Pee-pee, Dinosaurs, Pregnancy, & Loehmann's.

Yesterday was MFT's birthday, and we all went to celebrate at a restaurant with delicious Latino food in midtown. My old principal [yes, that's right, he's cool enough to invite to a birthday dinner...] and some of my old colleagues were there, which was great because I haven't made it up to visit yet in February, and it's looking like I wont have time to until March. After everyone had a drink or two in them, we started to talk about the kids, which was a combination of shocking [if that's possible anymore], charming [rare], and totally depressing [but not at all surprising].

Apparently, this week, one of the new sixth graders [they are all "new" to me, since I don't really know them], asked to go to the bathroom, and the teacher said no. So he decided to pee in his Poland Spring water bottle. And then, he thought "why not see if my friend William will take a swig of my urine?" And William unknowingly took a giant gulp of pee. How this all happened with out the teacher noticing, well, that's another issue altogether. But I guess when they both ended up in the principal's office, the kid who DRANK the pee was pleading with the principal not to get the other kid in too much trouble because it really wasn't too big a deal. "It didn't even taste so bad," he insisted. William wanted the other boy to "just go to detention for a few days" whereas my principal was saying things like "you know you could go to JAIL for this!" [appropriateness of this comment is debatable... I'm just tellin' it like he told us at dinner]. And the kid who did it is actually normally a "good kid" and couldn't stop laughing about how funny he thought it was. The thing that really gets me is that this kid actually took his you-know-what OUT of his PANTS in CLASS and then peed in a water bottle! How does this kinda thing happen when a teacher is in the room?

In other news, T-Rex is apparently out of control. I mentioned in January that when I last saw him he was listening to some song called "Hot F*ck" or something like that, and being all aloof and too-cool-to-talk-to-me, which was sad. He got in some giant fight a little while ago and my principal keeps telling him he's going to have to call ME to talk about it, and then he's like "Oh naaaaw, G, don't call her she'll get all disappointed and sh*t" which is pretty hilarious considering he pretends that I am no longer of any importance to him. I like the idea of having power from beyond.

But the biggest and most depressing news is about Mel. [You may remember Mel from this time last year, or if you don't, here's one refresher [scroll down to the last post waaaay at the bottom of the page], and here's another--incidentally, rereading these old postings was a tremendous reminder as to why I am no longer teaching]. Melanie holds the all-too-prestigious title of being the only student in my three year teaching career that I was not able to win over, despite endless attempts.

Apparently Melanie is back in NYC. She is not at my old school, but still in the neighborhood. And she is pregnant. Very pregnant. Mel's 14 by now, maybe 15, [and still in the sixth grade], and just as she told us last year, "If I get sent to Jamaica, Ima just end up pregnant like my sister." She wasn't lying. I guess her mother, who is very sick, lives in Jamaica. And her father, who is a lunatic alcoholic, lives up here. He was the one who said it was "her fault" last year when we found out she had had sex with something like 8 of the boys in the 8th grade, and then said that she was forced into it, but no one [including her father] would believe her, which is awful. Of course, she wouldn't talk to me about this, because she thought I was, I think the term she used was "beasted." I have resisted the temptation to inquire as to the meaning of the term.

This was, I believe, the catalyst for sending her to Jamaica in the first place. I guess one of the 8th grade boy's girlfriend had found out and was threatening to "knife" Mel, and so every day in class, I had to lock the door from the inside to make sure no crazy 8th grade girls came inside to hurt her. Keeping Mel inside my classroom was always a challenge, and sometimes I kind of just wished she would leave and stop torturing me, so locking her in was not pleasant [you know, in addition to the fear that some knife-wielding 8th grade girl who was 3 feet taller than me wasn't going to burst in at any moment].

So Melanie's having a baby. The notion of her being responsible for a child is completely horrifying, and when I started to think about it last night at dinner, my old co-teacher and I were having a hard time not getting teary-eyed. I guess when they are in middle school, you can have the "idea" of bad things happening to them in high school, and a lot of the time you can predict, as sad as that is, the select few who will end up dropping out or having babies, and which ones will grow out of whatever attitude they are sporting at the time, or just coast through on natural smarts, or really sincerely care about school and impress the hell out of all of their teachers. But when you are only teaching them in middle school, you don't necessarily get to "see" those outcomes, and you can naively reassure yourself that they will all probably be just fine, dismiss the horror stories as being unlikely. I mean, you go visit your old third graders, some of whom USED to be nuts-o, at their new boot-camp-charter-school and they are doing pretty phenomenally, so anything can happen, right? I just wish "anything" didn't have to be Mel having a baby.

I'm sorry to digress in such a depressing direction... And honestly, it's noon on Friday and I've been up for three hours and haven't started my schoolwork yet, so it's time to get going on that.

I'll leave you with an "Overheard in NY" comment that I witnessed in my policy class the other day. This was said by possibly the most annoying girl in my entire university [she's the kinda girl who makes me question whether I want to be in grad school anymore], to the girl sitting next to her, who is Chinese, and doesn't speak English very well yet.

"Oh my God, Ming! You've never heard of Loehmann's? That is like THE best part of America!!"