Greatest Hits, Volume 1

I spent some time today going through the archives of a blog I used to contribute to with some folks I graduated with. It was meant as sort of a support group for new teachers - it was great, and I really enjoyed reading about all the insanity that the people in our profession deal with on a daily basis. I'm a little bummed that it's died down, but I guess now that we are a bit more experienced, we might not need the support as much.

Anyway, I wanted to share one of the posts I wrote for that site here. It is, without a doubt, my strangest teacher story to date. Part of me kind of wants something else this batshit crazy to come along and rival it, but I'm terrified of what that could be.

So I now present, in all its glory:

The Rat Incident

Working with 9th graders, you sort of begin to expect outlandish things. Students shout out at each other across the room like vikings in a mead hall; they try to escape from the classroom, squirming through a barely open door like a cat slipping under a fence; God help you if a bee flies in through an open window - you might as well be in the middle of Tokyo as Godzilla approaches.

In my short month and a half working with freshmen, I have seen mayhem. I see mayhem everyday, I expect mayhem. That could not prepare me for The Rat Incident.

I don't know how these students get out of class so easily, but everyday my class is visited by escapees from other teachers. This usually plays out with my pushing them out into the hallway and closing the door in the wayward student's face. On this particular Thursday, though, things went a little differently.

I was enjoying the relative quiet of my classroom sounding only about as loud as a 747's engine room, as opposed to the inside-the-space-shuttle's-rocket-chamber sound to which I am accustomed, as my students were working on writing a memoir. All of that changed when my class received a visitor.

"Yo, Ike, you want some of these fries?" the mystery student asked, handing Isaiah a styrofoam takeout container.

"Hell yes, motherflipper!" said Isaiah, taking the container from his friend, using the parlance of the student told not to swear in class.

As I was getting up to remove the interloper, I was distracted by Isaiah's jumping and screaming, as if he had just heard a gunshot. 

Well, Isaiah screamed and jumped like I would have if I heard a gunshot, but since my students are usually the ones perpetrating the shootings around here, they might react differently.

By the time I got to Isaiah, the gift-giver was gone, running off down the hall. When I looked in the box, I immediately understood what had so shocked my student. In the styrofoam container was a large, dead rat caught in one of those sticky traps that gets the rat's fur so matted and tangled that there is no hope of ever removing it from its tiny cardboard coffin.

"Ugh, that's disgusting, Isaiah. Go throw it away. Outside."

Isaiah is the type of student who doesn't like to be told what to do, and so even a reasonable request, such as throwing away the disease-ridden corpse of a dead rodent, can become a source of disagreement.

I saw a dead rat and a room full of squeamish 14 year old girls. Isaiah saw a dead rat and a room full of squeamish 14 year old girls. And a chance.

This is when things started to get out of hand. Isaiah started chasing the girls around the room with the rat. Girls were jumping on desks, screaming in voices so loud and shrill that they would drown out air raid sirens. I had 12 girls rushing from one side of the room to the other, knocking over desks and each other, all in pursuit of a safety that did not exist. A place where their classmate would not follow. Luckily, we only had about 5 minutes left in school, and so it was time for students to go to their lockers and get their things ready to go to the bus. This was a perfect way to get Isaiah and the rat out of my classroom, and to a trashcan.

Taking this opportunity, I allowed everyone into the hall and directed Isaiah to a trashcan. Unfortunately, he took this opportunity to chase around those girls who he was not able to terrorize in class. He even chased a teacher around with it.

It was about this time that Isaiah had an absolutely brilliant idea:

"Hey, I should go get Mr. C with this."

Mr. C is our principal, and he does not like bullshit.

"I don't think that's a good idea, Isaiah."

"Naw, man. It'd be funny. I should go get Mr. C."

"Yeah, Isaiah. You're right, go get Mr. C."

Good life decisions are not Isaiah's strong point.

"So I can go? Yes!"

Isaiah ran out the door to the buses and the waiting principal. Maybe I won't have to see him for a day or two.