all that is so you would no I did my work!!

Last week was spring break. I took the opportunity to go to the other side of the world (Spain) and have as little contact with children as possible. My flight home was yesterday, so I took a sick day. It was actually kind of legitimate, since I started developing a cough Sunday night, although luckily it seems to be going away; if I get sick again this year I'm going to have to find a way to order a new body. I arrived home carrying a bit of emotional baggage to make up for all the physical baggage the airlines lost (including my cell phone... grrr...), trying to get mentally ready to get back to school.

Now, bit of background on what I thought I was coming back to. My primary partner teacher, M, who started out as the science and reading teacher for both my section and its sister section (L's class), has chronic health problems. She's been out of the room for what I think amounts to months, now, and the last few in a row. She came back for another staff member's baby shower, the day Maria told me she was running away from home the last period of the day, so I saw her only briefly, but she told me she was going to try to come back for report card conferences but would absolutely be back after spring break. (While I love M as a person, it was not the best moment of my year discovering she felt well enough to come to a staff party but not school...)
She didn't come for report card conferences, but I assumed, naively, that she would be back after spring break. Not so much.
The powers that be put in her place a while ago a long term sub working on getting his certification who's been in the building several years, who was previously subbing for an eighth grade teacher moved to another school a few months into the school year because of teacher/student ratios (my school has a lot of people who are legally considered teachers but are in actuality "support" staff, some who are terrific and some who are not, including grade coordinators who handle discipline and grade-wide concerns, and subject coaches. It's probably a system that should be in more schools, albeit with more accountability to actually helping the staff rather than doing CYA for administration, but it sucked for the kids who lost their teacher for no good reason they could see, mid-year, twice). But since she's been out, I've been planning for both my class and the other class and trying to take care of most of the administrative responsibilities for them, so Mr. Crush has something to go on, as being thrust in mid year not the best time to jump into to all of that, and even occasionally attempting science although mostly leaving that to him, trying to figure out how to do my job well in terms of actually meeting the needs of my special ed kids, and now also doing resource. Basically I've been doing three jobs rather than one, none of them particularly well-designed or very well supported. Fun.

I walked in ten minutes before the bell, and discover one of Mr. Far's kids (my roommate from last year) in the hall. She is probably one of the through and through nicest, sweetest, most innocent kids in the building, and I couldn't imagine her breaking the rules on purpose.
"Hi, Honey, what are you doing in the hall before the bell's even rung?"
She glanced at me guiltily, but had a good cause. "I just wanted to check if Mr. Far is here."
"Was he not here yesterday? I wasn't here."
"No, he broke his ankle!" She looked like she was about to cry.

Now, the last time Far was out, and I went in to check on his kids, since they are largely mine from last year, the rumors were already flying. The sub looked about to cry. Far's class is notoriously hard to deal with. My gift to him, from last year...

"How are you guys doing? I just wanted to check on you, because Mr. Far asked me to make sure you all had been doing your best today for your guest teacher," I lied. I actually had only stopped in because I had run out of the building to do an errand on my prep, and on the way back in heard screaming from his classroom window. I hadn't known before I walked in his room that Far was even absent. "But I somehow heard all this screaming coming from this room, so I wanted to make sure everything was okay."

A class full of fingers pointed instantly at Vandal, a kid I had last year along with Honey in the after-school program for kids who needed extra hours of school to make up for their low test scores.
"Naw, man, naw... it was him! I mean him!" Vandal protested, pointing at the kids he thought I was mostly likely to believe would have been screaming instead.
"Uh-huh..."
"So Ms. A, Mr. Far got arrested?" asked another kid out of the blue. A couple kids nodded and started whispering, but attention was definitely on my reaction.
"Arrested?" I asked, a little confused.
"Yeah, didn't he get into a fight?" Jekyll added. I looked at his face. He's grown up a lot this year from when he was in my class- I think having a male teacher, especially someone like Far, has done wonders for him, but thankfully his sense of humor hasn't diminished too much with his newfound maturity. He almost kept a straight face, but there was a trace of a smile underneath.
"Well, yeah," I decided to play along, "we went to a club last night, and there was a big fight. But when the cops came I managed to get away, but Mr. Far didn't, so he took the fall for both of us. I'm going to bail him out after school, so he'll be back tomorrow. But since he had such a rough day in jail, I want to have good things to tell him about you, not that you were screaming out your window."

Most of the kids instantly knew I was joking, especially since it was pretty obvious (I thought, anyway) that they had made up the whole thing. A couple kids, though, had completely not expected me to go along with it, and all of a sudden were taken aback with the potential that maybe it wasn't a hoax of their classmates. There was a look of suspicious confusion on their faces, but most of them knew me well enough to know I was joking after a couple seconds. Honey, however, who would never imagine a teacher would make something up like that, was devastated.

"Mr. Far is in JAIL?" she wailed. "He got arrested? Is he okay? Was he okay in the fight? He's not hurt, right? He's getting out?"

I didn't have the heart to keep teasing after that, and confessed that actually he just didn't feel well. But long story short, while kids are treasure troves of gossip, reliable info on teachers is not always their strong points, particularly gullible ones like Honey. So I took the broken ankle story with a grain of salt, although it didn't sound like the kind of story someone would have made up for fun.

