The punishment

I do enjoy my job most of the time, but there's two easy ways to change that. One, the students can fight, leading to someone getting hurt. Second, we can be self-contained, meaning 6 hours of sitting in a room with nothing to do.

Thursday afternoon, we were supposed to be self-contained. While heading to my room after lunch, I saw two kids starting to fight. While breaking up the fight with a few others, One of the students got angry at us and attacked me. He was rather unsuccessful, failing to land a single blow on me, but did successfully punch a 50 some year old man in the face, leading to eye surgery. Hopefully, the student will not be returning to this school. If he does, there are a lot of angry kids who like my colleague, and he may be hurt.

Friday's snow led to us being self-contained all day. Today quite a few teachers are out, so we are self-contained again. It's like torture. I'd much rather be teaching.

On an encouraging note, I brought in a bad of Manga Romeo & Juliets on Friday, and some of the kids began reading it. I didn't stop them, but wasn't too encouraging, since we'll be reading it as a class beginning this week (assuming we're not self-contained all week, in which case I don't care, because my sanity will give out long before Friday). A few wanted to borrow it, and most thought it seemed kind of cool. This is a skewed sample, since the kids I tend to win up with when we're self-contained tend to like me and are not my problem children, but it's still enough to make me optimistic that teaching Shakespeare might be something other than the painful chore I fear it may be at times (To clarify, I love Shakespeare. I've read alll the plays and sonnets several times. I just expect resistance from high school kids who don't like reading)

Gave out grades today to a couple of guys, who danced around with joy because they hadn't failed any classes. yeah, they should be striving for more than a D, but it's hard not to enjoy the sight of a few gang bangers dancing around because they didn't fail African American History or English Literature. Seriously, how many of you had someone dance for joy at your job today?