some lights seem eternal
in this springtime of hope

bite me

September 09, 2004
I wish I had something to write to you about beyond, �Day Two: everyone has survived.� Nothing exciting happened in my class but that is because I am a fascist and nothing really terrible will ever happen in my classroom.

However, when I was moving my class to lunch along with the class that I watch for lunch duty we passed Kindergarten and First Grade on their way to recess. While this happens, the Nursery is leaving for the day and it ends up for thirty seconds that the entire school is the atrium. During this unusually orderly traffic-jam, one of the newly minted Kindergarteners saw his mother leaving with his nursery aged sibling and wanted to make a break for it. He flung his lunch box behind him (getting his teacher in the gut) and bolted for the door, nearly toppling the Nursery Aide.

He was apprehended by the Nursery Director/Teacher, who is quick on her feet, foiling an otherwise perfect jailbreak. They handed him to me to calm him down because this kid and I are homeboys, you know, and that is the benefit of teaching in a parochial setting: I know all the kids in the school, have a relationship with them and you can comfort them when they are upset. How do you not hug a crying/screaming four-year-old? He ruined my tie. That is five ties that were mistaken for tissues so far and I still have not learned that J. Crew is not for Elementary School Teachers.

Back to his story: He had seen his mother from the lunchroom and had started crying, no one knew why and he would not tell. Later interrogation found out that he had seen his mother from the window, wanted to leave but knew that if he said anything they would have watched him and stopped him. He is a smart boy and I think the use of a lunch box as weapon was carefully calculated and clever. The rumor among my students, dating back to last year, is: the little boy is my son as he looks like me and is an evil genius. This incident did nothing to dispel that myth.

Another Kindergartener bit me today. We have had a wave of violence this week: a biting, kung-fu nose kick, and projectile lunch boxes. The Kindergartener bit my hand because it smelled like watermelon sherbet scented soap I use. That is what you get for having obsessive-compulsive disorder around hungry children.

That happened once when I taught public school too, I was talking to the parent of the student. The parent was also a teacher in the school where I was teaching and while we were talking the boy comes up and asks me if he can bite my finger and I said, �sure� thinking �he must be joking� and he did it, he bit me � hard. His father said, �NAME, you don�t know where his hands have been!� I said, �I do and I can tell you that it isn�t pretty.�

I treat Carol Smith�s words like the Gospel, �they (the students) have to think you�re crazy��

8:32 PM :: 6 comments so far ::
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