NY LOVES ME, ME, ME, ME. . . . .

Today I was walking through the normal crush of students on the quad right before school, and I heard one voice above the rest say to her friend, “Yeah, me and him are goin’ after school.” Unfortunately, all English teachers respond to such phrasing reflexively, and I have been known to be half-listening in meetings or social gatherings only to suddenly wake up at the sound of a grammar gaffe, and, before I can stop myself, yell out a correction. 

Today, when I heard the grating “ME AND HIM. . .,”  I did not place a hand on the student's shoulder and gently offer the corrective, “He and I.”  Instead, I had what I think was an epiphany about WHY this particular grammatical problem is so pervasive in our culture.  

The problem lies in the difference between subject and object. Here is what I tell my students (and remember, by high-school, it’s really last-chance grammar, hence the informality): 

 “ 'I' is always a subject; ‘I’ always DOES the verb, even if the verb is just a state of being: I am, I run, I eat chocolate, I love you! ‘I’asserts a self and acts! ‘Me,’ on the other hand, is NEVER a subject. ‘Me’ is ALWAYS an object. ‘Me’ never does anything. Can you ever say (and I say this in my best Bronx meets cavewoman accent),‘Me go to movies, me like you, me happy?’” 

The kids laugh and laugh, and I think I have made the point. Yet, even without walking through the quad at break time, even in my own classroom after what I think has been my brilliant grammar lesson (as if), I still hear the "me" as subject gaffe peppering the teen-age conversations around me. So what’s up?

The Me-Generation may be behind us but the detritus of all those love-thyself-above-all-others movements still haunts us, and, I posit, has irreparably changed our way of thinking about ourselves and our relationship to the world around us. 

These days it’s all about what’s good FOR ME! But look closely at this construction. “Me” is the object of the preposition “for.”  In fact, “me” is often the object of prepositions: He looks LIKE ME; the story is ABOUT ME; I want you to be WITH ME. Object city! The “me” gaffe reveals how teens, hell, many in our culture, tend to see themselves: as inactive, complacent objects at the center of the action-- not as subjects who act on things and assert a self by doing or being.

“I” rarely starts the simple declarative sentence anymore and is instead usually used incorrectly at the end of a sentence, as if to strengthen the notion of one's deserving: “That gift is for her and I” or “That is a portrait of him and I” or “Let’s keep this a secret between you and I!” Here, "me" just is not strong enough. One needs an "I," a more active recipient.

It turns out the Me-Generation has not empowered people as much as it has rendered them passive objects. My pal in New York capped this notion for me just today. She writes: “Remember the old “I love (heart symbol) NY” t-shirts? Well, the latest t-shirt sported around town says, “NY loves ( heart symbol) ME.” Methinks that sayeth it all.

Land of Nod

Today was one of those days. I thought it would be a quiet day, two classes writing an essay, one class reviewing an essay and thinking about how to rewrite it.  But the moon must be full, the stars aligned, hormones in sync. . . 

The first class bell rings, I distribute the essay prompts, the kids start writing, and then I hear it. Heavy sighing, loud, dramatic girl suffering. I finally call the student aside; then tears, fear, more tears. Bell rings, one down. 

Then the next class bell rings, and the student in the deepest hole is absent (that word we use only in school, never in life). Okay, now it’s a lengthy e-mail to her concerned parent and twenty minutes later, there she is, standing at my door, still wiping sleep out of her eyes. 

The period ends and another girl makes her way to my desk to apologize for her essay and the waterworks start. I find myself saying that she should volunteer somewhere in order to lift her spirits, to help her rise above her feelings. I tell her to put her body where she wants to be and her mind will follow. She repeats the words like a mantra and says she already has ideas about where to start. Crisis averted, maybe. 

Meltdown central today and a lots of time spent counseling and trying not to cry myself.

I should have known the day was off, when I got to work and found that the Dictionary.com word of the day was Land of Nod, the mythical land of sleep. 

As a public school teacher, I have spent years taking education classes and attending meetings where I have been taught how to get my kids to participate in vocabulary relay races; where I have been taught how to put up huge, wall-size Post-Its to create “gallery” spaces for my students to stroll along the walls of the room to view one another’s thoughts; where I have been taught “strategies” like “scaffolding” and “backwards planning” and “vertical teaming.” 

