THEY START YOUNG PART I

The past week of school brought back to mind the reasons I can’t wait to retire. On two days I spent what seemed to be an eternity in educational hell. By the time Friday arrived, I was exhausted. Guess what! At the center of both these terrible days were high school girls. Folks, I swear they are the meanest life form on this planet. This is Part I of a two-week piece. What I am relating is true. By the way, no names are involved because I don’t actually know any of these students.

The first episode occurred during an assembly. One of the school organizations arranged a faculty-student basketball game. For a couple of bucks students could watch a game and escape class. Most every student attended the event, and the stands were packed with our overflowing enrollment of 2000 kids.

I later regretted my decision of supervising the commons area instead of going into the gym and being a spectator. For some reason, maybe the result of being “old school” in my way of thinking, I believed that I could help the administration by standing guard and deflecting students as they attempted to sneak out of the gym.

At first, things ran smoothly, and I walked across the commons area and chatted with the cafeteria workers as they ate. Before long, however, a dribble of girls came through the doors and turned toward the restroom. The dribble soon became a flood as groups exited the gym. I stood up and used my “teacher voice” (that’s the one that sounds like the most hateful ogre on the planet) and instructed the females to return to the gym.

I need to explain something about teens and the restroom. Not that many young people have to use the facility ten minutes after a class or function begins. Our experiences as teachers have been that these adolescents want to enter the bathroom to do two things: smoke or use cell phones. The school policy also states that students should stay in class and only for emergencies be allowed to go to the bathroom. I guarantee all that probably 98% of these girls had no emergency. They simply wanted to leave a supervised area and to loiter in an unsupervised one.
One group of girls became quite hostile. They bowed their necks and tried to defy me, but even though I am old, I’m still pretty tough in some situations. One girl tried on three occasions to leave. During one attempt, I had to block her at the restroom entrance. The last time she came at me, she held out a cell phone and said, “My mom wants to talk to you!” I told her that 1) cell phones aren’t to be used at school, 2) I had nothing to say to her mother, and 3) she was to go back into the gym. I can’t repeat the names she called me or the profanities she spat at me during the heated conflict.

Another female came out and was as ill-tempered as the other girl. She informed that she wasn’t going to “piss her pants.” However, I told her to find a principal to escort her, and she disappeared back into the gym. Another girl indicated that she had a true emergency, and I asked her to get a principal to okay her visit. Apparently, the girl’s emergency wasn’t nearly as serious as she let on. In fact, her desperate situation was probably fictitious.
I walked to the boy’s restroom to stop the few males that were in need of a smoke break, and while I was there, the most insistent girl exited again, and when a female staff member told her to return to the gym, the child pushed the woman and went into the restroom.

By the time the basketball game ended, I was exhausted. I wasn’t in the mood to return to class. My blood pressure was high enough that I expected to suffer from a stroke at any moment. What made things worse was the fact that I had a half hour of bathroom duty to complete. I’d been cursed, abused, and chided by teenage girls who wanted their ways over what the school policy was. I wondered if the mouths from which they spewed such venomous things were the same ones with which they kissed their mothers. I sat there and stewed as one horrific day came to an end.