52 ways to touch yourself without taking your clothes off

Mrs Chan came up to me today (she's my instructional aide in charge of helping my special education students). "You have to move Veronica," she stated baldly. She's normally good-natured, but her face brooked no argument today.

Crap, what now?

"Sure thing, but why?" I asked (It does have a bearing on where I move them. For example, talkers and wigglers get moved next to bossy kids so they get the crap kicked out of them whenever they bug the people around them. Daydreamers get moved in front of me so I can badger them to my heart's content).

"Well......," she started, then looked uncomfortable. Definitely not normal for Mrs. Chan. "You know how Ryan sits behind her"

Um, yeah....

I nod.

"You know how he's started to wear those silky pants?"

Uh oh. I have a sneaky suspicion I know where this is going.......

"Well.....he sits at the corner of the table, you know.....and lately, he sits with his legs around the table leg.....and then he starts talking to Veronica and he starts rubbing himself on the table leg.......", ..........and Mrs. Chan pauses significantly, looking at me expectantly.

Thankfully, this isn't my first rodeo.

"Let me guess: he's masturbating on my table leg while he's talking to Veronica, right?"

Mrs. Chan looks so relieved, I have to laugh: it couldn't have been easy on her, trying to tell me this.

"So you're going to move Veronica,right?"

I assure her I will move Veronica. What I don't tell her is, moving Veronica isn't going to stop Ryan getting his jollies on my table leg (I am sooo not touching that table again). Now that Ryan has figured out his penis does other stuff than urinate, it's probably going to see more rubbing than a ShamWow.

I had to call my mom and tell her about this. You see, mom's a former special education teacher. I thought she could use a laugh.

"Oh that's nothing," she replied. "Did I ever tell you about the book Maggie (Maggie was the name of her instructional aide) and I wanted to write? We wanted to call it '52 ways to touch yourself without taking your clothes off'. Seriously. In one school year, we counted 52 separate ways."

Wow.

And she proceeded to tell me several of her favorite ways her students figured out how to pull out that ShamWow cloth and buff up the classroom without taking off a stitch of clothing. Here is a few gems gleaned from her years of experience:

- The Obvious- reach down the pants.
- The Less-Obvious- reach in your pockets.
- The Less-Obvious-2-pretend your hands are cold and shove them in your crotch to warm them up.
- Ryan's favorite: straddle a table leg.
- lean against the edge of a desk and wiggle.
- take an umbrella (only works with the long kind, not the collapsable kind) and roll the handle back and forth rapidly in your hands in front of you.
- pull your shorts up really high and wiggle.
- put an open book in your lap and wiggle: also known as the single-cover method.
- the double-cover method: put the book in your lap and open and close the cover rapidly.
- lean against the door frame, face-first, and roll in and out of the room.
- put a stapler in your lap and rock (makes an unfortunate "click-click, click-click" noise. Also have to worry about accidental stapling).
- put a large rubber eraser down your pants and wiggle (notice how a lot of these require vigorous wiggling? Welcome to my world).
- straddle a chair and rock in a 180 degree circle from left to right.

As my friend Chuckles says, "I.....I got nuthin...."

Now THAT'S dedication!

We've been studying flowers (pollination and all that) in class and let me tell you, it's been hell on the allergies. Remind me next year not to pick flowers with so much pollen. Unfortunately, it caused more serious reactions than just a few sneezes and stuffy noses.

They actually had to call 911 for one of my girls (she's ok now).

We'd been handling the flowers for about 15 minutes when Anna comes up to my desk, huffing and puffing like a five-pack-a-day smoker.

"Can I go to the office?" she wheezes at me.

Of course I'm going to let her go to the office: the girl's got something seriously wrong with her. 20 minutes pass. Then I get a phone call.

"Can you send down Anna's stuff to the office? Her mom's coming to pick her up."

Like wildfire, word passes around the school that there's an ambulance in the parking lot (how the hell does word pass that fast when everyone's in class?). Sure enough, it's for poor Anna, who's still wheezing in the office. But despite her sure-to-be-impending-demise due to a pollen allergy, she manages to convince her mother that she needs to get her homework before she leaves school.