You would think I would have a callous on my heart that would prevent these excruciating time-wasters in the Land of Nod from getting to me anymore. After all, I have taught for over twenty years and have NEVER had occasion to use what I have been subjected to in any of these in-services, even though the swag--Post-Its, pens, markers, glue-sticks--have come in handy. It’s really hard to build resistance to nonsense, especially when it seems as if many of those around you swallow it all without question or protest. 

I always leave these sessions in a tizzy, thinking I am not doing my job well, thinking that if I do not employ these strategies the same way these “professionals” (often people who have opted out of the classroom) employ them, I am doing something wrong. I second guess myself and then struggle to get back on track in my own classes. It’s all I can do to remember that I teach a complicated, multifaceted subject to often resistant students. Unlike these in-service presenters, I don't normally face a docile audience with a high BS tolerance.

A refresher on how to teach “Informational Texts” was the gist of today’s mandatory meeting and today’s presenters "shared" a list of “strategies” designed to teach students how to read “informational texts.” If you can get past the phrase “informational text,” you are doing better than I am, but here’s what I saw as the premise for these sessions: students will not want to or know how to read the deadening “texts” that the California standardized tests demand the students read, so give them the same kind of deadening “texts” in class to show the students “how” to read them. Let’s break down the reading into sentences and paragraphs; let’s make them talk in groups about translating and rephrasing these sentences and paragraphs; let’s make them learn vocabulary that is unrelated to anything but these sentences and paragraphs. In sum, and based on my experience in this in-service, the gist was to make reading MORE of a chore than it already is for students reluctant to read. 

Don’t get me wrong. I do see the value of teaching kids how to read any text closely. It’s just that I am wary about the line between making reading accessible--even enjoyable--and reducing it to nothing more than a chore. 

Because I had first mistaken the date of this meeting and I had scheduled parent conferences and a medical appointment, I made the second mistake of asking those in charge the following questions: What if I already do a lot of close-reading work in my classes with texts relevant to the literature I teach, like critical essays, reviews, even grammatical instructions? Do I still have to attend this meeting? Naturally, I was met with a resounding, YES!

Aye, there’s the rub. Just as we teachers are asked to “differentiate,” teach our students based not only on our curriculum but based also on their different learning levels and needs, those in charge never differentiate. But that’s the problem with the entire in-service, professional development philosophy in my district. The district hires teachers who cannot do the job for which they have been hired, and then spends lots of money and time figuring out ways to make whipped cream out of horse manure. The problem is that those who are teaching well are swept up into that effort at great cost to their time and their morale. 

During meetings like this I think too much about the time spent vs the information gained ratio.  I then get to thinking about all the time I sacrifice when I work in the evenings and on weekends. I am reminded that there is simply no good reason for anyone to do more than show up in a district where contracts are disregarded, where pay is diminished at will, where no one really has a voice, but most important, where all teachers are treated as if incompetent and all students treated as if they are stupid. 

And then I think to myself, no wonder there are so many bad teachers--what a cake job for someone who sees it only as a day shift. Why these in-services probably don’t even phase them as much as they give them a chance to appear busy.

Yup, it was meltdown central today, lots of crying and time spent counseling and trying not to cry myself. 

  

Test-Score Tyranny

When I last wrote, I set off quite the stir, and by quoting some in my department, I may have created an irreparable rift. To recap, I had suggested the department read one another’s Shakespeare essays and after assessing them together, give an award for the best of the essays. According to lists I generated at the end of last year, I could see that most of my colleagues teach at least one of the plays or sonnets and most of them require that their students write essays about their reading, so I honestly thought that reading what we ourselves generate in our classes would be compelling and instructive for us all. Unfortunately, this suggestion ended up revealing the emotional temperature of a  beleaguered faculty, where any suggestion can sound like extra work, though I maintain no extra work and no harm was intended. 

