Pragmatism Trumps Racism In The Adoption Process

“It’s important to me that my child looks like us.” As soon as I said it I thought we’d be thrown out of there. It smacks of intolerance and that subtle New England brand of racism. We love the race but hate that ethnic family that lives down the street and cooks strange food. Ok, we like the food but that family is sooo “not our kind, dear.” Imagine my surprise when I learned that there is one institution that formally accepts racism. In fact they demand a level of honesty that is hard for the politically correct modern American to admit to.

Being a white male it’s absolutely forbidden for me to talk about race, as if my perspective is some how marginalized. Decades of institutionalized “reverse racism” to make up for past injustice still has “white privilege” to blame for our societies failure to lift the standard of living for the minority community. I am to apologize for my fortunate birth. So OK I’m sorry. I’m not sure what I’m sorry for but I sure am sorry about it.

I make my living judging children on the merits of their scholarship. I’ve only taught at schools which are predominantly white. I’ve seen kids that are lazy and kids that are driven. I haven’t seen too many minority students but I can say that of the few I’ve taught, they’re exactly the same as the majority. Some work hard, some don’t.

Maybe the kids at the privileged schools have more opportunity and I’m seeing the minority students take advantage of opportunities they wouldn’t have in less affluent communities. The most recent data from federal testing suggests that minority communities still offer less opportunity.

Obviously we need more leveling. Despite electing a black president we still aren’t out of the woods in terms of racial equality. There are pockets here and there where we’re beginning to mix. The Echo Generation is very color blind when it comes to choosing their friends. Much more so than my own. It’s much less shocking to see mixed race couples and it doesn’t take quota laws to get children to play together. They just do.

Still there is an inequality between the races in this country. One that still needs coercion to rectify. I don’t think we should think about relaxing anti-discrimination laws for a while. This is were the shock hits. As demonized as discrimination has become in the public arena, that it exists in the private arena can not be ignored. Rather than punish racism, the adoption process acknowledges it and tolerates what some consider racist views. Racial discomfort is forgiven. The alternative is to either drive away otherwise wonderful parents or start a childs life with a family who were so wanting to be parents they denied their basic human nature. That can’t be good for a child.

What's Wrong With Education In America Part 4: Journalists and Social Scientists

Read this. Pay particular and close attention to the block quote in the "Gangsta Generation" section. I thought the author of this piece clearly didn't understand the irony inherent in his or her prose. It is clearly lost on David Kupelian. There are so many things wrong with Kupelian's use of this citation in his assault on modern culture.

The quotation felt dated and trite the first time I read it in 1989. I don't remember who originally said it but I think I read it as a block quote in a book called "The 13th Generation" which if I remember was a compilation of soundbites about how lazy and scared Generation X is.

As for that quote, the biggest giveaway as to the outdated source material is the assertion that all MTV plays is Hip Hop videos. Wait for it... Wait for it... There someone said it. MTV doesn't play music videos anymore. Hello... 1995 called they want that joke back. Also white kids don't wear Malcolm X hats anymore. Malcolm X hasn't been cool since Tim Burton's "Batman" made it cool to be white again.

As for the whole damn article. It made for an interesting chuckle the first time I saw it. That's right, the same article from two different websites. However if you notice, the first is dated 2008 with the second 2004. I'm wondering if I could dig a little deeper and find it with a 2002 byline.

Ultimately this two part rail into everything that's wrong with kids 15 years ago ends up blaming in exceedingly well cited detail the corporations that run the country and with no citations at all the public schools of America. OK, maybe teachers are solely to blame for why your kid finds Beakmans World fascinating and the members of their community who actually care about them boring. Sorry about that.

Kupelian does offer conclusions as to how to save the children of America from the evils of marketing. They should all join The Boy Scouts. Except maybe the gay kids. Kupelian hates fags.

What's Wrong With Education In America Part 2: College

True story time. I once took an analytical chemistry class at Salem State. There were 24 students in the class. Ten were chemistry students the rest were from the bio department. One of the labs we did was to detect chlorine in various aqueous samples. One way was with a special electrode and a pH meter. The other way was through gas chromatography and mass spectrometry. It was in the fall semester and I got an A in the class.

