room, one of the posters? It's on fire." She still was just looking at him, so after glancing at me as if to say "what is WRONG with this woman?" said "Um, did you want to come up and do something about it?" She agreed that maybe that would be a good idea, so we went up to find that sure enough, one whole poster was turned into ashes. We evacuated, and I didn't go down to get my coat because I thought there was a time limit on getting out (as the office staff came out 10 minutes later, that was clearly a misconception...), so I stood out and froze my tush for a good 15 minutes before finally going in to clean up the lab. What a day!

So that brings me to my trip to New York. On Saturday night, Rachel and I went to see her friend David in a play at a community theater, which was super fun. We went out after with David and his friends to get margaritas. The highlight of that experience was when David came in after running back to the theater to get his wallet and being greated by a huge round of applause from the whole restaurant, started by his friends. It was so cool. We had a good time, walked through the city in the rain, and got back to Rach's and crashed. The biggest high point of Sunday was my delicious NY bagel, since was totally sick otherwise. But I got back to Baltimore unscathed, despite my death-defying solo travel to and from the train station (my dad is ultra-paranoid).

So then there was this chill week, and now this relaxing weekend, and now I don't want to go to school tomorrow. I know, this always happens. I was supposed to be in Colorado Springs on a recruitment trip, but it got cancelled...tragedy. I'm about to start mushing up the guacamole for the Super Bowl, and hopefully planning something productive for the next few days. Sigh...off we go...