Things Fall Apart

Reading Things Fall Apart did not go over very well with the Sophomores. The black kids were determined to make fun of the Africans, which frustrated me to no end, and the other teacher even worse. Everything was so alien.

Just like Romeo and Juliet though, the book was ironic compared to the experiences I was having.

I remember the title from the Yeats poem. "Things fall apart, the center cannot hold...and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity. "

I started fighting with the special ed team. I had been trying to decide for sometime between teaching history or pursuing special ed or bilingual ed. I had been looking at programs, but I hesitated. I liked special ed and I was learning a lot, but I felt like I wasn't doing that great of a job.

Then the director of ed said that I was going to teach history and civil engineering next year if I hadn't already enrolled in a program, and that made me relieved just to have that in front of me.

But the special ed staff were very angry, and thought that I had deceived them. They also do not like the director of ed very much. Before they could not stop complementing me "you're so smart, you are our man or it is so good to have a man in the department, thank god you speak spanish..." Now there was nothing but tense silence.

One women is more obnoxious than the others. She always tried to tell me what to do. I snapped at her once for calling a kid a fag, another time she corrected a student of mine for not having her shirt fully tucked in and said that while that might work when I am there teacher, she had higher standards. The thing is, the girl was just standing up from a chair, and had a small part of her shirt sticking out.

The students were having trouble to. I came into our office and saw one of our most needy and struggling, most challenging and annoying, and yet dedicated students getting arrested. She cried I don't want to go to jail and the cops started screaming at her "shut the fuck up". Two of the spec ed teachers were crying. This student does have a history of fighting, but this one took the cake. A male in class was using some tool or other and she tried to snatch it from him, they got into a fight, and he had her in a headlock and was punching her, somehow she got a pair of scissors and stabbed through his ear, tearing it, and slashed his face.

She wasn't doing well before this, she has an older boyfriend, her first serious one because she comes from a protective family, and unfortunately she is also just very unattractive and slow, and we think this guy is an asshole. Her grades were slipping.

"B" in my reading group was falling apart too. He was not happy because one of his best friends got killed in a drive by. He also got roughed up in gang fight. He was not passing a single class. Sometimes he would sit there silent, and then lash out with his leg and kick something, without warning.

He started smoking weed inside the school, started skipping classes (I found him hiding in a closet once), and then one day I saw him drawing gang graffiti and he flipped out. He only lasted a couple of weeks after that, and then left for an alternative school.

His mother blamed everyone, and was beside herself, but lashing out and incoherant, and you had to wonder if she was on drugs again.

There were two weeks with back to back expulsionary hearings, and students were being forced out in droves.