Mind Your P's

The best and worst parts of yesterday started with P, which appealed to my OCD complex with alliteration, but not much else.

Punching and Portland.

Relatively speaking, my school is a very calm place. We have a strict management system that usually does its job well. Save a few outliers, kids know what to do, and they do it. As charter school teachers, we're so unused to the normal behavioral woes of public school, that chatter in the supposedly silent hallway and pen tapping seem like egregious offenses. We're spoiled, maybe hazardously so. Especially as a first year teacher, I've had to deal with very few of the painful hurdles that might characterize the experience in a more typical New York public school.

That is, until yesterday when things took a sharp downturn. Cue P one: The (Perilous, Premeditated) Punching.

It was the end of the day, and I had my homeroom for a brief 15 minutes before sending them down to the cafeteria to take a state test. My only job was to pass out the test, have them bubble in their name and race ("but, what if I identify as African American AND Hispanic?" Pick a bubble, kid. That racial identity ain't gonna get any easier) and line them up to head downstairs. This should be a simple task, only it wasn't.

One kid in my advisory has a vision impairment that's unfortunately quite, er, visible on his face. Seventh graders are cruel, so this makes him the target of much subtle bullying (probably even CYBER-bullying, which is the hot new trend in harassment). I had to give him a large print test booklet, which was comically-sized about three times bigger than the other kids' tests. Thank you, New York State, you couldn't have just added in more pages? (Note to self: write strongly-worded letter to New York State's testing department). Despite brainstorming, I could think of no strategic way of giving him his test booklet without the other kids noticing. Maybe as a fourth-year teacher, I will able to finesse situations like these a bit better, and my classroom will run like a scene out of the Sound of Music only without the Nazis. I, of course, will be Maria.

In the time it took me to answer the hundredth question about where to bubble your race, the five kids surrounding large-print-test-booklet kid had pounced--sly comments about his test, his eye, whatever. And then there was the Punching: right in the face of the worst bully.

Shit. That's a new one. My teacher training gave me the tools to handle many classroom situations, but Punchings did not make the cut. It was only a year-long program.

He kinda deserves it, right? Making fun of something that someone can't control--like a physical impairment--is the worst form of mean, and it'd been going down all year. The other kids rally around it because there's no easier form of friendship than mocking others--together. I felt my blood start to boil. This is not what I wanted to be doing at 4pm on a Thursday afternoon. The reason teaching is so hard (and interesting on a good day) is that no matter how well-planned you are, you still have to make hundreds of quick decisions every day--some tiny, some huge. By Thursday afternoon, your brain starts to hurt and you really just wish people would stop asking you things.

Here I had one puncher and one punchee plus a classroom full of of shifty-looking kids, most of whom were participating in or allowing the bullying to continue. Before consequences were doled out (because even when you're the target of cruel bullying, punching still lands you a suspension), two other teachers and I hosted an impromptu lecture for the advisory. The kids sat stiller then I'd ever seen them as we took turns explaining the long-term effects of harassment, the idea that even passive-participation in bullying is still bullying, the fact that our homeroom had become an unsafe space. As the words were tumbling out of my mouth in what I hoped was a bad-ass tone of voice, I started to have some serious "how the hell did I get here?" thoughts.

I was giving a lecture I hadn't planned after handling my first-ever classroom punching (a badge of honor on my girl-school vest). I was an authority figure, a major grown-up, apparently. I was too mad and tired to feel the power, though. I just wanted the kids to get along, but that's a lot to ask of kids. They don't understand compassion or repercussion, empathy or cruelty. The boys might be taller than me, but their grasp of reality is still very, very short. That's why teaching middle school is about teaching life and character as much as reading and writing.

The kids were finally dismissed and I plopped down at my desk with a killer headache and a killer craving for a really cold beer or my bed. Everything felt wrong and confusing.

So I tackled the one thing on my gargantuan to-do list that I knew would make life make sense again: booked a two-week trip to Portland for July. Nothing like spending $400 to make life right again. Cue second P.

(Pretty and Predictable) Portland.

There's something about hometowns. When everything else feels insane, I know that Portland is always there with its welcoming arms of delicious food, foggy coastline and backyard BBQ's where everyone wants to give me a veggie burger. Portland is the remedy to what ails me; it's rejuvenating. Even though the city has changed (the hipster percentage has tripled, we're pushing our urban growth boundaries and my liberal hood has been taken over by blonde Republicans), there's a certain constancy and normalcy to home that just feels right. Things in the great PNW make a little more sense to me. My parents are getting weirder, but they live in my old house where all my books are. Nothing grounds me quite like my book collection (woah. nerd alert.) The trees are greener; the beer is hoppier; the air is fresher and so are the brunch ingredients. These are things I care about.

By five, the day had improved exponentially. Punching was behind me and Portland's on the horizon.

Here are other P's I dig: Pancakes, People, Poetry, Passion, Petulance (just the word), Pride, Preamble, Pragmatism, Posture, Public Policy.

So mind your P's and Q's.