I had my first REAL girl-fight in my classroom today. I've seen them happen all the time in the hall and cafeteria, but never in MY precious French classroom.

Words were had. At least, I think they were words. I would have to use gizoogle.com to translate. Anyhoo, there were smacks and hair pulling, shouts and hollars from the other kids, guys trying to pull the girls off each other. I didn't know what to do other than calmly write office referrals and send them out, knowing that if I pushed it, these girls could get citations or suspended. The rest of the class was almost impossible to control after that. Pure uproar. Ugh.

And, earlier that day, I was out in the hall talking to a 10th grader about how she was being just plain rude and disrespectful to myself and the class. I thought I was making headway...but not so much. I come back in and my overhead projecter has been wrapped. Yes, like in toilet paper. ( I keep a roll around because the kleenex supply has been depleted). You gotta hand that to them, that's pretty creative. I didn't know whether or not to bark at them and assign punishment or to bust out laughing. Then I realized,

Oh, God: I'm their Ms. Patak.

( This will be funny automatically to maybe 2 or 3 people who know what I'm talking about.) For the rest of the world, Ms. Patak taught 10th grade English. For the most part, I guess she was a good teacher...she helped me with my cretive writing a lot, and I liked the books we read. I felt that in some of the ways my classmates TORTURED her, was just plain unfair. She just had a way of making students feel...uncomfortable. Her "thing" was, if you did anything to remotely cross her, or if in her kooky brain she thought something was wrong, she'd request a little chat out in the hall. In this chat, she would break you down and spit you out. This is probably where the severe backlash came from. She'd be out in the hall with a kid when the punk kids of IB ( yes, there were such kids ) would quickly hide things in her ceiling. In one semester, a computer monitor, a set of dictionaries, and a chair or 2 made their way behind those styrofoam ceiling tiles. How they didn't crash through, I don't know. Her TV monitor was ruined by some chem-lab "gak" we made in Chemistry. I only had to go out in the hall with her once, the day I left a writing assignment at home. I had honestly done it, I just left it in the printer. Since this was the first time I had forgotten an assignment, she automatically assumed something was horribly wrong with me. She asked me if I was depressed, except she didn't know the word for "depressed". She said, " sometimes people feel sad because the chemicals aren't moving fast enough in their brain". I just stared at her and started crying. ( I would like to say I cried because she sounded so stupid, but it was just a really bad day. ) In which case she told me " Oh you're a pretty and smart girl, you have nothing to cry about. " Or something along those lines. I remember feeling shocked and violated.

So I think I'm going to stop the whole hall-talk thing. Yet, you've got to hand it to her, after all these years I'm pretty sure she's still teaching. And I, well I'm just about ready to quit. Sigh.