I walked upstairs. On my into the office to sign in, I see Mrs. B, Melissa's partner teacher.
"Oh, Ms. A, have you talked to Melissa?"
"No, what happened?"
"She's in the hospital!"

Long story, but thankfully far from the kids' version I heard later, which involved her having a heart attack. The hospital part was true, though.

I sign in, go back toward my classroom, see Mr. Crush in the 6th grade office and stop to talk about what he covered yesterday with my class, as M obviously had not come back... As we start talking, L comes in. She looked kind of upset, and without too much of the how-was-your-break small talk, jumped in.

"Did anybody... talk to you about it?"
I was confused. "What do you mean?"
"About... you know..."
"Oh, M not being back?" I brushed it off. "Yeah, can't say I'm terribly surprised..."
"No, about... the whole hospital thing..."
"Oh, Melissa? Yeah, Ms. B just told me..."
She looked confused. "Melissa's in the hospital? No, I didn't hear about that, is she okay?"
"Yeah, I think... Wait, what are you talking about then?"
"The other thing..."
"Oh, Far? Yeah, I just ran into one of his students, I heard about that too. I'll call him later, but I'm sure he's fine."
She looked even more confused.
"No... you mean, you really haven't talked to anyone? I left you a message..."
"My cell phone got lost with my luggage. Long story, but I don't have it right now. What's wrong? What are you talking about?"

L took a deep breath. "Now, don't freak out."
I started to freak out. "What?"
"Just, before I tell you, she's fine. She's really fine, she's home, she's okay. Don't freak out, she's gonna be just fine."
It's amazing how the words "don't freak out" make you do exactly that.
L took another deep breath. I started to hyperventilate.
"Whoopi got shot."

Whoopi (so nicknamed by her classmates who think she looks like Whoopi Goldberg) is the girl who wrote the fairly incomprehensible birthday card that she worked on for three days from my post back in December.

"She what? Like, with bullets? From a gun?"
"That's why I said to not freak out... She's fine, really. She got caught in some cross-fire, and she got shot, on the news something like three times, but she's okay, she's out of the hospital."

I almost fell over. As mornings go, finding that my partner teacher who was absolutely positively supposed to be there after months of absence is nowhere to be seen, one friend has a broken limb, one is in the hospital, and one of my student has been shot three times, all before 8:10 in the morning, is not the best way to start. And I'm not really a morning person to begin with. Way to come back from vacation...

Whoopi actually wound up coming into school today. She couldn't use her hand- she evidently still has a bullet in her arm, but she seemed to feel fine. I couldn't believe she actually showed up. Granted, the shooting evidently happened the last day of school before break, which was over a week ago, but still... she has a friggin bullet in her arm. As everyone in the class was fussing over her in the hall, I helped her open her locker. Cyrus came up to us.
"See, Whoopi? I told you! Everyone's going to be all nice to you and give you all this sympathy because you got shot. That's why I want to get shot. I'm gonna go get myself shot in the head."

I looked at him and said dryly, "If you get yourself shot in the head there won't be any Cyrus for us to give sympathy to or be nice to."
Cyrus appeared to contemplate this for a minute. "Well... yeah, maybe. I guess so."

What disturbed me the most was the total normalcy of how he said it, for all the other kids as well. Getting shot isn't even a huge or life-changing event... Cross-fire is a part of life. A few weeks ago Penelope came in grouchy and snappy. In the afternoon she explained to me that she was just tired. There was a gunfight in her neighborhood the night before, and some bullets hit her house. The cops spent a significant part of the night banging around her house looking for the bullets.
"Stupid cops... I didn't get any sleep. It's not like we shot anyone! I just wanted them to do it quietly."

Penelope, is, incidently, trying to make up for weeks (verging on months) of apathy and indifference to school. She's a really special kid, loves learning about other cultures and is, when not beating other kids in a rage (which to be fair has only happened a couple times this whole year, though she's had other problems and evidently spent last summer under house arrest, I'm not real clear on why) actually really respectful and considerate of others in a way that I wish more adults were. Over break, as part of a reading program we're supposed to be having the kids do, she was the only one who actually recorded what she read, how many pages (145!), and even wrote a summary of what she read for me to prove that she actually read it. The only problem lay in what she read... I'm not sure how I'm going to pass this onto the reading coach...

The summary, with spelling but not much grammar edited, for your reading pleasure (consider it a preview, I'm sure they have it at Barnes and Nobles...):

G-Spot

The book The G-Spot is about a teen. She was 16 when she first heard about a man named G, and G was a pimp he got money from left to right. So she always heard this about him like one day he almost killed his cousin because his cousin because his cousin couldn't pay him his money so what she knew was that G was very strict about his money but as she got older she always heard things about him. She lived with her grandmom. Ok so shen she was 18 she and her friend wanted to go to G Spot the club G onde. Well, really her friend wanted to go but you had to be 21 or older to get in because it was a strip club. At her house she lived with her brother that was kind of mental but not too mental and one day she met G she didn't really know who he was until he told her and by then she had a crush (editor's note- the word she wrote is actually "clow" but I can't figure out what that is... "crush" is my best guess). So you know he got money so he told her he will help her get some money for her brothers school. So she love her brother and wanted him to finish his school so she went along with it.
Then they lived together started going out and then he was beating her.

but I didn't finish reading the story.

(arrow pointing up to her summary)
all that is so you would know I did my work!!

Have a good day (smiley face inserted here)