The toughest week: part 1

Last week was HARD.

Rough part #1: Being sexually harassed at work...by a group of seventh grade GIRLS (!). Yes. Who would've predicted THAT? I've blogged before about how my playwriting class has devolved into mayhem -- even though it's only 11 kids, six of the girls (I secretly think of them as the "Nasty Six") should never be in the same class ever again, because they just goad each other into worse and worse behavior. Last Tuesday as they were (allegedly) working on their plays, one of them asked me if I was married. "No," I said distractedly while I went through some papers, "I have a boyfriend."

"YOU have a boyfriend?" they marveled incredulously, as if I were so repulsive they couldn't grasp the concept. Then they started asking me all these questions, innocuous ones at first: what's his name, do you have a picture of him, how did you meet. This, by the way, was the first time I ever lied about how the Nicest Guy in the World and I met (on Match.com). I never mind telling other adults, but I knew instantly that they would have a field day with that information. So I lied and told them we met at a friend's party.

But then their questions quickly descended into outright sexual ones. "Do you kiss your boyfriend?" "Are you still a virgin?" "Do you give your boyfriend head?" That last one shocked me so much, I thought I must not have heard it correctly, so I said, "What?" And she REPEATED it! No matter what they asked, I said, "That's really inappropriate and disrespectful. I'm not answering that. You have an assignment you should be doing." But they would just laugh their heads off and ask me something even worse. And honestly, I didn't know what to do. Administration has been on us to keep the kids in class and not kick them out unless it's a safety issue, and I didn't feel threatened physically...just emotionally! So I just took it for the rest of class until it was finally time to go. I was dreading class the next day, but luckily it was cut short due to an assembly. They asked if I'd brought in a photo of my boyfriend, which of course I hadn't, and when I said no, one of the girls said with a smirk, "No photo of your imaginary friend?" They don't believe the Nicest Guy in the World exists, I guess. This time they didn't get into the sexual questions, but probably only because the period was shorter than usual.

But the next day I was helping in one of the seventh grade math classes, and a group of kids on the side of the room kept looking over at me, whispering and laughing, so I knew they were insulting me in some way. I don't really care one way or the other, except that they weren't getting their work done, and they were distracting me and the kids I was helping. Then one girl from my playwriting class detached herself from the group, walked over to where I was standing, dropped a paper at my feet, and slowly walked away. Thinking she was just littering, I called her back to pick it up, which she did with a big smirk and handed it to me. It said, "Ha ha ha lolsz SHE GOT NO NECK = Ms. Artichoke." Which is kind of funny, because I actually have a very long neck -- these kids can't even make fun of a person correctly! Unless it's some kind of sexual reference I'm not aware of (I'm getting the distinct impression that some of these 12-year-olds know more about sex than I do).

I knew Mitchell and the other administrators would probably be pissed if I kicked anyone out of class, but I felt I had to nip this in the bud immediately. I can't do my job and actually teach the kids I need to teach if half the class is laughing at me to such an extent that it's distracting. So I immediately took the girl who dropped the note and the one who wrote it out of class. I did it calmly, but they were NOT happy about it. I brought them to my room for the rest of the period to have them do the math there, and the note-writer finally settled down and did some work. But the girl who had showed me the note, the one who's in my enrichment class, started crying and carrying on about how she shouldn't get in trouble because she hadn't written the note. Without permission she ran into Mitchell's office (no one was in there -- all the administrators were at a leadership meeting), and I watched as she called her mother -- which was great, since it saved me the trouble of dialing the numbers myself. ;o After she sobbed to her mother, I got on the phone, and told her not only about the girl's behavior in class that day, but also the things she'd said to me on Tuesday. "She was asking me really inappropriate and disrespectful questions, like 'Who is your boyfriend?' and 'Are you still a virgin?'" I explained.

At that, the girl burst into fresh sobs and hollered, "That is not true! I never asked who your boyfriend was!" Which I thought was really funny -- THAT was the question she objected to? But she admits to asking me if I was still a virgin?? Talk about being a few sandwiches short of a picnic.

