Last Friday we ended the first semester, as usual, with exams and grading. This year we stretched the exam days from three to four, with the seventh period on Tuesday, first and sixth on Wednesday with shortened class periods in between for second, third, fourth, and fifth periods, second and fifth on Thursday and third and fourth on Friday with students released at 11:30 a.m. both Thursday and Friday. Thursday and Friday afternoons were spent with students making up work or time (classes missed because of too many absences) and teachers trying to finish grading and to get all grades entered into the computer grade book.
Friday afternoon the silence was suddenly pierced by the sound of a student screaming at someone down the hall. The sound came from the direction of the library where the students were making up time. From what I could understand of his sometimes incoherent screams, he believed that he had somehow been wronged by the teacher monitors in the library and, to paraphrase one of the characters in the movie Network, he was mad as could be and not going to take it anymore. For a moment I considered going to the aid of the teacher at whom the student was yelling when it occurred to me that the situation might already be resolved by the time I got down there, and what exactly was I going to do anyway? Hit the student with my cane if he stopped yelling and resorted to physical force? So I stayed in my seat and moments later heard reinforcements arrive in the form of several assistant principals and some other teachers.
The boy sounded angry enough to have caused physical harm when he was yelling, but when the other adults arrived, he calmed down quickly, even when he was escorted off campus. While I personally have never been directly threatened with physical harm, I know teachers who have been, and I’ve dealt with plenty of angry students. In fact, there are a lot of students whose primary emotion seems to be anger. They may have yelled at me, called me a name, or even in one instance, thrown their textbooks, but most have retained enough control not to do anything that could be perceived as assault.
I did have one student last year, while I was still using the walker to get around, who quietly made an adjustment on my walker while I was helping another student. He shortened one leg of the walker by about eight inches and sat there watching to see if I would fall. Fortunately, I reached for the walker without relying on it to hold me, so when it tipped over backwards, it didn’t take me with it. It was only a few days before semester exams, and he was removed from my classroom for the second semester.
Since my accident in 2010, which left me with some difficulties in walking, I have learned to beware of the accidental injuries that could come at school. The hallways are crowded and can be dangerous when students are dashing down them to avoid being tardy. In the halls I generally try to stay close to the walls, just in case. The biggest danger I encounter every day is being run into by someone who isn’t looking where he’s going. One day last week as I came into the building from the parking lot, the same boy ran into me not once but twice. Actually, he didn’t hit me but the little cart I use to transport my things from the car to my room. He cut around behind me and tripped over the cart, then regained his footing, took a couple of steps, and bumped into it again.
That I’ve never had to deal directly with the possibility of physical force is not to say that I haven’t been in some situations where I thought I might get hurt. I tried to break up a fight between two boys one morning as one of them had grabbed the other and was dragging him towards the glass doors of the trophy cases outside the gym. His intent was apparently to ram the other boy’s head into the glass. When he didn’t stop when I told him to, my recourse was to grab the boy he was pulling and try to release him. After a few moments of tug-of-war with the boy in the middle between his assailant and me, the attacker gave a tremendously powerful jerk that nearly pulled me off my feet, but I had slowed him down enough for several coaches and an assistant principal to get there and break up the fight.
I was nearby when a similar fight between girls broke out a couple of years ago. The aggressor began hitting and scratching wildly, while the other girl bent over in a defensive movement that shielded her face and eyes while she wrapped her arms around the other girl’s waist. The first girl continued pounding wildly on the back of the other girl without being able to do any real damage. Another teacher and I pulled them apart and took them to the office.
The first time I ever tried to break up a fight between two girls, I had just made myself a big cup of hot tea. I was on my way to the office when I rounded a corner and saw the two fighting. I stepped between them, thinking that would break up the fighting. It didn’t. They continued to fight over and around me, jerking me from one side of the hall to the other, once even spinning me around in a circle. When help arrived to rescue me, there was no tea left in my cup but a wet trail of Earl Grey recording the path of the fight on the carpet.
My first several years of teaching were without incident. Sure, there were times when students misbehaved and got into trouble, but the first fight I witnessed and tried to break up occurred after a football game in Lampasas between two men who were not students. I had been at the game to take pictures and still had the school camera with me when I saw the two men, who appeared to have been drinking, insulting one another. Summoning up as much of an authoritative attitude as I could, I stepped up to them and asked them to break it up and move along. Since they didn’t seem to be much younger than I, they weren’t too impressed with my “teacher voice.” Still, I kept them apart until a couple of male teachers and a police officer arrived. Later, one of the male teachers who came to my rescue told me that he didn’t know if my standing up to those two guys was the bravest thing he had ever seen or the most stupid. Maybe a little of both.
But it was when I was teaching at Westlake High School in Austin that I had the most serious scare in all of my 35 years as a teacher. I had, as one of my students in a freshman English class, a young man who had just enrolled in school, coming to us from being an inpatient at a mental hospital. He had authority issues and was subject to violent outbursts. I knew from talking with him that he was obsessed with Charles Manson and the book Helter Skelter. But when one of the counselors called me in to tell me that he had written a note to another student telling his plans to kill me and another teacher at school the following Friday, I was shocked. The counselor showed me the note, which was illustrated with drawings of what he planned to do to me and to his Algebra I teacher. According to his drawings, he planned to stab me with what looked like a Bowie knife and shoot the Algebra I teacher in the head.
I was understandably upset, and most of my friends advised me to call in sick that day. However, the counselor insisted that he didn’t believe the boy would go through with it, so I showed up at school that day with more than a little trepidation. The day was a student dress-up day where kids come to school in costume according to a pep rally theme. Shortly before the middle of the morning, I caught a glimpse of the boy from a distance. He was dressed as Rambo. Obviously, nothing happened, and the Rambo outfit seems oddly humorous now. The counselor was right. But keep in mind that that was before Columbine and the rest of the school shootings. A threat like that would have to be taken seriously now.
And while there does seem to be more of a climate of violence, especially among students, these days, especially where gangs have gained a foothold, the possibility of violent behavior in schools has probably always existed. I can remember hearing my grandmother, who had been a teacher in Fort Stockton in West Texas shortly after the turn of the 20th century, tell about a problem she had with one of the older boys in her class. She had punished him for something he had done (I don’t remember either his offense or his punishment). The next thing she knew, his mother had strapped on her six-gun and was supposedly coming to the school to “straighten that teacher out.”
Someone must have talked her out of it, though, because the woman never appeared either at the school or at the boarding house where Granny lived. At the end of that school year, Granny decided that life on the frontier was a little too rough for her, so she visited with an old friend from college who introduced her to her brother-in-law. That would be my grandfather, whom we called Grandman, the subject of my first blog post. She married him and taught for many years in the Friendship School, a two-room schoolhouse southwest of the Adamsville Community.
So while I have had a few close encounters with student violence, the majority of my dealings with students have been, if not always cordial, then at least manageable. Frequently, the ones who have caused problems in school for me have come back years later to apologize for their behavior as students. And many of my students over the years who have been great as students have stayed in touch and come to regard me as a friend. As I realize that my teaching career is winding down to a close in the not-too-distant future, I’m happy to say that, overall, the students have been the best part of my job, and the source of most of the “hazardous duty” experiences of my career have come from adults—parents, administrators, and even one school board president.