One fine spring day I was sitting around the Chemistry Society office. It was a little closet off the Bio Society office. One of the bio majors who had just taken the class with me came into the chem society office to get help on a project he was doing for a bio class. He wanted to know how he could measure the amount of chlorine in pond water.

Having an audience of chem nerds I started fucking with him. I was thinking he'd recognize that I was fucking with him. I told him he should get some sodium metal and throw it in the pond. Then he should evaporate the water off and the sodium chloride would crystalize like when a tide pool at the beach evaporates in the sun. He could weigh the salt and then use the atomic mass to figure out how much chlorine there was.

He goes off looking for sodium and comes back an hour later to call me an asshole. What I told him was, from an engineering standpoint, a very valid way to solve his problem. From a scientific and environmental standpoint it was fucked up. Unfortunately it took his bio professor to point out to him how he had been had. I reminded him that we did the lab twice with two different ways of detecting chlorine. We could also have used Atomic Absorption and UV/Vis techniques but the easiest way to answer his question would be to go two blocks off campus to that pet store and spend five bucks on aquarium test strips. All you have to do is dunk them in and then look at the color.

What's Wrong With Education In America Part 1:The Students

This is a Periodic Table. Most periodic tables put Hydrogen in the same category as Lithium and Sodium. However metallic hydrogen is very very rare and so I've always felt that H-H really belongs above the Halogens as it bonds more like F-F or I-I. On the other hand HCl dissociates in water much like NaCl and does not form the bond that IBr does.

I have also seen Hydrogen placed in both periods 1 & 17 on the table and also listed alone, detached from the table.

However, placing Hydrogen in period 1 and 17 at the same time seems to throw todays precious little snowflake into fits of despair wondering if there are other repeats in the periodic table but being too lazy to actually read through all 119 elements in sufficient detail to remember anything useful makes that one of the great un-answered mysteries of the Universe.

It's like asking what's the square root of a million. No one will ever know. Well actually the kid who brought his calculator will tell you smugly that it's 1000. That kid is going places. The rest will be lucky to fetch his dry cleaning when they grow up. Calculator Boy will be managing the H1-B's America will need to hire to fill in the knowledge gap left when we realize we shouldn't have spent so much time teaching Snowflake how to have good self esteem instead of how to do calculus. Maybe if Snowflake's little sister is hot she can marry Calculator Boy and talk him into hiring his new Snowflake-in-law to be Vice President of Marketing and Synergy. Of course Snowflake will have to go back to night school and finish that degree in communications first.

I've been watching Doug Stanhope doing standup on cable. He makes a very valid point about why The New York Yankees are what's wrong with America. He tells the story in the context of dumb fucking assholes who will take a day off work to have a parade when their millionaire sports team wins but won't do the same to go to city hall and tell the mayor to let them smoke in bars. If only there was a way to get people to worry more about Paula Abdul than their own future. Whoever comes up with a distraction compelling enough to get my kids to skip their homework is going to become a millionaire. I just wish I could write a test where knowing who America's Next Top Model is going to be is important.

Should Jason Castro cut his hair?
A Yes
B No
C Who the fuck is Jason Castro and what does this have to do with Chemistry?

In regards to answer C, you tell me. Really. Because when I was trying to lecture on oxidation/reduction reactions you were texting your boyfriend in study hall about inane crap.

Good luck explaining to your boss at the hair salon why the EPA and OSHA are going to fine him tens of thousands of dollars because you poured ammonia based color stripper down the same sink you had been pouring chlorate bleach yesterday.

By the way, I had your boyfriend in my other class. If only he got this question right on the final.

A soldier has been assigned to clean up a small mess in one of the ammunition storage bays. The gunpowder spill is not water soluble. It is soluble in kerosene. Give three reasons why this is going to end badly.