Her mother was appropriately mortified, apologized on her daughter's behalf, said she should definitely know better and asked to talk to her daughter again. But again, she ran out of the room without permission, back to my room, where she wrote this statement:

"In playwriting I agree that I give Ms. Artichoke attitude. But I didn’t ask Ms. Artichoke if she have a boyfriend? And is she a virgin and do she suck boys penis. And ask her about her sex life. And her relationships. It was Inez. And Debony. Me and Karla be laughing at it. And they be sayin she got no neck – Janique, and others."

After lunch, Mitchell finally got out of the leadership meeting and talked to them, and sent them back to class. The girl who wrote the note saw me in the hall later and apologized. But I didn't see the girl from my playwriting class again that day, and she was absent on Friday.

So on Thursday after school, I went to the special ed director and asked her if she could be in the room with me during playwriting this coming Tuesday, because this group of girls is basically sexually harassing me and I don't feel comfortable being in the room alone with them. She asked me to tell her the whole story, and when I did, she practically fell off her chair. Which was nice to see, actually, because while on one level I like her, on another level she can be a little by-the-book and robotic, so it felt good to actually get a reaction out of her.

"Well, that IS sexual harassment, and we take that very seriously," she said. She called the principal that very second in her office and told her I would be filling out a discipline report about the incident, which I did that night.

I also told two of the people who work in the office about the whole thing, and they were so appalled about Inez, the girl who'd asked (twice) 'do you give your boyfriend head?', that they called her mother and talked to her themselves! "Inez is a Christian!" the woman in the office said. "She lives above a church. Her father is a deacon!"

Whatever they said must've gotten to her, because she came to my room the last period of the day on Friday practically trembling, saying how sorry she was, promising she was going to change her ways and stay away from 'bad influences' (the other five of the Nasty Six, I assume), and asking my forgiveness. She even hugged me!

The whole incident was so bizarre -- like an episode from "Mean Girls," except they forgot I wasn't another seventh grade girl they could push around but an actual teacher. Thank God this class ends on January 6th. Not a moment too soon for me. Unreal.

Recess and enrichment. Ugh.

The kids have come up with a couple of new "games" during recess. Game #1: They slap each other until one or more of them falls down. They claim it's not "real" slapping and doesn't hurt ("We're just playing! Why you gotta take away our fun?"), but it looks like a lawsuit waiting to happen. Game #2: They tie things like scarves around each other's necks and drag each other around. During our staff meeting after school on Friday, we were coming up with ideas for how to put a stop to this, like making kids caught playing these "games" sit out for the rest of the recess period -- a 'recess detention' of sorts. Then Juan made this weird speech about how, when he was at the mic at the end of breakfast shushing kids and telling them to line up for class, someone from the public high school we share the building with came up to him and asked, "Do you feel alone?"

"I don't feel alone," Juan said. "I saw that teachers were going around getting the students' attention and helping me get them lined up. But that was his perception, and no one can do this by themselves." Then he made some soccer analogy about how when he played soccer, he would watch the action and his dad would tell him he had to get into the game, and he said he sees a lot of watching but we teachers have to intervene.

Then he got a phone call on his cell and left. The room was silent for a minute, until another teacher said, "Um, so does he like the recess detention idea or not?" And I thought angrily, what was the point of that little passive-aggressive speech? That he feels like we teachers are not doing anything to help? I wanted to say that I *DO* intervene -- on Thursday I must have gone into the fray five times during the 25-minute recess to try to make the kids stop slapping each other. But when I walked away, they were back at it within minutes. Maybe, I wanted to add, we're watching more and doing less because when we try to stop the kids from touching, slapping, and hitting each other, and they REACH AROUND US to continue doing it, it's a bit discouraging, not to mention dangerous. We already have one teacher still out with a badly hurt ankle because a kid, oblivious to the fact that we were trying to get them to stop playing basketball and line up, ran into her and squished her foot. We don't need that to happen to anyone else.

Oh, and Mitchell told us the principal told him we're blowing through our budget for substitute teachers, and if we keep hiring subs every time teachers are out, we could get to January, have half the staff out with the flu, and have no money left for subs. So now when a teacher is absent, the rest of us are going to have to cover his or her classes during our free periods, though Mitchell said he would balance it so we would still have at least one prep period a day. One of the teachers who was there last year told me afterwards, "That's really weird. We had a teacher quit on the second day of school last year, and another teacher who quit during the second week, and throughout the whole schoolyear we still never had any problem paying for subs." I thought it was strange, too -- I mean, aren't we SAVING a lot of money not having to pay salary and benefits to the English teacher who quit?

