cut your mullet
While I was at a Target, I noticed that the school supplies were on sale. The public schools have already started so anything they have in the way of school supplies needs to move. I waded into the sea of unprepared parents and ornery children to see what was on sale. I was wearing Birkenstocks, a bad idea in a room full of children and harried parents.
I do not envy parents � you have a hard job. How anyone has survived childhood is beyond me sometimes.
In this morass of humanity, I encountered a boy who was in my class last year and will be again this year. He was telling his mother he needed something for school that I do not think he needed and before I had the opportunity to be polite I said, �Oh, no you don�t!� I know that I used a contraction. I hate it too.
The parent disagreed with me but I feel that as the teacher I should get to decide what comes and goes in my classroom. I am responsible for the safety and health of the pupils. I make the decisions. This boys parents are a mess.
The other day I left a note in Weetabix�s comments, I admitted to do something horrible to a student.
His mom is not bright. She would come in and complain that the other children were making fun of her son. His name was Richard, he had a mullet, and she would not cut it. Her husband�s name was Richard so they called him �Little Dick� or �Little Dicky� which is a horrible name to have and a horrible name to have coupled with a mullet.
She said to me, �Why do the other kids make fun of my Little Dick? Why are you not doing anything?� I was working against this but when you are twelve or thirteen year old boy and your mother drops you off at school calling you �Little Dick� as you pray for baldness to relieve you of your mullet there are things your teacher cannot do to help you. I told her to stop calling him by a word that his peers use to describe their privates when the size of those privates is also a matter or pride and that perhaps updating his haircut would not hurt.
She was opposed to the idea of calling him �Rick� �Rich� �Richard� or anything that did not mean �PENIS� in the common vernacular language of boys. She also said, �I love the hair on my Little Dick.� I was at the end of my rope.
This conference happened before school. Rick, as I called him because I cared about him, looked at me as if to say �thanks for trying to help� but looked like he was also going to cry. This was a difficult thing conversation to have, much less in front of the kid.
That day William the Terrible, as he was known decided to cut my hair in class. I was helping another child and he came up and CUT my hair. I was furious and then I realized what I needed to do: get William to cut Rick�s hair.
I ended up giving William twenty dollars to cut Rick�s hair. We waited a week to do this so it did seem obvious.
Mom of Little Dick was furious but I apologized and offered to take Rick to get his haircut and even pay for it. She had no idea that I had already paid to get his hair cut. Another teacher went with me. We took the kid to some insane place in the mall and also got him some clothes from Old Navy. The other teacher talked me out of getting him clothes at Abercrombie since we are teachers. We really just got him uniforms that did not look so dingy.
So, yes, I paid someone to cut another kid�s hair. After he looked like someone who lived in the year 2000 and dressed like it the kids did not make fun of him. They even stopped making fun of that unfortunate name.