I bring this up because right after I emailed the essay contest suggestion to the department, we received not only those benchmark tests that I have complained about in previous entries, but we received an additional test to give to our students: a diagnostic for the California Exit Exam (CAHSEE).  Now we have to take at least six hours (roughly a full week) out of our class time to accommodate these tests and suspend whatever we are teaching. In addition, we will have to carve out some class time to give standards tests preparation exercises, and we will have to deal with altered and diminished schedules in order to accommodate the roughly three weeks of CAHSEE testing that awaits the students this term. 

Now we will have at least two department meetings spent on assessing the benchmark and diagnostic essays. But before we read any of the essays, we will first have to determine appropriate grading criteria since none of the rubrics or after-the fact “Decision Rules,” designed "to guide us as we assess the quality of the work," are ever adequate for assessing ACTUAL student writing.  

Yes, this assessing our students’ writing is the exact task I had suggested in my Shakespeare contest email, but in this case the faculty dread has been fulfilled: we now face extra and irrelevant work--both proctoring these tests and grading the results--and have to deal with one more district obstruction of any progress we hope to make in our classes. 

The problem with the CAHSEE diagnostic essay is that in addition to presuming that students know something about global warming, green thinking, energy conservation, the essay prompt itself is confusing in that it seems to at first ask the students to talk about how to conserve energy; then it asks them to use examples and anecdotes to persuade other students to conserve energy. The prompt is so overwritten that its intention is unclear, and it seems to have garnered two kinds of response from the students: “Listen to me! Here’s why” essays and “Here’s how to conserve energy” essays; one persuasive, the other expository. So how are we to assess these essays? Do we just look for good, clear, thorough writing, or do we hold students accountable for reading carefully a prompt that was, to my way of thinking, not written carefully?

What is perhaps most vexing about the “assessment” tests, the other tests to which we treated our students to this week, is not only the low benchmark they set, at least in English, but how often these tests are wrong-headed and just plain wrong. This problem is in keeping with why NCLB is not working: when states and districts set their own standards and essentially lower standards to punch up scores, the tyranny of these scores, which are spun as a district’s attempt at progress, only hinders progress.

Here is a quick “benchmark” minute brought to you by one of my astute 10th graders (and I am not even going to mention how stupidly the question itself is written!). The students are first given a quotation from a previous reading (and I am not going to mention the problems with that reading either!):  
Now here is the actual question:
"Even ladies were wading in the water, thinking it was fun." 

To delete "thinking it was fun" from the quotation above, what would be the correct way to punctuate the sentence?

a) "Even the ladies were wading in the water [   ]."

b) "Even ladies were wading in the water:"

c) "Even ladies were wading in the water--"

d) "Even the ladies were wading in the water. . ."

Before you give your answer, read this explanation of the ellipsis, which I pulled from a GOOGLE search:

The MLA Handbook recommends using square brackets on either side of the ellipsis points to distinguish between an ellipsis that you've added and the ellipses that might have been in the original text. Such a bracketed ellipsis in a quotation would look like this:

"Bohr […] used the analogy of parallel stairways […]" (Smith 55).

Now read this direct quotation from the MLA Handbook (6th Edition):

Some instructors prefer that square brackets be placed around ellipsis points inserted into quotations, so that all alterations within quotations are indicated by brackets (cf. 3.7.6).

Given these rules, what's the correct answer for students who were taught to err on the side of caution and add the brackets around all ellipses they add to any quotation?  There doesn’t seem to be any correct answer among the choices they were given, though the choices seem to allude to the MLA rule by offering an answer with empty brackets and an answer with only an ellipsis. 

Here is my question: If I taught the MLA rule in the interest of college prep. and told my students to err on the side of caution and use brackets when in doubt, am I a bad teacher? Are the students then incorrect for adding brackets when they insert their own ellipses? Of course, the students figured out the issue and opted for answer D, but they were definitely confused.

Then there was this question:

The students were asked to pick the “correct way to rewrite this sentence”: 

“The event remains one of the deadliest natural disasters has occurred in United States history.”  

Here are two of the choices they were given:

1. The event remains one of the deadliest natural disasters, which has occurred in United States history.
2. The event remains one of the deadliest natural disasters that has occurred in United States history.