Enrichment started last week. Teachers came up with interesting, cool classes that are different from what the kids usually take during the school day, things like drumming, arts and literary magazine, community service, etc., the kids picked their top three choices, and we slotted them into a class. It takes place during the last period of the day, two days a week. I decided to offer Playwriting. I walked into the first day of Playwriting class on Tuesday, all excited, thinking, Great, it's only half a dozen kids and playwriting was their first choice -- they'll be really into it! It'll be a lot of fun!

Wrong. It was a disaster. We had literally been in the room two minutes when one girl asked another, "Why did you sign up for this?"

Looking totally bored, she said, her voice dripping with contempt, "I thought it would be cool, but I guess not." She had been in the room FOR TWO MINUTES -- she hadn't even given it a chance. I had to send one girl out to Mitchell's office because she was so disruptive. And Wednesday was even worse. Five of the six kids were blatantly rude, disrespectful, and out-and-out mean to me. They were getting personal, when I was nothing but nice to them. I was shocked. I ended up raising my voice -- I didn't say shut up or get personal back with them or anything, but I did raise my voice -- which I know I shouldn't have done. But there's only so much time I can be attacked before I get angry, no matter how young my attackers are. I've decided to give it another try for four more class periods, maybe start each period with a play in front of us and get into reading it right away, with each kid taking a role, and then moving into the writing portion of the class. And if they're still horrible, I'm going to ask Mitchell if I can disband the class, reassign each of them to a different enrichment, and just help out another teacher who has a larger enrichment class. I don't get paid enough to be verbally abused. No one does.

The ironic thing is, we took all the seventh graders to the Museum of Natural History on Wednesday, and it went really well. The kids behaved pretty well, and they were going around filling out the answers on the scavenger hunt sheet the history and science teachers had given them. So they know how to behave like normal young adults; when they're in school they just choose not to, I guess.

Less stress is best

Today was a lot less stressful than I expected. Both the English teacher and the history teacher were back today, for one thing. And for another, I walked into math class with dread in the pit of my stomach -- only to find the kids sitting straight in their seats, absolutely silent, like little angels. For a couple of seconds I couldn't figure it out. Had she just screamed at them a minute before and scared them? Her screaming usually just makes them louder. Then I got to the back of the room and saw Juan, one of our administrators, sitting there observing. The kids like, respect, and fear him all at once -- I think he's the only staff member who has worked at the school since the first day it started a few years ago -- so they were completely well-behaved in front of him. If only he could sit in on all of Andrea's classes. ;O

It was a lucky day in other ways, too. For example, I took one kid out of English class and made him stay in the hall for a couple minutes as a time-out, because he kept talking, laughing, and messing around -- and the vice principal happened to walk by. "Why are you out of class so much?" he demanded. "It looks like we have to call your mother and have her come babysit you in class so you learn how to behave. Let's go call her now." And he stalked off, taking the kid with him. Well-played!

Cori told me one of the administrators sent her an e-mail saying that a (negative) letter would be put in her file regarding the exploding-pen vandalism incident that supposedly happened under her watch during indoor recess. Shouldn't they put a POSITIVE letter in her file about how she took over Amy's math class one period last week with no notice?? Unreal.

And the only other bad news: today during advisory, I did an activity with the kids where they had to give a thumbs up if they agreed with a statement I read, or a thumbs down if they disagreed. The last statement was, "I like me," and only one kid, Jonathan, put his thumb down. "I hate myself," he said matter-of-factly. And he wasn't kidding around -- he was serious. He's a nice kid, well-behaved. He said he used to get into a lot of fights, so it seemed related to that. I said, "But you seem like a peaceful person. You don't fight anymore, do you?"

"I guess not," he shrugged. But he said he still hates himself. He's 12! Doesn't he realize he has YEARS ahead in which to hate himself?? Ha ha. But seriously, I'm going to talk to the social worker about him. Maybe he's depressed and no one has realized it? :(

Isn't it too early in the schoolyear to call in sick?

