The new breed of swear words

Yesterday I busted three fourth grade kids (two girls and a boy) who were stomping down the hall chanting, "Needledick, needledick, needledick!" Even though they were point-blank howling it in my face, they denied it (the most common form of reply around here). Later that day, one of my sixth grade boys referenced the term "camel toe". Last year my husband busted one of his kids for using the word "shiznit". She denied there was anything wrong with it.

Remember when you'd get sent to the office for saying, "sucks" or even "retarded"? No more. Those are mild-- they're today's "darn". True, you can swing your weight around and bust them for it, but you're commonly seen as a nitpicker for it. I've caught kids using racial slurs I didn't hear until I was a teen. As for "gay" and "queer" and even "lesbo"-- don't even get me started. I have never seen kids so obsessed with these terms (derogatorily, of course). I don't let this go, ever. Of course, because I harp on it so much, there was a rumor flying around that I was a lesbian, despite the fact that my husband works right there in the same school.

Oh, and a nine-year-old boy flipped my husband off last week for sending him to his reading class. Unluckily for him, the 6th grade teacher turned the corner & caught him.

This is just the elementary school. I cannot begin to detail the foul language at the middle & high schools, but truthfully, that doesn't bother me much-- unless it's sexual in nature, bigoted, or the ever-popular heterosexist lexicon.

magnetic poetry for the masses

We own two sets of magnetic poetry: the Redneck edition and the Genius set. That is all you need to know about our household.

I am a terrible poet. Solid writer, passable artist, terrible poet. However, I am rendered somewhat less awful by these little infant-choking gems.

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Spurn the pedagogue, huh?
Have fun in jail
Yer only another common redneck miscreant
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Obdurate hate
Can't alleviate you
Will time ameliorate?
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*And now for the first wave....
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Curious domicile
Festooned with an amalgam
of ersatz deer & fish
Paragon of Great American double-wides
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O Sedulous salesman,
Munificent system:
Bait in the cooler
manure out back
Repose is nearly his.
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professional development haiku

My Bitter Half was forced to endure an inane presentation from a representative from Reading First, a federally sponsored program of questionable merit that is the bane of specials teachers everywhere. The rep kept referring to something he called, "Nickelby". About twenty minutes into it, after some confusion, they figured out this guy was talking about No Child Left Behind--NCLB.

Anyway, it was predictably dull to hear this guy pimp an irksome program that was already in place, so a couple of the teachers started passing notes. (This is a common coping tactic. Don't pretend you've not done it.) They started writing Professional Development Plan haikus to avoid brain atrophy. Here's a sampler's worth:

The MAN in our school
Our kids have flunked Reading First
Don't you want the grant?
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This one's from a diabetic---nearly lost his leg--who's being moved up to the new middle school.

I'm still a biped
But I'm losing my classroom
Middle School next year.
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A reflection from earlier in the year:

Shards of glass outside
Kids' shoes off on the playground
Imminent nurse help!
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The principal says she wants this one tattooed on her arm:

Principal stretched thin
Mother, queen, and referee
Whip them all soundly.
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There are plenty more. I'll post them as my man remembers them.

Most Likely to Stay in the County

I am discovering a phenomenon peculiar to this burg: rewarding everyone without regard to ability, effort, or talent. My Bitter Half was required to bestow an honor upon each pupil during the school's Awards Day. Everyone. No matter that a third of his little cretins regularly misspelled their own name on their papers if they didn't omit it entirely. Save for maybe three or four cringing overachievers, the powers that were "stacked" his class with some real jerks and slackjawed nose-pickers. He was encouraged to come up with bogus awards for handwriting, or the School Spirit Award. (I think he gave out four of those.)

Even more laughable was the school Science Fair. Get this: awards were given for each class for first through fifth place. As many as three kids could work on a project. There are often only 17 or 18 kids in these classes, so they'd all get ribbons. Anyone who didn't 'place' got a ribbon anyway for participation. In addition, the judges were (of course) local, and somewhat less than impartial, or perhaps truly clueless. There were comments on the judging sheets about how "cute" the "decorations" were. Scientific progress evidently goes, "Awwwwww."

Understanding Poverty, or Po' Like Me

I have only worked in impoverished areas. I realized early on that I'd never really get along with middle-class people, let alone the rich. I went out with a guy from an upper-middle class suburb of Chicago once. His sense of entitlement sickened me. I spent my formative years in a double-wide trailer.

Stay with me; this is going somewhere.

When I was in my first year of teaching, I went to some training session that excerpted a book titled A Framework for Understanding Poverty by Ruby Payne. I read the passages with all the seriousness befitting someone trying to do well on her first salaried job. Much of what I read made sense to me anecdotally.

