Usually, I don’t like to talk about the fights at school. It seems that it is impossible to talk about a fight or two, even a few fights, without leaving the impression that fights were a daily occasion, which they weren’t. Police officers will tell you the same thing. Most law enforcement is writing tickets, writing a report on a petty shoplifter or writing accident reports—not very exciting, not like TV. There is a lot of potential for violence, but not much ever happens. One officer told me, “It’s mainly driving around in the car waiting for the shift to end.”
And that was the way it was in school. With two or three thousand kids jammed into one building, sooner or later there was bound to be a fight or two. And that’s all it was: a fight or two. One day, I was cutting through the lunchroom. It was late, the lunchroom was empty and all cleaned up. There were two kids, freshmen, playing Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker with plastic lunch trays. They were just fooling around, having a great time. I yelled at them to stop. I hurried over to where they were play fighting. Just as I got there, the kid closest to me swung his tray up and around and hit me in the mouth. They were both terrified. All that happened was that I had walked into the top of the tray’s arc; the tray tapped my partial and one of my two front teeth, whole and intact, hit the ground. I quickly grabbed it, told them I never wanted to see them again and “You better get the hell out of here.” They were scared to death. Just as they were leaving, I said, “Stop. Wait, don’t worry, nothing happened. If you don’t say anything, I won’t take you to the office.” They nodded and I said, “OK, now get the hell out of here.” Of course, when I went to the dentist, he didn’t believe me. He wanted all the juicy details. I had to disappoint him.
Most fights were over in a flash. I sometimes think that the males depended on the teachers to be there to break up the fight before it got too serious. If two males were fighting in the halls, a crowd immediately formed a ring around the combatants. The last thing the spectators wanted was teachers to break up the fight. A good fight made a good story, gossip for the whole day. It was hard to get to the fight; the other teachers and I had to dash down the hall, break through the wall that the audience had created to keep us out and then without hurting the combatants, break up the fight. Most of the time, after a little bravado, the males were happy to have us break up the fight. They had made their point (God only knows what it was) and they had maintained their honor.
Fights among young women were rare, very unusual, but if two young women were fighting it was entirely different from the way many males fought. They completely lost their heads. They freaked out. They would grab each other’s hair or try to and hang on. Then it was nearly impossible to separate them. My friend and I once broke up a fight. Our superior size and weight, the fact that we were teachers, didn’t matter. We had a hell of a time. Finally, we got them separated with much loss of hair. We had to figure out a way to hold them, you couldn’t just grab them anywhere the way you could grab a male and drag them down to the office. Even in the office, we had to stay until they calmed down. The disciplinarian could more easily handle two seventeen year old young men twice as big as the girls as he could handle two still half-crazy young women. On the way back upstairs, I asked my friend what he did to break up the fight. I hurt her and that’s why she stopped. He replied. “As soon as I was able to get one finger free of all that hair, I just kept pulling on it. I would have broken it off, if she hadn’t stopped.” In thirty years, I don’t think I ever hurt a student, but he was right.
He was upset because he had missed out on his daily rendezvous with his latest teacher flame. I had to hear about it all the way back upstairs. I had wanted to talk about what could be done to reduce the number of incidents like the last fight. Anger management wasn’t part of our vocabulary yet, but it made me mad that I’d go back upstairs and do vocabulary or we’d talk about a short story or whatever and never talk with our students about the reality all around, this sense that there was always at least a potential for violence.
A few days later, I was in a good mood—everything was humming along. I was looking forward to my first period, a wonderful freshman class. They were always ready, always prepared, bright, cheerful and most importantly, on time. There were two young men in the class still waiting for puberty to kick in who were both madly, blindly in love with the same young woman. She didn’t even know they existed. She was more interested in the older males she saw in the halls. Robert started fussing with Michael or maybe it was the other way around. It didn’t matter. “She’s mine, leave her alone.” “Don’t tell me what to do!” and of course the good old F-word started going back and forth. As I moved down the aisles, they started swinging at each other. These were good kids; they didn’t even know how to fight. When I got there, I pulled them apart and then shoved Robert—much too hard. He went flying over a bunch of desks and landed in a heap on the floor—unhurt except for his dignity.
The class turned on me. “That wasn’t right—you could have hurt him—Mr. Wemstrom, you’re bigger than he is—you could’ve hurt him—not fair—you be wrong—not right. So I had to settle the class down; keep Robert and Michael separated even though they weren’t going to do anything; (later in the hall they would apologize to each other) get the desks straightened out, find out where we left off, find out that we hadn’t started and then I decided, to myself, “Oh the hell with it.” To the class, “The bell is going to ring in a minute or two (thirty to be exact), just sit quietly and finish the story. We’ll talk about it (the story, not the little fight) tomorrow.”
Robert and Michael wanted to know, “Are you going to take us to the office?”
“No, just sit down and be quiet.” They were relieved. Because they were good kids, if they got in trouble at school they’d also get in trouble at home, and they didn’t want that to happen. And I knew that they had learned their lesson and it was all taken care of. Except for my black mood and the gossip in the hall, it was already history.
Of course, the class was right. I had overreacted. All I had to do was step between them, snarl a couple of threatening words and it would have ended right there. I didn’t have to take out my frustrations on the two of them, who were in some way still kids—cute kids actually. The students were quiet; they didn’t want to risk my wrath. In the meantime, I was still mad at them, but even madder at myself. They had ruined my day—I had ruined my day.
The good news was that it was a good class and it continued to be a good class, and over the course of the year Robert and Michael each shot up six inches, discovered basketball and other girls who were as interested in them as they were in the girls. And better yet, they remained friends. And best of all, it remained my best class.
No comments:
Post a Comment