The English teacher and the history teacher were BOTH out today -- I hope they were just slightly under the weather, and that they're not about to quit or disappear. I was in one of the 7th grade English classes today with the substitute, and the behavior was discouraging, although they did finally settle down enough to read an article aloud, and some of them actually answered some of the questions at the end. I was in one of the 7th grade math classes today, too. The teacher introduced an incentive program where, when kids are on task and behaving well, they get tickets they can eventually redeem for prizes and other incentives. But by halfway through the period she was discouraged and yelling at kids again. I don't know. I'm still getting my bearings with this whole special ed "push-in" thing. I try to deal consistently with the misbehavior, but it's amazing how hard it is with so much else going on. Classroom management was always a challenge for me, which is part of why I went back for my special ed degree, since I like working with small groups better. And anyway, I'm only in each teacher's class a few times a week, so if they can't manage the class on their own, we're all screwed. Sigh. This morning the assistant principal sat in on the sixth grade English lesson and, at the end, asked if the lead teacher and I had discussed my role in the classroom -- I think because the lead teacher taught the whole lesson pretty much on his own. Tomorrow the math specialist and I are both in the sixth grade math class, and we're going to break the class into groups and each teach the lesson. Hopefully it will go well. I haven't used this much math in ages!

Sleeping with strangers

Tonight I'm getting ready for my five days away from home for week 2 of professional development. All of us teachers have to arrive there tomorrow, stay for five nights, and leave on Friday. The place we're staying looks nice, and I'm sure the professional development will be at least partially worthwhile, but the truth is -- I'm dreading it. I think it's a lot for the school to ask us to go away for five nights when we won't even have our own hotel rooms. We're sharing, three people to a room. I need my alone time to recharge my batteries, and I won't have that, so I'm really nervous. I also usually have a personal policy not to spend time socially with co-workers until either they've left the job or I have, and we don't work together anymore. But this week I'll be sleeping with two of them, which upends my whole policy! We'll see how it goes.... :/

Orientation; and Diane Schuler, Part 3

Yesterday was my first day of professional development at my new job and WOW, I am tired! I haven't worked full-time hours since last fall. Even when I had three part-time jobs, it might have taken all day to complete them, but I had free hours during the day in between each of them. The other teachers seem very nice, but I'm nervous. A couple who were there last year told stories about objects being thrown across their classrooms and "nothing working" to solve behavior problems -- and those were the first grade teachers! :O I found out I'll be the special ed co-teacher for the seventh grade and half of the sixth grade, which pleases me -- I especially like sixth grade. I have to admit, I'm relieved I won't have any eighth grade classes. I taught eighth grade my first year of teaching, and it was really hard.

Also, because we are supposed to model healthy eating for the kids, all of us, teachers included, are only allowed to bring "healthy food" into the school building. Even when we're having lunch in the teacher's room, we're not supposed to drink soda or eat anything unhealthy. Is it bad that my first thought was to strategize as to how I can smuggle chocolate in my purse and secretly eat it in the bathroom? If that's not the first sign of addiction, I don't know what is -- I really AM a chocoholic!

In Diane Schuler news, Westchester district attorney Janet DiFiore announced today that neither Schuler's husband, Daniel Schuler, nor anyone else will be criminally charged in the case. Here are the links to the NY Times article (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/19/nyregion/19taconic.html?_r=1&hp) and the Newsday article (http://www.newsday.com/long-island/nassau/da-no-charges-in-deadly-taconic-crash-1.1376535). Not surprising, since she was the one who got drunk and stoned, drove the wrong way on the Taconic Parkway and killed eight people, including herself, so, as the D.A. said, the charges die with her. There's no evidence her husband knew she would drink and drive, as she didn't appear under the influence when they left the campground that morning, or even an hour and a half later when she stopped at McDonald's and then a Sunoco station. But Schuler's family will likely still face a civil suit from the family of Michael and Guy Bastardi, the father and son she killed when she crashed into their S.U.V. The State Police did note that "Mr. Schuler answered many questions from investigators but 'has not been forthcoming, perhaps, about marijuana use'" -- probably because he's a public safety officer and doesn't want to admit to knowing his wife (and he, too??) was using an illegal drug.

Here's a link to an interesting Huffington Post article by Stephanie Gertler, "Diane Schuler's Demons," which theorizes she was severely depressed, and the alcohol unleashed her suicidal impulses(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephanie-gertler/diane-schulers-demons_b_254266.html).