A Student Of Mine Made A Phone Call Today

No give me the phone. Hello. You mean this really is ______'s father. Yes this really is _____'s teacher. No she's feeling sick. You think it's strep throat. Well usually students ask for a pass to see the nurse and I give them one. Then they don't disrupt my class with a cellphone. Well no she certainly doesn't sound like she normally does. I'll send her down, the number of the main office is ########. They'll dismiss her from there.

Well that was awkward.

Etiquette

The rules are that the phone is to be kept off and in the students locker. Otherwise the phone is a constant distraction to the learning process. Either to the student using the phone or the other kid being texted in another class. Every time I take a phone off a kid it's always "a call from my mother." Sorry kid, Mommy needs to learn to call the main office and ask to have you dismissed. It's a system that worked for the 90 years prior to 9/11 and there's no reason it can't work for parents and their kids today.

That being said, if this kid had come to me before class and said he was expecting a possible call from his deployed father. I would let him answer and then take the call quietly out into the hallway.

The story is lacking in details but I'm going to give the school the benefit of the doubt here. The kid probably didn't discuss the possible call before class. The teacher would have no idea why the kid is answering the phone in class and past experience would be that the call is another in a long series of cell phone related disruptions. The teacher, needing to maintain classroom control probably ordered the student to cease their disruptive behavior and relinquish the offending device. The student being a child probably did not reason with the teacher effectively and mearly informed the teacher that they were talking to a parent. The teacher hearing that every time they talk to a child about illegal phone use probably did not assume that the parent was a serviceman and this may have been the last time the (from his own admission) troubled boy may ever hear from his father. Emotions most definitely got out of control. Probably by both the student and teacher. They're probably even more out of control as the kid doesn't sound like an honors student and the teacher probably has had disruptions from the boy before.

You and I know nothing of the past history of discipline issues the school faces with this student and classes in general. You and I don't know anything about the level of student commitment this class has. Today it's the cellphone from this kid. Tomorrow it will be the cellphone from another kid. Next week it will be an iPod.

That this made national news is an indication of how fucked up our priorities as a nation are. Snowflake there isn't going to learn that had he merely cleared the call with the adult in charge of the classroom prior to taking the call that things would have worked out. Instead the lesson is that kids can do whatever they want in the classroom so long as mommy goes to the newspapers to complain. What should have been a lesson in civility is now a public embarrassment for the school. Now every phone call is going to be from someones father in a war zone. Every disruption during instruction time is going to affect every student. The outrage here shouldn't from this one jackass kid and his parents. It should be from the parents of every other kid in the class over the loss of instruction time when these snowflakes lose control.

If the student had answered the call and said to me "This is my dad in Iraq. It's the only time he can call. Can I take this into the hall?" I would say yes even if he hadn't asked for permission before class. I doubt very much that is how the event played out.


(A side note here... If you are accused of disrupting classroom time and go on national TV to defend yourself, clean up. Every judge knows that criminals can borrow a suit but showing up to court in a dirty t-shirt shows either contempt for the seriousness of the charges or a lack of understanding about your end of the social contract. In either case, it's an indication to the judge that you may not belong in polite society. The same case is true here. I'm going to assume trailer trash dumbass and say the kid knows nothing about good manners.)

Beautiful Night

Saw a deer coming home from school tonight. Peeping frogs in the swamp behind the house are peeping away. I'm drinking beer in the back of my truck. That was creepy. The frogs all just stopped peeping like they were on a switch. Now they're back. Coyote must be back there. Pictures of the Coyote in the newspaper taken from around the corner (print not online addition so no linky love.) I'm not the only one who's seen that damn thing. I've been saying it for years and everyone but Lisa who's seen it too say's it's a dog or something.

I gave my kids a test today. They all thought it was an April fools joke. It wasn't. It was a hard spank on the ass for most of them. Now they know I wasn't kidding when I said you need to remember everything in chemistry. What we do in September comes back to haunt you in April. Learning it for the test doesn't cut it. I sent a progress report out to every parent a few weeks ago indicating their kid was doing poorly whether they were actually doing badly or not. It was actually pretty ambigious. It really depended on the relationship the parent had with the kid. Bottom line is that the report cards are always bad 3rd quarter and I didn't want anyone to be surprised. I'm giving several kids their first C ever. I'm also sending one kid back to jail.

