Another Day In High School

They came back from lunch, sat at their desks and were fairly quiet for thirty-something seventeen-year-olds packed in a tiny room. The questions to the novel we read together were on the SmartBoard. My goal was to discuss the characters and themes. The students were quieter than normal, which falsely lead me to believe that they were really interested in our discussion. After all, this was a novel one boy had referred to as “a book I actually may buy.”

There was little room to move in the classroom. Big bodies, little chairs, legs, and backpacks sprawled everywhere. I was in the middle of a sentence when a boy stood up and walked to the back of the room. He was someone who I had met years before in middle school when I covered for a teacher on maternity leave. The only thing that changed in the three or four years since I’d first seen him was his height and voice. He sat and refused to work in middle school, and he sat through my class every day in 11th grade, socializing, knowing he wasn’t going to graduate. From his point of view, why do the work?

So, when he got up, I didn’t think much of it at first. I walked up to him, tapped him on the shoulder, said his name, and asked him to sit down. Immediately, I noticed his posture, shoulders back, feet grounded. Something caught my eye, I turned and saw a girl standing, cell phone aimed at me, recording. And that’s when I knew! And that’s when I froze because just a month earlier, another teacher had been recorded in class and reprimanded for something she had said. Things are blurry in my mind after that point. It was as if I went into a daze. I remember seeing the boy I had tapped on the shoulder, reaching over the desk to punch another boy. Desks and chairs fell. I yelled for them to stop. I remembered glancing at my heels, knowing I’d never keep my balance if I tried to pull the boys apart. Desks, chairs, bodies were on the ground in front of me. Behind me were more students and desks. One step either way, and I knew I was going down.  More students entered the fight while others watched. I yelled for someone to get help. It was chaos!

Then it stopped. The boy who had started it was in the hall. I remember him attempting to come back into the room and me telling him to leave. I remember the other teacher who had been in the room telling me she was taking a bleeding student to the clinic. I remember standing alone with the other students understanding that I needed to say something to them. We all stood there, and then they helped me pick up the desks and chairs. I had never seen a fight. I never thought to get any training on how to stop a fight or what to say to students after a fight. I looked at the clock and saw there were still thirty minutes left of class. Inside I was a mess of nerves and fog. My mantra was: hold it together. Luckily, my next period was planning. Hold it together. I finished going over the questions.

At the end of class, I found out the students all knew the fight was coming. That’s why they were especially quiet. They had been waiting for it to begin. No one wanted to be a snitch and let me in on their secret.

Everyone left.

I stood alone in the room.

There was no fight in me. Only…

I went to the assistant principal’s office and said: “This isn’t for me.”

I left thinking of how lucky it was that a student didn’t slam their head on a desk, that a weapon wasn’t hidden in a backpack, that stitches would heal one of the wounds.

The next day I cried. I cried for the boy our school system failed–the boy who had learned by middle school to hate school. I cried for all the students who came to class curious, wanting to learn, and then could’ve gotten seriously injured. I cried for our school having to put so many students in a tiny room because our district decided to pay the class size fine instead of actually having smaller classes. I cried because I gave up. I care about kids. My compassion runs deep, but I can’t fix a system that makes our students feel terrible about themselves. That is something we are all going to have to fix together.

What happened shouldn’t be

Another Day In High School