I have no quarrel with B as the best answer, but in explaining why B is the best answer, the Administration and Scoring Manual, which teachers are to use in order to teach to the standard that this question is presumably testing, offers the following explanation (NOTE THAT I USED A NON-RESTRICTIVE CLAUSE, OR DID I?):

A--The clause “has occurred in United States history” is nonrestrictive so it cannot be introduced by which, which introduces restrictive clauses.

B--That is used to introduce nonrestrictive main clauses.

UH, WHAT?!?!?!?!?!?!?! 

Keep in mind that there were only 19 questions on this  benchmark test, so possibly missing two of the 19 can hurt a student’s score. In addition, wrong answers can cast aspersions on a teacher’s ability to teach a certain standard since both questions relate to the same Language Conventions strand, as they call it. 

So, I say yes, let’s spend valuable collegial time looking closely at our students’ earnest work generated by these bogus instruments, then let’s publish the scores and feel like failures because of tests that PRETEND to test kids on what they have learned, but instead confuse everyone and ignore the real grist of any English class--literary analysis, critical thinking, correct mechanics, in-depth reading comprehension. In such a budget crisis time, a district’s giving boat loads of money to the company that creates these tests, specifically the bogus benchmarks, and demanding that their teachers pander to such imprecision and confusion is not good for anyone! Yet all this testing will be effective in one thing, that's for sure: the erosion of everyone’s good will, the teachers’ and the students'.

Shakespeare, Anyone?

This past week was finals week--yes, it’s February!  In addition to giving five finals,  I started a new semester at my other job, where I teach two classes (all boys, 9th and 12th grade), caught a mean and nasty cold, nailed down some details for a trip my students and I are taking to NY in spring, and along with several of my dedicated colleagues, I hosted a Shakespeare recitation contest. Because this contest has an essay component, I also had asked several of my Shakespeare students to polish recent Hamlet essays for submission. Then after spending what amounted to fruitless time searching the internet for the essay entry form, I discovered that the sponsors of the contest have canceled the essay portion of the program. Hmmm, what to do. 

Not wanting to disappoint the kids who retooled their work in hopes of some recognition other than mine for their efforts, I got to thinking. What if my school hosted a contest of its own? We could meet all departmental directives by looking at and assessing student work together AND we could reward a kid in the process. Since most of the English faculty teach at least one of the plays or the sonnets and all of us are supposed to be teaching how to write essays and all of us are oppressed by the mind-numbing standardized assessments and want to assess what we ARE teaching, I suggested we look at the Shakespeare essays we ourselves have assigned at the first full meeting of the year, but I added that we could wait until a meeting where more of us have some essays to contribute and examine. We don’t need a class set for this meeting work, but we can at least look at a few of the pieces the kids are proud of--after all we want to instill the notion of pride in their work, right? I mean, I really thought this would be a good idea, so this is what I sent out to my colleagues:

"Hello Everyone,
I normally submit student essays about Shakespeare to [I am leaving out the name], and after gathering a few edited pieces for submission,  I discovered, much to my dismay, that they are NOT having their contest anymore.

Then it occurred to me, why not have a contest here?  Since many of us teach Shakespeare in some form or another, let's nurture the best essays of our students, take the names off the essays and insure that they follow MLA manuscript format for objectivity, and in our next full faculty meeting (or one of our faculty meetings if we have no essays yet), let's read them, assess them, and pick the top three; and the best part is we can give the kids stuff for winning!

My thought is that we will look for intelligent and thinking responses, even though the power of the actual writing may vary widely, and with enough of us just reading and discussing the essays, we will be doing work in keeping with the goal of coming up with our own deparment-wide assessments and honing our collective vision of what we expect from our students.

We can either have one winner and two runners up and ALL of us read the essays and ALL of us discuss our thoughts; or we can give two awards--an upperclassman winner (12th only, since 11th is American Lit) and an underclassman winner (9th and 10th)--and read the essays in grade-level groups. 

This could be fun, and it may refresh our ongoing discussion of good student writing.

I will find some money to buy a [leaving out the prize I will give] for whoever wins. Let me know what you think. . . ."