Good News Everybody

A little common sense. And to those opponents who think the cops won't be able to tell those defending themselves from the criminal shooter I have two things to say (well three actually.)

1 fuck you

2 What makes you think the gunfight will still be going on 7 minutes later when the police actually do arrive?

3 The police, when they do bother to show up, will know that those lawful and legal firearms owners who are defending themselves are not the criminal shooter when they put their weapons down after the police arrive.

All Hat No Cattle

OK Wikipedia is not the least bit credible but there's something especially wrong with an encyclopedia that has more to say about a ball player than the man who ripped open physics and made the future possible.

Some Things Can't Be Taught At Home, part 1

There are subjects that I just can't wrap my head around. It's not the material or the standards I don't get. I don't understand how we can teach them the way we do. English lit comes to mind. Give kids a list of books to read. Give them the books to read. If the books are worth reading kids will read them. We should be done here but we're not. "The Machine" then meddles where it shouldn't. Assessment rears its ugly head. It's not enough to ask students to read a list of books chosen for vague and subjective reasons. We have to make certain that every student then takes away the correct message from the book.

We have to make sure studets understand why Tom Buchanan was a callous racist. F Scott might simply have penned in Tom's choice of books to show how he was a trend follower. However, the modern interpretation, the correct answer on the essay test is that Tom Buchanan is a racist because he reveres this book by Goddard. This would be fine except the casual reader doesn't know, without digging, that the book Fitzgerald quotes espouses restricting immigration and then inclusion for the inferior races who are already here. The character doesn't discuss the inclusionary aspect of the book probably for the simple reason that Fitzgerald hasn't actually read the book he's disparaging. Heaven help the student who isn't suitably offended by Tom Buchanan's racism. Aside from a poor grade on the assessment, racist students go to counseling. If their attitude isn't suitably re-adjusted The Machine will see to it that they suffer for having their own opinions.

There's an entire graduate thesis in there for the student who can type lots and find a committee that likes him.

There's a PhD out there for any kid who can figure out and prove the exact timeline and sequence of events in this little gem.

Did I have to sit in on hours of classes listening to an instructor and the one kid who did the reading prattle on about opinion? The Machine thinks I did. I had a class where the professor gave us 5 questions and the reading list on the first day. He told us that was the final exam. The questions were how the books on the list related to each other and the usual themes: sex, death, power, desire and so on. I made a big poster board grid with the questions on top and the books on the side. I penciled in an answer for each question as I read enough of the book to pencil in an answer to the question. Some books I didn't read. I filled in the blanks with some quotes from the professor. On the day of the final exam I arrived early enough to cram in a little more. The kids who were there were desperately discussing what one book or another was about. Some of them formed "a study group" where each read one book and at the last minute tried to tell the others what they read. I unfolded my chart with the questions and books neatly laid out. They almost crapped themselves. I read it once and then put it away. One girl asked me if she could see my chart but it was too late. The test started. The first student got up after 20 minutes. I filled two blue books and left after an hour when my hand got tired. I probably had enough to complete the exam in the first question. I left the last two questions blank. I got an A in the class. It wasn't that hard. I probably didn't need to go to class but I did for the simple reason that I had paid for it. I had money in The Machine and I didn't want to miss anything important. Nothing important really happened but it could have and if I wasn't there I would have missed it. That and I wanted the professor to know I valued his time enough to show up. I don't remember much about him but I made certain he knew my name and that I appeared to take him seriously. It was the usual game of subjective assessment. I'm expecting an A. I want you to know I'm expecting an A. Here's my work. Thanks for the A.

Could I have gotten the same education from simply reading the books on my own? Probably. I don't remember anything from that class today. I don't even remember what books were assigned. I probably have copies of the books somewhere in the house but I don't remember which book went with which course. Did I get an A because I wrote brilliant essays about the books I was to have read? I did write a lot and hit many points that I believe the professor was expecting in a winning essay. Could the course be taught online? Yes.

