It�s the perfect time of year (somewhere far away from here)
Today was a day that will live on in infamy.
Lunch was where all hell broke loose and ran across my life like fire ants. The other teacher watched the kids while I heated up my lunch.
When I got there one of the girls in Second Grade had lost the privilege to sit down. I don�t know why or how but I was left to enforce the decision of the other teacher not to let her sit in her chair. She had to spend the half our on her feet and I was to make sure it happened. She fought me hard, had a couple tantrums and became the object of my classes ridicule.
If you think a seven-year-old girl jumping up and down and screaming is funny you should see eleven-year-old boys doing impressions of them is something you�ll love. I know I did.
To add to this comedy the ten-year-olds joined in the show when the seven-year-old started to tell me, �It isn�t fair.� They gave a barber shop quartet version of my, �life�s not fair� speech complete with gestures and glares.
Then at recess I was trying to film my fifth graders sliding into home plate because it�s ridiculous. I wanted a moving picture instead of a still shot.
While I was panning the gym I noticed the kindergarten go from a pack of five-year-olds to a brawl that would make a bar look tame. They were kicking, punching, grabbing clothes and using them to fling others into the benches; one girl was banging a boy�s head into a pipe. It took me and two fifth graders to break the mess up and one of the fifth graders got it in the balls for his efforts. They were beating the ever-loving shit out of each other.
Our Kindergarten is six girls and two boys. It was a melee of patent leather shoes and Laura Ashley prints, it was girls gone wild in the worst way imaginable. It wasn�t like boys in a hockey game or something, this was the sugar and spice and everything violent.
We drug them to the Gestapo (what I call the First Grade teacher in my mind) and let her arbitrate the mess because I had to take a kid with sore testicles to the nurse. By �drug� I mean we had to carry or pull them across the gym.
We need the winter to end. We need to play outside. We need Spring. We need it today.