Now while I realize that we are being impacted by dramatically increased class size, potentially devastating pay cuts, and other hideous fallout from a collapsing district, I was not really asking anyone to do any extra work. I thought we would just have the kids polish the work they would normally do for our classes, then we’d have a look and a little chat (thank you, Heidi Klum).  A few of my colleagues saw it another way:

One admired my enthusiasm. . . .then explained that he was feeling too overburdened by teaching responsibilities and concurrent pay cuts. Another accused me of using this potential contest as a departmental directive and was clearly angry that I had not discussed it with the faculty first, even though I plainly stated that I was interested in hearing the department's thoughts about this contest. And yet another argued that not everyone teaches Shakespeare and added that I am the only one who teaches Shakespeare to the degree needed for a contest, so it would be inherently unfair. My suggestion that we look at student responses to Shakespeare was either patently ignored or treated like a malignant request for teachers to do extra work--in a time of pay-cuts, no less. 

LESSON I AM SUPPOSED TO LEARN: How could I suggest something so preposterous? After all, we already examine student work on those benchmark tests that ask students to write about "informational texts" that discuss the value of video games. 

LESSON LEARNED: I am going to have my own Shakespeare contest and will submit the students’ essays to the professors with whom I have worked at university for their candid assessment (and, I am hopeful, their approval). This kind of evaluation could lead to a great lesson for my students and for me. Should have just done that in the first place! What was I thinking?

Rewards Points

The mercifully long winter vacation gave me the chance not only to grade 200 pages, to read several of the novels I thought I might have to save until summer, and to catch up on hours of sleep, but also to see one of the two movies I usually see per year. And given my ridiculous work schedule, I am usually relegated to choosing a film based more on convenience than anything else. 

Generally, I must say, I am repelled by American movies. For a while there it seemed as if every American film contained the requisite “aren’t we all suckers for beautiful young people in love” scene. In these "heartwarming" films, a restaurant full of all kinds of people, all in unison and all clearly impelled by the same overwhemling emotion, would giddily erupt into some song like “Stop in the Name of Love,” and everyone would clap and sing, happy just to be breathing the same air as the beautiful young lovers. UGH! I say. When a friend recently asked me what movies I DO like, I had to say foreign movies, which are usually atmospheric and subtle and don’t feel the need to clobber the audience with sing-alongs or sentimental strings or overblown moral or emotional messages (Ennio Morricone and some Italian cinema excepted).

Give me a movie like Patrice Leconte’s 2002 film “Man on a Train,” where Johnny Halladay and Jean Rochefort meet by chance and enter each other’s very different lives. Halladay’s character is a thief; Rochefort’s, a poet and teacher.  The scene that exemplifies the kind of subtlety I am talking about occurs when the two have lunch in a local cafe and a young man comes up to Rochefort’s character to say that he remembers the teacher and can still recite one of the poems he had been taught. When Rochefort’s character, obviously flustered, embarrassed, and proud, asks the young man what he currently does for a living, the man says he works down the street in a lamp shop. No big, dramatic, “You changed my life, and I am now part of the Dead Poet’s Society forever.” No eavesdroppers joining in, clapping and singing, “What the World Needs Now Is Love Sweet Love” or something equally banal. Here the quotidian was colored and warmed for a moment by nostalgia, both the teacher’s and the student’s, and the connection felt true and, therefore, profound.

Well, as with all things, one must never say, "Never!" or make sweeping comments based on overblown opinions because one never knows when such broad statements and gestures might come back to, as they say, bite you in the rear, especially when life seems to imitate "art." This past weekend I went to Santa Barbara to visit my family. We exchanged gifts for birthdays and other assorted recent holidays and then trundled off to our favorite clothing store to redeem our gift cards. As we moved through the racks, one of the sales women, who offered to set up a changing room for me, could not help grinning at me, her head tilted, a question on her face. After teaching for as long as I have, everyone looks familiar, so I sometimes ignore the impulse to ask people whether I know them, particularly when I’m about 100 miles away from all my teaching experience. But clearly this young woman and I knew each other, and just as she was about to ask, “Are you. . . ,” I asked her whether she had attended the high school where I began my tenure in the LAUSD. She was ecstatic when she determined that I was in fact her former English teacher and offered her graduation year and her name. 