Credit

MCAS scores for Massachusetts hit the news last week. Thanks for the kind words Mom. Sadly I had nothing to do with our success in chemistry and everything to do with our failure with Science & Technology.

Last year I taught the freshmen intro to physics and engineering design class. It was basically Tech with extra math. It was designed by the Museum of Science and one of the other science teachers. It was poorly conceived from the start. Curriculum was never written, it was just pages pulled from lab manuals with no sense of why we were doing things or what the topics had to do with each other. Even at that, it was meant to be offered to high achieving students not the 2 level kids I taught. It assumed a firm grasp of algebra and geometry including trig straight out of 8th grade. It was a nightmare. To make matters even more fun, we weren't informed that the kids would be expected to take MCAS until February.

My theory is that the teacher who was to write the curriculum never expected to have to share the course with another teacher and was planning on winging it alone. Then half the students were given to me. The other half of the kids ended up with a series of different science teachers as the department imploded under a series of poor staffing judgements. The MCAS the freshmen took was nothing close to the scope of the course. They were set up for failure. I did the best I could.

That was 3 of my 4 classes. The 4th was chemistry. A course for juniors. Only sophomores had to take the MCAS. They took the MCAS for the science they were studying that year. A small handfull of sophomores took chemistry with the rest taking biology. I only had two of the sophomores in my chemistry class. One was a boy who transferred in from another teachers class 2 months before the MCAS. I don't think he takes school very seriously. He didn't pass. I am very proud of my other sophomore. She was one of my knitters. She passed. I like to take some of the credit for her success. The rest of the chemistry students who took MCAS were in classes with the other two teachers.

Some would look at my record and say I have a 50% pass rate. I only got a chance to see individual chemistry students scores. As I didn't have the boy for the full year I'm unwilling to accept his failure as a reflection of my ability. On the other hand, knitting during class didn't hinder the girls abilities. Perhaps it helped. The boy didn't knit.

I haven't been able to see the individual scores for the freshmen. However I hear that the freshmen who scored the highest in the school was one of my students.

That's a good sign.

Binary Solo 10001000011100101010001010001

Weekend of computer issues. Largely self inflicted. Been trying to sync a Sony camera to my Macintosh. No firewire, just USB and it's a Sony so no Macintosh support. VirtualPC works and I can drag the mpeg-2 files to my Mac desktop but I want a more elegant solution. I tried installing WinXP on Lisa's Mac but had issues with BootCamp recognizing the windows install disk. No it wasn't an OEM disk. I know better then that. It was an XP disk that I thought was a full install of the home edition but it wasn't having it.

AT&T amuses the shit out of me. Only carrier to work with the iPhone, which as far as i know is an Apple product, will not sell me DSL service because i use a Macintosh. Looks like i'm stuck with Comcast a while longer.

My 12 inch powerbook is fading on me. It makes me sad. The fluorescent tube grows dimmer every day. I'm just hoping that it survives until the start of the next school year (two weeks.) Then I'm elligable for another MacBook on my teachers discount. What I really want is another submicro notebook like my little aluminum PB G4. The 15in is more than I want to carry around.

Although, the good news is that the new MB will come with iLife which rumor has it has a version of iMovie that now supports DVD cameras through USB. According to this cryptic message from the Apple site my camera will work with the software.

It might just be worth the $300 premium over what I would spend trying to fix my screen, install Leopard and get iLife'08 for Lisa's computer because it still won't work on my G4.

By the way Darren, what I meant to say is 3mm jack not 3/4 inch. It's the little 8th inch jack like on a Walkman. The line out on the iPhone dock will work with a standard mini headphone plug and doesn't need to be connected to the power cable to feed music to regular headphones or in my case a Walkman to RCA addapter into my TV. I'd still like to know if you tried docking it in your iPod speakers.

I know, I'm using my TV to listen to music. I don't have a bitchen stereo with tube preamp and powerline smoother. iSuck.

Does anyone remember the phrase "Don't touch my Dads NADs!"

