So, today I deescalated a situation by dissuading the use of blood, sweat, or tears as a writing tool, participated in a class rodeo chasing an autistic child around the room, and got into 2 driven battles over Sundials and Solitaire. At least I can say my job is not boring. What did you do today?
Rewind to 10:55am. The peace is over. I am begrudgingly returning my partner-teacher’s sweet sweet class for 2 solid hours with my kittens. I affectionately refer to them as my kittens, as it is like herding cats trying to get these kids to do an organized anything, or at least think before they attempt such things. Today, I am welcoming them back to class while simultaneously trying to comprehend a story one of my emotionally disturbed student’s aides is telling me about how he just tried to sharpen his finger in a pencil sharpener....and maybe he’s going to have to have stitches. I nod, half-aware, and ask him to put the gauze back on his finger and take out his planner. No, I’m not a total bitch. This is just....a day in the life. A few weeks ago, I had to personally extract 3 inches of mechanical pencil lead from one of my boy’s hands. It’s part of the job description.
After an agonizing 10 minutes of settling, we’re ready to go. This is the part where I spend a full 2 minutes of my time battling an oppositional-defiant child to give up his Solitaire game and participate in our math lesson. I got the iPad. He drew the entire math period. Whatever. There’s just not time to deal with these kinds of things when the rest of the class starts popping up like overgrown whack-a-moles with the extra 120 seconds of unstructured time. I have threatened them with rubber hammers. They are unaffected. Right about the time I get them all settled again, in walks our highly autistic child who is only in my math class because my principal is afraid of her mom, who has legal ties and is in an extreme state of denial about her almost-non-verbal autistic child’s condition. She spends her time in class screaming for fruit snacks and paperclips, while occasionally announcing to the world “I finished! I finished!” before we have even started. You can imagine how well this goes over with my highly distractable group of 10-year-olds. But we press on. I manage to get a few words in about finding the volume of irregular shapes before we have our daily race. Turns out, the aforementioned autistic child has developed an obsessive fascination with glue sticks. At least once a day, she sees a glue stick in a desk, waits for just the right moment, and then leaps up and bolts across my classroom, tackling anyone and anything in her path, to immediately grab the sticky tube and start covering herself in glue. Her aide, and 90% of my kittens, all leap up after her and start chasing her around the room while trying to pry the glue stick from her hands. I join in because…if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. I’m pretty sure everything I’ve just said about volume is ancient history. But I try my best to press on.
Somehow we all make it to lunch/recess, and I’m able to shove a chicken sandwich down my throat just in time to run back up the stairs to retrieve my class. At this point, we are on the home stretch. One more hour of skillbuilding practice and this shit show is over. I instruct the kids to go outside and get their Sundials from the field, where we had left them after our earlier science lesson on the rotation of the Earth, and find myself in iPad battle number two. OD kid would prefer NOT to go outside to retrieve his sundial. He instead would like to play on his iPad again and battle me for 5 more minutes with another teacher in the room, who later expressed his extreme disbelief at this child’s unnecessary defiance. “Oh that? That’s all day every day. Nothing unusual. And yes, I drink a lot.”
The clock has finally ticked down to 15 minutes before dismissal, and I’m sure I’m in the clear when I realize my good pen is missing. I go on a determined search and find it in the hands of one of my kids with anger-management issues. Great. I take the pen back and tell him he’s going to need to go get his own pencil, where he flat out tells me “No.” Knowing this child is particularly escalated by authoritarian battles while ALSO knowing I will goddamn win this battle, I chose my technique. “Well, your language arts teacher is NOT going to want you turning that assignment in written in blood, sweat, or tears, so I’d suggest you choose a different medium.” I walk off as he’s explaining to me how he actually COULD answer the questions in blood, technically. A minute later, he had a new pen. I win, motherfucker.
And that’s a day in the life of me. The insane circus that is our education system. And yet, those moments of empathetic understanding from my math small group while I rush off yet again to deal with the shenanigans of OD kid and Anger-Management kid, and the clay-splattered faces of my creative girls, and the laughter I share with my teammates over an all-too-short lunch are each treasures I found today. Treasures I wouldn’t have without that insane circus. We have a long way to go, but I try to hang on to the good stuff.
Now if you’ll excuse me while i go get that drink.
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