I want a day in the life of an accountant

Six of my kids were suspended today. Five boys from my class, and one resource kid. Three guesses as to which resource kid. No, I take that back... Just one. Think hard, now...

Evidently five (I thought it was four, but no, five) of my boys jumped another one of them on Friday and took his gameboy and something like eleven of his games. The kid's mom went to the police and is evidently pressing charges... It's Dae, Gecko, Huffy, and two other kids I don't think I've written about specifically. One is a generally a good kid following Dae's lead (as, actually, were all the rest of them), and the other is relatively new to my class, who got transferred for being harassed himself in another class. (My favorite story from the week before he was transferred in- from the same teacher who actually also had Jay back in the day: walking to an assembly, another kid calls this one, for whom I've yet to think of a good nickname although I'm leaning toward Pockets from his habit of cramming food such as whole cheesesteaks in there on a regular basis, a faggot. Pockets turns around and replies,
"Oh yeah? Then how come my fingers were in your mom's butt last night?")

They were supposed to be arrested but the police from the local station never showed... So they're out for five days. This morning someone asked about it in class, and Cyrus interrupted to add:
"See Ms. A? Another bad thing I wasn't involved in!"
I told him I was proud of him for how he had stayed out of the whole thing, since he's friends with all the boys that did the attack and robbery. He's also friends with the kid who got attacked, though... I really have no idea what his motivation was for staying out of it, but I'm glad he did. It's funny the things they need to know I appreciate. It also looks like my wallet was stolen while I was out at dinner last week, which clears Cyrus (huge relief, although it doesn't make the annoyance of the whole dealing with the stolen wallet thing any easier. I can't even begin to express how heartbroken I would have been if he had actually done that) but makes me even more disappointed in Dae, since I believe he now lied to me about it and made me doubt a kid that I really love who really just needs to know someone believes in him. It sucks; in a lot of ways Dae and Cyrus are my DJs of this year. They're the ones who've made the most obvious drastic improvements in behavior from their last year in school, that I have in some ways the most intense relationships with. Dae has definitely got a lot of DJ's sneakiness, that I just pray he grows out of... Thank god Cyrus doesn't have that, although I think some of the other teachers might appreciate that more than his current overwhelmingly oppositional behavior with some of them.

Tangent on that note- one of my professors came in today to do observations, although I was doing make-up testing. Cyrus was supposed to be finishing his test, but was having trouble concentrating and so was walking around the room. He started rifling through the health teacher's stack of posters as I was talking to the professor, so I told him to put it down.

"But this is my project!" he protested as he pulled one out. The subject? Cocaine and crack! My professor looked a little overwhelmed. Little bit embarassing. Just a little. And by little I mean... a lot. (ever see the Buffy episode in sixth season with the social worker...?)

Walking into the special ed office this morning I hear over someone's walkie that Jay had entered the building- the same time that another girl started having seizues evidently, outside, and an ambulance was on it's way. I asked the principal if the ambulance was for Jay, but she said no; I don't know whether at that point she knew about the security issue or not. Now, it's not like Jay's a regular at the building, but him coming isn't so shocking that it would go out over security. So I go up to see if he's there the beginning of third, but his teacher was out so I went around to check for some of my other eighth graders and see Little Jay in the hall.

"Where's your buddy, Jay?"
"He got locked up." Little Jay responded, lounging comfortably against the lockers with no thought of class even in the vicinity of his head.
"Locked up? What do you mean, locked up? He was here yesterday, and this morning, I heard it over the walkie. He's not locked up, it's not even 10:00 yet."
"No, Miss, I'm serious. He's locked up. He threatened a teacher or something."

Turns out he threatened a security officer yesterday at the end of the day, was suspended, and came back anyway and so was arrested for trespassing. Kid doesn't show up for months, and now he can't stay away... sometimes they're just stupid. I didn't get the chance today, but I'm definitely calling him tomorrow to yell at him for being stupid.

Little Jay, however, decided to be my best buddy. I told him to walk with me while I went around dropping PSSA stuff off and picking other PSSA stuff up. Kids aren't allowed to be alone with the testing material, even to carry it between rooms, which makes the whole thing a ginormous pain in the ass. Then he asked if he could stay with me for a while, and since I wasn't going back in with my main classroom, and his class was split up (not that he would have gone or attempted to learn anything anyway), I said sure so long as he didn't talk to whoever I brought into resource, and that he could use the computer so long as he did something educational first. So he came in, did First in Math for a little while, and checked out at the bell and even waited for a note to go back to class. Even the thug kids'll surprise you some days...
Lez told me that after I left Melissa's class yesterday when she was telling Jay that she wanted to have me following her around, Little Jay was all about it. I'm not sure how explicit he got, but evidently he was seconding her on my being hot and being jealous of my following Big Jay around, and he may have had an ulterior motive for following me today- he told Lez he'd work on getting me to hook up with her somehow.

