A Minor Disruption

My classroom is rarely a quiet place. It's always peaceful once the students have left, but the broken pencils, wadded-up paper, and knocked-over chairs that litter the floor at the end of every day betray seven hours of semi-controlled chaos. Occasionally, however, an event will transpire that inspires a unique and remarkable degree of pandemonium.* Such a moment occurred yesterday morning.

I have never allowed my students to engage in any organized "show-and-tell" activity, for the sole reason that I don't trust them to bring in anything appropriate. This did not deter Velquisha (vel-KWEESH-ah) from bringing in a small cardboard box, taped shut, that she insisted she had to share. Given that it was another pleasant Friday morning, I'd allowed my guard to slip, and failed to consider the possibilities of the box's contents. She stood before the class and announced that she wanted to show something she had discovered in the street near her house. I immediately tensed up, knowing that hers is not the nicest neighborhood in the city. Could it be a crack pipe? A hypodermic needle? A condom? It turned out to be even worse. She opened the box to reveal a dead bird, and accidentally dropped it on the floor when I told her to get it out of my sight immediately. I'm not going to waste words trying to describe the students' reaction; just imagine the sounds they would make if I brought in their favorite rapper, Soulja Boy, and proceeded to set fire to him. 

Given that Dead Bird Removal wasn't one of my Ed School classes, I didn't really know what to do with the decaying pile of disease on the floor. I grabbed a couple paper towels, picked the thing up, and dropped the tiny carcass out of an open window, where it fell two stories and landed fairly close to a parent who was walking into the school, who gave me a look of shock and horror before presumably heading straight to the office to tell the principal about my teaching methods. In all honesty, tossing a dead animal out of a window wasn't even my most serious transgression against my professionalism committed that week, as I'd earlier praised Denisha's whiteboard demonstration of how to reduce a fraction by assessing that she "treated that problem the way Chris Brown treated Rihanna."

*Prior to Friday, my Holy Shit These Kids Are Insane moment happened last spring, when a student's wig managed to detach itself from her scalp and fall harmlessly to the floor. I should note that the wig was worn purely for cosmetic purposes; most of my girl students make weekly trips to beauty parlors with their mothers, and new hairstyles and fingernails are always a hot topic of discussion on Mondays. Approximately half of the girls at my school wear some form of artificial hair, and it's not unusual to see the occasional braided extension on the floor, looking sort of like a dirty shoelace. In any event, the screaming and running incited by the Wig Incident could be heard throughout the building, and also continues to haunt my dreams.