Got to get ready for school!

That Takes Care Of The First Ammendment

Children cannot be allowed to advocate any viewpoint the principal disagrees with.

What bothers me the most about this story is not that the kid disrupted a school approved event. Allowing classes to go outside while the Olympic Torch ran by did not fully cancel the school day. Unfurling the banner was a provocative act and the kid got called out on it. What bothers me is the implication that the kid was a troublemaker and so had no expectation of a fair trial. It all comes down to this statement in the article "Frederick, who had had previous disciplinary problems at school."

Frederick was a nail that stuck out. The Supreme Court has given carte blanche for school administrators to bring out the hammers.

Update

No one came up with squeaky voiced zombies demanding brains but one kid did list "World Domination" for the secret formula for Coca-Cola.

Final Exam Time

Real questions from my chemistry final exam. Can you answer them?

____________________________________________!


What is the formula for heavy water?

A number without ______ is _______.

Zombies have no body temperature and are cold blooded. Their temperature is whatever the ambient temperature is. Imagine you have a Star Trek transporter and beam 100 zombies into an airtight container full of helium. Would the temperature in the container rise or fall? Explain why.

____ _____ __________-___________

And my favorite:

What is the secret formula for Coca-Cola?

You See That Sign That Says Rib Tips?

"I wonder if these guys know the Commodores?"

I'm watching Nat'l Lampoons Vacation and all of a sudden I'm overwhelmed with a sudden feeling of loss. For some undefinable reason I feel suddenly ashamed that I haven't seen The Kurz since December. I haven't seen Tommy Okktane since November.

I'm a terrible friend. I need to fix that!

Totally off topic: SADD staged their annual fake drunk driving accident yesterday. They call it the "mock crash." We took the juniors and seniors out to the street in front of the school to watch the show. It totally fell flat.

Not since I went to high school with a broken leg and a song in my heart have I seen a lesson so totally wasted on an unreceptive audience. I don't know how much it cost us but I know donations average $2,500. Those donations are to cover the costs that aren't absorbed by the police and fire departments who "volunteer" their time on the clock. They aslo volunteer the towns trucks and squad cars. The result is one hell of a dissapointing show.

The problem is that thanks to CGI editing with realistic shading on CGI models, a phoney car crash with real cars looks glaringly phoney. Maybe this kind of thing had an impact in 1989 but too little, too late. Tokyo Drift and Grand Theft Auto have taught my kids a physics lesson in ways I never could. They see clean through the hokey staging of a couple junkyard wrecks set dressed for maximum effect. It's too bad. The kids who found it funny are the kids who need to learn the lesson the most. Perhaps it should be manditory for parents to attend. They're the ones who have a chance of actually changing their kids behavior. And they're not so jaded that the lesson doesn't sink in.

By the way Kurczy, it appears that my psyche thinks you're a fucking drunk. Pot, meet Kettle... Kettle thinks I'm black too.

The highlight is that there was enough time at the end of the period that I got to see the tow truck flip the upside down car back over. They pulled it up to stand on one side and then a bunch of fire men pushed it over to the wheels. It was a Mitsubishi Eclipse convertable. The A-pillar kept it from crushing the roof to the doors. I'd buy one.

If I were in charge of this show, I wouldn't be stirring up a witch hunt for teens driving drunk. Teens got the message years ago. They really aren't driving drunk the way we did. The sensational stories are the statistical outliers. The new thing is trunking. The law of unintended consequences has trumped the junior operator laws. Kids don't need to be told not to drive drunk. They need to be told not to drive like assholes in general. Drunk driving is so 20 years ago. Hiding that extra kid who really wants to see the movie too is the current witch needing to be hunted.

Maybe SADD needs to make adjustments to their script.

Flashbacks

I spent about 20 minutes of the job interview for my present employ discussing my strategies for controlling a classroom full of young teenagers not fully in control of their hormones. At the time I wondered if the whole "hormones thing" was really as bad as the vice principle so seemed concerned.