So mom drops Anna off at her locker and stops by the language arts teacher to get the homework. How could she know that Anna would go charging back in my classroom to get the math homework?

I turn around (I'm standing 2 feet away from a large bouquet of flowers, mind you) and there's Anna, gasping something about the math homework. It takes a moment for me to realize just who I'm looking at and why I shouldn't be.

Aw, shit....

At this point, mom realizes where Anna is. She rushes in to my room and starts dragging Anna out of the room by her arm. Anna, who I would swear had barely enough air to stand, drags mom back into my room, whistling angrily the whole way about the math homework like a deranged tea kettle! Finally, I manage to lead Anna out into the hall (as the dispenser of math homework, she has to follow me) and explain to her that she has to stay in the hall: I will happily bring her the math homework if she will just keep breathing until I get back.

Thus, with the math homework in hand, Anna triumphantly leads a weary mom back down the hall and out of the school. I really think that girl would have killed herself to get that assignment.

Now that is true dedication.

Angst

So it's March. The hardest month. Statistically, this is the month when teachers refer the most number of students to the vice principal. It's the month when the most number of detentions occur. It's also a month when we have no holidays.

This is the month of angst. The month when the teachers hate the students and the students hate the teachers. When everyone just wants a friggin break. When you just want everything to end and the end is nowhere in sight. So pardon my spleen: it needs a little venting.....

1. No, I will not give you another pencil. What the hell did you do with the last 2 I gave you, eat them? Lose them in an orifice? What?
2. Stop picking your nose. It distracts the hell out of me when I'm trying to teach and I can't stop thinking about what you've wiped on your papers when I'm grading them. And speaking of your papers, I DO NOT GRADE HOMEWORK DONE ON A FUCKING POST-IT NOTE, SO STOP TRYING TO TURN ONE IN!
3. When you smell like cheese, it's time to take a shower. And Axe body spray does not cover the smell, it just makes you smell like a hideously-smelling cheese.
4. I am not your mother and i don't clean up after you, so stop pretending my entire classroom floor is your own personal garbage can. Besides, if I was your mom, I'd beat the shit out of you for doing that.
5. I do not teach Romper Room. I don't care if Jacob stole your pencil: if you're running in my room, you're getting detention. Deal with it and shut the hell up. And beat up Jacob when I'm not looking so I don't have to punish your ass again.
6. If you were talking when I was teaching, do not expect me to feel sorry for you when you have no idea how to multiply a fraction and a mixed number together.
7. Yes, you have homework. And even if I wasn't planning on giving you homework, you have homework now.
8. Only geniuses and idiots do math in pen. You are not a genius.
9. If you were passing notes in my class and Maddie stole your note and showed all her friends what it said, publicly embarrassing you, karma's a bitch.

Sarcasm

Do you ever remember using a pencil in school? So why do they keep asking me if they need to have one?

It was Michael today. ""Mrs. W, do we need a pencil for this?"

"No," I replied. "If you have a thumbtack, you can always write it in blood."

He looked at me suspiciously for a moment. "You're being sarcastic, aren't you?"

It only counts as sarcasm if you were joking.

Pull my finger....

In its infinite wisdom, the state has decided that it wants to do its standardized testing online this year (for those of you who don't remember standardized testing, it's the bubble test you had to do every year in the spring that took 2 hours a day for a week). This sounds like a great idea at first: it saves paper, cuts down grading time, reduces waste, eliminates a lot of error, and means I don't have to sharpen 60 #2 pencils for once.

In reality, there are a few problems. First, teachers are total technophobes. I know teachers that can't change their own wallpaper. You want them to administer an online test? To students that can probably circumnavigate our own porn filter? Second, our students type at, like, 10 words a minute. Seriously, they hunt and peck like retarded chickens. They'll be taking the reading test for a month.

But still, the state dictates, so we follow. So on a Friday afternoon, when I'd rather be playing World of Warcraft, here I am, trying to figure out how to administer the state's reading test (WHY?! I don't even administer the reading test!!!).

Let me set up some background knowledge before I continue. Kyle is one of the teachers at our school. I guess you could describe him as a big kid. He sings in a very loud voice as he walks down the halls. For superhero day, he dressed up as TeacherMan and pretended he could fly outside the windows of all the 8th grade classrooms. He even changed the marquis screen savers of all the 6th grade teachers to say "I Love Skool" to drive them crazy because he knew half of them didn't know how to change it back (technophobes, remember?).