This will come up later, but I gotta say, sometimes I get tired of being the young attractive teacher that the boys have a crush on and the girls relate to. Too much baggage. At least this time it was funny.

Anyway, I grilled him for awhile about how I keep hearing about how he and Big Jay used to be such good students, which he steadfastly denied, and how they were really sweet and polite, "-not that you haven't been polite to me. You've been very polite to me. But threatening security, and all the other stupid choices you guys have made this year? What changed?" LJ just shrugged. I asked him if he was in the same business as BJ. He claimed ignorance but it was a pretty clear cover to get me to ask him if they dealt drugs, which I didn't want to do outright. He told me anything we talked about would be in confidence- I suppose meaning he wouldn't tell BJ. I think he might have wanted to have an actual heart to heart, but I was just curious how much he would tell me right off the bat. Especially since when I first ran into him, he was practicing how to roll a joint using his late slip.

"Just practicing my skills," he responded when I gave him a look.
"On your late slip?"
"Uh huh."
"That's probably not the best thing to practice on. A lot of people have probably touched that paper. I wouldn't stick it in my mouth. Do you not get enough practice with the real thing?"
"Naw, I don't smoke that stuff. I'm just playing around."

And pigs have wings... and then in a slight veer of conversation:

"So do you smoke Newport cigarettes?"
"No."
"Tell the truth, Miss!"
"No, I do not smoke Newports. I promise. It's the truth."
"Do you smoke weed?"
"No."
"No, really. I won't tell." Actually probably true... Another teacher the TweedleJays are close with told me Big Jay offered her a sample.
"No. When you're a teacher, you can lose your job over something like that."
"Oh." I don't know if he believed me, but he let it drop.

The clincher of the day, however, came after school, when two of the eighth grade girls came in late, freaking out.

"Miss A! We gotta show you something! We don't want to say it in front of anyone, though."

Turns out someone thought it would be cute to put a condom on the third floor railing. Like, really on, not just hanging on. One of them touched it by accident before she saw it and was paranoid she was going to get a disease. They thought it was used because it had stuff inside it, but it wasn't quite that disgusting; I'm pretty sure it was just lubricant or spermicide or something, which I tried to explain to them before getting really uncomfortable with the whole topic.

"Oh, we know about that, Miss."
"And how would you know about something like spermicide in condoms in eighth grade?" I asked pointedly.
"Because our parents tell us! You know, like how to protect yourself from disease and stuff. But I'm a virgin, I never even touched one before! I washed my hand, like, fifteen times. Do you think that's enough?" Anita asked, panicking for probably the eighth time in as many minutes.
"Yeah, I'm a virgin too. Well, I mean, technically..." Maria started to answer but faded off. Guessing she was referring to oral sex or something else I didn't really want to know about, I waved her off.
"I don't even want to know..."
We started back downstairs to go back to the program. The girls started chattering in Spanish. Anita talks at lightening speed even in English, so in Spanish I had no hope of understanding, but Maria looked progressively more and more upset. I was going to keep going down the stairs but when we were almost there Anita yanked me back.

"Um, Miss, there's something we- Maria- well, she can't say it, but there's something we want to tell you..."
More conferencing in Spanish, then confession of the year... They told me Maria had been raped by a teenage neighbor when she was a little kid, which is why she stumbled over the "virgin" issue. Not only that but that her step-dad molested her for four years, only stopping last summer, and that her mom doesn't believe her. It was one of the more depressing conversations I've had yet this year. Some days I want to have a neon sign on me that says, "Please do not tell me anything you don't want me to report to someone else." because she flipped out when I talked about going to the police or DHS... I have to do something, though. The situation just sounded worse and worse the more she talked about it. Needless to say the end of the after-school program was shot. She started shaking as she told me, and a lot of it she just looked at Anita and Anita told me because she couldn't talk or she would start tearing up, and she kept saying that she just really didn't want to cry.
Back to the tired of being the young female teacher... she's not even in my class, or on my caseload... Just in my after school program. I've been friendly to her, but we're certainly not close- that was really the first conversation I've ever had with her, but she told me she just never knew an adult she trusted before, and I doubt she would've told me if not pushed to by Anita, who I do know well and who does trust me.

Just for one day I'd like to have a boring job. Maybe just have a day in the life of an accountant.