She then said that my class was life-changing for her, and because of me she had learned two other languages, traveled and studied abroad, and was not just working in this clothing shop, but she was also in school, earning her PhD.  She said she would always remember that I told my students never to settle for mediocrity, and that she herself has always lived by this credo. I could not help but hug her at this point, and we both welled up with heartfelt tears. 

It was at that moment that I noticed the clicking of hangers and the whooshing of garments had stopped, and all the well-appointed Santa Barbara shoppers stood as if frozen, listening to our conversation. As my former student wiped away her tears, so, too, did the women in the store, and one whispered to my mother that she had never seen such gratitude or heard such a, dare I say it, heartwarming story before. The whole store had stopped to listen to the story of this humbled teacher and her grateful student, but I am happy to report that within moments we were all rifling through the racks again, and no one erupted into song.

Cost of Living Raise or Pay Cut: The High Cost of Teaching!

Anyone reading the paper these days will know that the teachers in my district are being threatened with a 12% pay cut PLUS four furlough days to be taken during what is already our contracted spring break. Demoralizing? Yes. But even moreso when one contemplates how many district employees are moved around from bogus position to bogus position as empty reminders of empty district goals. What's worse is contemplating how much district money is spent on external contractors and other programs designed to make bad teachers better when that same money could be spent on rewarding smartly evaluated good teachers.

Just a week ago, prior to the Superintendant’s supremely callous Friday, 5pm, YOUR-PAY-WILL-BE-CUT letter,  we gave the first scheduled SPA (Secondary Periodic Assessment) of the year. This means that as a department chair, I have to follow administrative directives and rally the teachers to swap our classes’ 9th grade SPA essays so we can grade our students' work more objectively. Theoretically, this means that we have all set the same goals, have taught to those goals, and have seen whether and to what degree we have met those goals. But this test asks that students read mind-numbing essays, charts, stats and graphs about big bad video games; then they are asked to write a “persuasive” essay where they are to take and defend a position on the “issue.” And let us not forget their “position” had better be against those dangerous, evil video games, or else!

Here is the real rub, especially in the face of these horrendous pay-cut threats. The district contracts this “benchmark” test to Princeton Review, but only AFTER the students take the test--having read the information, the prompt, and the rubric--does the district's Secondary Literacy Department create what they call  “DECISION RULES.”  They describe these rules as follows:

“. . . established during the process of selecting the SCORE POINT REPRESENTATIVE PAPERS that help determine “proficiency.” These rules, which were developed through consensus among those selecting the training set papers, address questions and issues that might arise when teachers score their student work. Knowing these rules up front assists scorers and helps 'standardize' the scoring process.”

Irony? Let me count the ways:

1. Time and money have been spent not only on the Princeton Review’s silly and irrelevant test, but also on salaries earned by LAUSD "literacy experts" tasked with modifying the contractor’s sham test.

2. The LAUSD rightfully demands that teachers’ expectations be clear enough for students to understand what they need to do in order to achieve goals and grades, yet our Secondary Literacy Department (a name that can be read two ways, I know) creates grading rules AFTER THE FACT.

3. "Standardizing” what could be clever, original, intelligent writing (which these tests not only do NOT promote but work hard to prevent), the kind of writing that sometimes happens despite the idiocy of the test, is a ridiculous goal.

4. This benchmark proves nothing about students who are working hard in their classes to think and write intelligently and inventively about literature. But if they can read VCR instructions, they are on their way to the kind of proficiency that warrants a high-school degree.

5. The district has cut teacher pay, has ignored teacher contracts, and as these tests seem to indicate, maintains priorities that do anything but serve the community it's supposed to serve.

Cut away, Superintendent! I probably do not deserve the pay I receive if I see these ironies clearly but the effectiveness of these benchmarks, not at all!

Finger-lickin' OBNOXIOUS

The administration decided to host an assembly for seniors in an effort to inform them of important policies and requirements for graduation and other "fun" senior events, ranging from BBQs to prom to the graduation ceremony itself. Teachers were asked to escort their classes to our “state of the art” auditorium to ensure order, well, theoretically at least.  I scanned the room and saw about six hundred students, five teachers, and two or three administrators. Oh yeah, I knew this would be bad. Knowing my inability to cope with the boorish behavior of masses of students empowered by their anonymity, I dug into my seat, kept my nose in the papers I brought to grade, and the corner of my eye on my well-behaved class. 