Now we're winding down the last term and I've had to rewrite my syllabus to include in the classroom rules the phrase "No lapdances!" I have had countless numbers of young girls fall madly in love with me one day and then refuse to speak to me the next.

I had 3 different sets of girls who were BFF one day turn so venemous against each other that they had to seperate them by switching all their classes.

I have a student who spent a month talking online to her best friend (a boy) pretending to be a girl from Atlanta looking for a boyfriend when she moved to her dads house. She was going to end it by making him think she died of a heart condition. He found out what she was doing and now refuses to sit anywhere he can see her (it's too late to switch classes.)

Then there's the hormones that don't lead to sex. There are the let's do dumbass things because we're bored and stupid hormones.

I thank my lucky stars that I'm not the teacher who had the kid who blew his eyes off. It's everything I can do to keep my kids from turning every moment of their life into a "Jackass" live performance act.

I have a new respect for the force of nature that today's teenager is. I just wish their parents knew how to teach them self control.

Still, it beats working.

Don't Stand So, Don't Stand So Close To Me

I have this student. A 14 year old girl. She failed every class but mine. That's pretty common for my class. Either my standards are too low or I'm the only teacher who gets any work out of some of these kids.

Anyway, she's sitting in my class, smiling at me. She's just beaming in my direction. She's like a renaissance painting. Everywhere I stand in the room, she's staring at me. This goes on for 20 minutes. Then I figure out what's going on. She has new glasses.

I stop the lesson and say "I see you there, smiling at me all period. I see your new glasses." She turns beet red. She's both embarassed and all proud of herself. I tell her they make her look "wicked smaaaaht."

We finished the lesson a few minutes early and I was talking with students at the door waiting for the bell. She comes up to the group of students I'm talking with. "Mr Seeeeeeee!" she calls me. Still smiling at me. She puts her elbow on my sholder like she's leaning on me.*

Then it dawns on me. It's not about the new glasses. She's seeing the world clearly for the first time.

And she's got a crush on me.




*For the record, I don't let students touch me. She knew she crossed a line right away. It was over before I could tell her to stop. It was harmless. My ESP was even teasing me about it afterward, if it was anything but innocent we would all have gone straight to the office. That's one of the good things about working with the at risk kids after NCLB, there's a second set of adult eyes in the classroom. Because after all this crap, I'm hyper aware of how my actions can be percieved.

I'm The Last Person Who Should Be Chaperoning The Prom

"Some of these dresses cost more then my car is worth." "What kind of car do you drive?" "A Saturn." "Well that's why right there." - Katy, the 8th grade science teacher they talked into chaperoning and myself.

"Don't touch it they're extensions and will come out." - Latania, the other 8th grade teacher they talked into working the prom.

"It doesn't matter, you're not getting laid tonight." - I have no idea who the girl was or what prompted it but I thought it was hilarious.

"You know this is a hotel." - Me to both of the 8th grade science teachers when they lead me by the arm on to the dance floor.

"I can't believe the DJ is throwing Mardi Gras beads to all the girls. You know what teenage girls usually have to do to get free beads?" - Me again to Latania.

"Ignore them, if you catch them doing something we'll have to punish them." - Advice from one of the other teachers to me.

"Mr SEEEEEEEEEEEE!" - About a dozen drunk students to me every time they saw me.

"I think they want us to unload the busses one by one and we're 5th in line so fuck it, it's your prom. Go have fun." Me to my busload of kids after the most uncomfortable ride ever. I'm not kidding, the bus stank of blue toilet water and then one of the electrical panels snapped out of the ceiling and hit a kid on the head half way there.

"Your cardigan sweater and softspoken nature makes every one think you're all prim and proper school teacher but the black eyeshadow leads me to believe that there is a pair of handcuffs somewhere in your bedroom." - Me to Katy, probably crossing a line somewhere.

"In my bedroom? Yes." Katy, who probably should have slapped me.

I can't wait for the senior prom.

A Question

How many near misses will it take before this girl learns to stop relying on luck and a police force that waits outside until they're sure it's safe to go in before she takes ownership of her own defense?

And why does this shit always happen in April?