When we moved out here, to a district where 98% of the kids are on free or reduced lunches, the same text was excerpted and the book was made available to us. I read it immediately, trying to make some sense of my new situation. What I unearthed was a jumble of slapdash clip art (I cannot cope with that), stereotyped "case studies", and a shrug of the shoulders. Evidently poor folks don't want in on the middle class world, and since the educational system embraces middle class values, they reject it, and with it all the trappings of literacy, culture, and financial security.
I don't buy it.
I know a good many poor people, and they don't necessarily like the lifestyle. Sure, it's familiar, but to assume that they don't have the courage or gumption or whatever to leap into a life of bills being paid on time, cars that are street-legal, and PTA meetings is biased and unfounded. Likewise, I know people with money, money, money, and a college degree or two who believe that buying a new car every three years, buying tickets to see Rent, and buying into Fear and Consumption makes them fashionable, cultured, and patriotic, respectively. (I know firsthand that money can't buy taste. People will pay for the stupidest, ugliest, most inane things. This was one of the harder things to come to grips with upon becoming a paid artist.)
Yes, there are things afoot that exist to keep the caste system firmly in place, but I object to the blanket statement that po' folks want to stay uneducated so they fits in wi' other po' folks. I can't ever recall wanting to be undereducated and culturally limited. In a defunct mining town with few opportunities, I scrambled to get all the culture I could possibly scrounge. Many others took the same initiative in various ways: academically, athletically--some even traveled.

What is the problem with this area, then? Is it the isolationism, the desire to remain cut off from the potential for progress, save for driving an hour to shop at a Super Wal-Mart? Is it intergenerational poverty, just never being able to escape living for the basic human needs? Is it simply lackadaisical parenting?
I don't think I'll ever know. With any luck, we will escape teaching, and this blog will be no more. I'll replace it with some blog entitled Cute Kittycats I Have Known or something equally cloying, and I'll stop shallow-breathing and grinding my teeth when I sleep. (That's called bruxism, by the way. It can make you chip your teeth, or get a divorce.)

untitled

Teaching is like internal bleeding of the soul.

another thing that would 86 me from this job

I absolutely believe that public schools are mini-societies. Within these microcosms are reflected (with dizzying simultaneity) the past-- as these children ape their parents' behaviors, values, and opinions-- and the future-- if indeed the future holds little else but video-gaming and mass sugar consumption. In the realm of the Tweens, life is Machiavellian and there is no cold Justice. It is served up fresh, hot, and disproportionate to the perceived transgression. In addition, there exists a subset of mini-people who are simply a drag on the system, much like their parents are a drag on society. I am starting to wonder if the dichotomy holds water: "You're either a part of the problem or a part of the solution." If so, then these Problems and their offspring are Oxygen Thieves, sucking resources regularly and contributing nothing in return. (I am NOT speaking of the infirm or elderly, so shut up.)

Moving on, I've found quite a few Oxygen Thieves in the school. One in particular claims he wants nothing more than to join a gang and kill people. He thinks jail is "cool", and he regularly practices bullying, cheating, and theft. Worse yet, he is cunning and manipulative, and has done much to poison the behaviors of those around him. We simply don't have the resources in this area to place him in an appropriately structured (read: militaristic) setting, as the district would be required to come up with the dough to ship him out. He enjoys a large following, and has built up a reputation of sorts. He needs to be taken down several pegs, that his growing band of mini-thugs might see what a weenie he actually is. In lieu of a costly transfer, I propose a humiliating beating by a peer.

Although I could not follow through on this, I have chosen a student to carry out the ass-whuppin'. He's in foster care, and thus escapes the blood ties of the town; he regularly gets into trouble, but has a sense of honor and fairness; he is genuinely street-smart, as opposed to an MTV-manufactured Bad Boy; and we get along very well. I'd gladly pay him $20 to beat the tar out of this obnoxious little poseur, but we all know that this could only end badly.

Thus it remains a fantasy...and my job remains intact.

Meth dream

Last night we were watching Intervention, which is of considerable merit (considering that it is 'reality-based'). One of the addicts was a meth-head, which prompted a discussion of the drug between myself and my Bitter Half. Between us, we've had ample drug experience, although for many years beer and coffee have been our only vices. Neither of us had the stupidity to try meth, though. I'd never even heard of it until I lived in Montana in 1995. The stories I heard were all from seemingly normal, working class folks, but had sidebars such as: "Yeah, I went on this one binge that lasted three weeks...didn't sleep the whole time, but nobody noticed because I was tending bar OK," or,"I remember looking out my driver's-side window and there was like this big black dog keeping up with the car. I was going, like, 70, so that's how I figured out it was just a shadow ghost."

This is not anything I'd like to experience. Add to that the potential for addicition and you've got...nothing. That is a drug that will rob your SOUL. The girl on TV was twenty-six and couldn't keep her eyes open. She prostituted herself to nasty, nasty men for chump change. She had the benefit of a supportive family and a chance at redemption financed by a television corporation. I think of all the poor suckers who don't have either and are already at rock bottom. Why put yourself and your family through this? Who invented this poison?

No big surprise, then, that I dreamt I got high on meth. I was on a bus and hiding my pipe from this zealot who kept trying to convert me to some weird Christian sect. It was a huge pipe, looked more like a bong, and I distinctly remember the sensation the drug caused. It was a blurry, slurry high with lots of trails that caused me to not process what people said for several seconds. The bus I was on was moving, which made it even weirder. I'd only had a drug dream like this once before, when I dreamt I did heroin (never have). I was sitting in a chair & couldn't move, but didn't want to anyway.

I don't know if these are accurate descriptions of the effects of those drugs or not.