So anyways, we're all sitting in the computer lab, running through a tutorial on how to administer and complete the state's online reading test. To amuse myself, I'm trying to see how fast I can get through the tutorial without reading anything (because I know that's what all the students are going to do).

The room was fairly quiet, so what happened next startled everyone.

From two computer banks in front of me came a loud ripping sound, as if a sheet of silk cloth had been rent in two. A shocked silence filled the room. Then pandemonium broke out. I looked up just in time to see five teachers dive out of their seats and sprint towards the corners of the room, panic on their faces.

When the dust had settled, Kyle sat alone in the middle of the computer bank. The entire room glared at him. His face turned a dark shade of red.

"You weren't supposed to hear that," he muttered......

we interrupt this blog for a moment of gravity

Ok, fair warning. If you want to laugh, skip this post. It's been a long week and I need to detox.

I've been feeling very introspective this weekend. Probably a large part of it has been the tremendous lack of sleep I've gotten. From Tuesday morning until Friday evening, I'd logged a minimal 13 and a half hours of sleep (and don't you dare feel sorry for me: it was my own damned fault. I'd promised too many things to too many friends). When you're that exhausted, you tend to wonder what you're living for.

So I started wondering what I was doing with my life. Why I get up at 5 in the freaking morning each morning (and let me tell you, I hate it every morning. Even the birds tell me to shut the hell up because they're still sleeping). Why am I still teaching? I've joked about my kids, but I don't think I've ever really talked about my kids.

I think it's time I talked about my kids.

Yeah, I joke about my kids all the time. I tell goofy stories about them. Some of them even get not-so-respectful nicknames amongst the teachers like "Mr. Wifebeater" (named after the wifebeater shirts he always wears) or "Coppertop" (because she tried to add a little red to her hair and instead died it bright orange). But deep down, I've always loved my kids.

That's why I get up in the morning. And that's also why I wonder why I get up in the morning.

Part of what makes teaching such a hard job (in addition to the long hours and the sucky pay) is the fact that we're not exactly making widgits here. We're trying to pass information from one person to another. And that requires some sort of relationship. You can't teach without building that bridge first. So I've tried to build that relationship with my students. But you can't build that bridge without giving something of yourself first. It's hard to offer a piece of yourself: rejection is a real possibility. Thankfully, with most of them, it's pretty easy: as long as you're willing to reach, so are they. But some of them have been hurt before, and they don't want to reach. They push you right out. And it hurts. It might not even be your fault, but it still feels like a fail.

And things happen to kids. Oh, the broken bones and badly-dyed hair isn't so bad: you can laugh about shit like that with them. It's the other crap that you can't do anything about that breaks your heart. Sometimes it's something small like Taylor falling in love with a girl I knew didn't love him. Sometimes, it's not. Kevin lost his dad to cancer. His brother couldn't handle it so he started doing drugs and disappeared on the streets. So, now Kevin has lost both his dad and his brother. One of my girls has an inoperable brain cyst: every time it gets bigger, it makes it harder for her to learn. To add insult to injury, the cyst has made her deaf in one ear. Samantha was kidnapped for 4 days and raped by her captor. I never even got to say goodbye or give her a hug before her parents moved her to another school.

All this happened this year alone.

They become a part of you, and you a part of them. Whether it's something cataclysmic or merely a broken heart, you feel it. And when they fail, it feels like you failed too. Every D and F on the report card feels like your fault. Every tear you can't stop feels like you caused it.

Yeah, I make fun of the funny moments. Sometimes, you have to hold on to the funny moments.

Next post will be a funny moment. Promise.

And now they've ruined the best meal of the day

They were staring at me this morning, the dirty little vermin. I usually spend the first 10-15 minutes of my day at school drinking coffee and eating my breakfast while reading my choice blogs on the computer, but it's hard to eat with a dozen Madagascar hissing cockroaches eyeing your egg mcmuffin. I had to throw most of it away. Sigh, I've been wanting to lose weight anyways.