No matter who stood up to speak to the assembly, the din never stopped. The man from Jostens, or whichever cap, gown, and ring company he represented, tried to impart information the kids would need should they make it to the finish line, but only a few listened to him. The poor man had to say,  “Listen up, people” as punctuation for almost every phrase he uttered. Remarkably, he never lost his patience. Then the phelgmatic student-body president mumbled a request for the students to purchase senior sweatshirts that they loudly considered too pricey, and an Assistant Principal spoke about what many considered the unreasonable senior attendance policy (7 absences max? Really, that’s unreasonable?). Soon the din became an uproar. I continued to mark comma splices and agreement problems and read and reread the sentences before me in an effort to tune out the noise. The last thing I wanted to do was confront misbehaving students whom I do not know by name. 

Finally, after questions no one heard and after an administrator was brushed off and left the stage for lack of stamina; after hoots, hollers, and whistles every time some well-meaning adult called them the Class of 2010; after rude call-outs and continuous inattention to the front of the room, the nightmare ended. Inches from a clean getaway, I rose to lead my students out of the auditorium.   

Then I saw them. Two girls in the seats right behind my class were sucking on fried chicken wings, fingers covered in grease. I was nothing short of aghast. Now, I have been known to hunker down over a little KFC myself, much to the dismay of my politically and dietarily savvy friends, but here in this sacrosanct auditorium designed for the top notch performers who attend this school, food is an absolute no-no. So I thought about it for a few seconds: do I say something and face inevitable resistance and hostility or do I just ignore this egregious defiance in front of all the students who know I have seen this display and count on me, as one of the adults in this barely controlled chaos, to maintain some form of order? 

“Are you REALLY eating in here? You have to put that away!” I registered my protest and insisted they modify their behavior. Very teacherly, but I knew I was in for it.

Blank stares. Lips wrapped around wings.

“Put the chicken away!” I remained firm.

“Where?” Finger licks, bone gnawing.

“Wherever your got it from!”

“Hunh?”

“Take out whatever the chicken came in and put it away. NOW!”

“Put it in what? What are you talking about?”

The conversation was so unprofitable, so impossible that I was getting angry at myself for starting it, for wasting my time, for feeling bad that I didn’t have a piece of chicken myself. But I am the adult here, or so they tell me. So why do I feel that sick feeling I always get when I know what the right behavior is and am made to feel the fool when I try to enforce it. 

I turned away from the offenders, cursed heartily under my breath, and stated that I was tired of the pigs at this school. One of the girls, who knew me, though I did not know her, says, “DID YOU JUST CALL ME A PIG?!”  Righteous indignation, of all the deflecting nerve!

Before I could say, Original Recipe, all the anger I had worked so hard to quell for that hour and a half of patent, room-wide disrespect rose up in me, and I just let it fly: “I said members of this student body act like a bunch of goddammed, disgusting pigs, and if you think you fit that description, then YES, I guess I called YOU a pig! Your behavior is a disgrace, an intolerable disgrace, and I am just sick to death of it!”  I turned on my heel and stormed out of the room, muttering to myself like the crazy person I suddenly felt like.

The question all this raises in me is why anyone would expect any adult to be at the mercy of disrespectful teenagers, who rarely face real consequences for their actions, and NOT get angry. One of my colleagues was recently called a bitch by one of her students, a curse to which she responded in equally colloquial and insulting language, and she was not only called out for her behavior by the administration, but she was told that a student’s calling a teacher a bitch is not an offense worthy of suspension. Really? Now if the same kid had called one of the administrators “Asshole” or dare I say something worse, would that have been an offense worthy of suspension? I also wonder whether it is just a coincidence that when I cannot get the team of boys who play a wild football game in front of my bungalow classroom (where they are forbidden to play) that this teacher, the one called BITCH, is the ONLY one who can get the kids to stop. Fire with fire, I say, unless of course, we suddenly turn this terrible tide and make civil student behavior priority one. Not likely, I fear.

Well, all this contemplation is making me hungry. I think I'll go out and get a little of the finger-licking good stuff and be done with it.