back to school with a bang

Monday marked the start of a new school year. And boy, did it start with a bang. Three bangs, to be precise.

Elyria is a strange city. With a population of about 30,000 people, it's about as diverse as they come. My students tell me it's easy to tell where a kid comes from based on what they look like. North and East sides are preppy (they're near a community college and nicer suburbs) and the West and South sides are more ghetto (closer to Lorain and other run-down areas). We have quite a bit of rif-raf. Most of the kids are good, but we get a bad egg every now and then.

Gangs aren't something new to me. In Arizona gangs were rampant, Bloods, Crips, Mexican Mafia, the biggins. When I got to Elyria, they talked about all of the gangs, but really, it was like gang-light compared to Arizona. Many of my E-High students would talk about being in gangs, but really, they had no idea what it was like.

One week before school started there were 2 shootings relatively close to our school building. Both of the kids were 19 years old, one was shot in the arm, the other in the leg. They were seemingly unrelated.

Then Wednesday night I hear that one of E-High's students was shot and killed after school. This kid wasn't a good kid; he was involved with the wrong crowd. At 4:15pm on Wednesday, as part of a gang initiation, this kid was told to play a game of Russian Roulette. Unbeknownst to this kid, it wasn't just a gang initiation. One of the other boys told another kid that in 15 minutes he was to call 911. They knew what they were doing. So there was a 17 year old kid, shot point-blank in the chest.

This has understandably shaken a lot of kids. Rumors were flying that another shooting was going to occur today. Kids stayed home today. While the events of Wednesday are very tragic, it was a specific target. The people knew what they were doing, it was an isolated incident. When we live in fear, our freedoms are taken away.

So now, we have Kevlar vested police officers in and around our buildings trying to dispel rumors and calm the kids down. Hopefully the weekend will do just that.

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As far as the rest of the week goes:

This week schooled me (pun intended). I'm beat, whooped, I got my trash kicked by this week.

I'm happy to be back, to have a job. But, I can tell, already, only one week in that I'm getting burned out.

Part of me feels like a woman with no country. I share an office with 2 other teachers, I don't have my own room (I travel with a cart), I don't have regular access to a computer at school. I feel really displaced and out of my element.

I am enjoying my kids. I only have a handful (maybe 7 total) of kids that I had last year. Unfortunately, none of them were kids I particularly liked, but we'll make do.

I have a killer schedule. I'm non-stop from 7:50 to 1pm. I don't even have a small break to pee. Luckily, I've been sweating so much this week due to the excessive heat, that I haven't had to pee much during the day.

This all sounds really boring. Probably because it is. I will have funny stories to tell eventually, and until then, I'll leave you, dear reader, with this one:

Today was picture day, and nobody loves picture day more than an English teacher. Each student has (at least) one English class, so we take the kids down to the auditorium to get their pictures taken and hang out in the air conditioner for the rest of the class. No work is done, it's glorious.

This year, in addition to having pictures taken, the kids needed to have their index finger scanned. This isn't for security purposes, but for things that the kids would normally use their student IDs for, like the lunch line and checking out library books.

Naturally, high school kids don't understand this and so there was a lot of talk about Big Brother. One of my kids took a black Sharpie marker and colored over both of his index fingers, you know, so they couldn't see his finger print. The thought never crossed his mind that it doesn't matter what color your fingers are, your print is still visible.

Another girl of mine proclaimed, rather loudly, that "they ain't takin my DNA!" Really? Because that's not how they get your DNA, darling.