I taught at Hillcrest High Thursday. I was miserably late; due once again to my inability to get up early enough to leave the house on time, and also the fact that I got off the train at the wrong station. When I finally did catch my bus I was riding what appeared to be the Park Cities Spanish-Speaking Domestic Help Shuttle. The driver spoke Spanish exclusively, and most of the passengers wereolder hispanic women who disembarked as the bus wound its way through tony University Park and Highland Park streets.
I got in and was signed in by an unusually young dean. Most dean's are candidates to join the aarp. So a 30-something dean is remarkable. I hung out in the teacher's lounge until the dean summoned me to cover for a teacher who was having a conference with the principal. My first class was fun. It was marred by one student walking out and not coming back due to instructions left by the teacher to not write bathroom passes. In retrospect, I should have just written the pass because it must have truly been an emergency for the student to dare the consequences. I did write passes for other students during the day claiming emergency bathroom situations. I suppose bathroom trips should be expected, since other than lunch, students only have five minutes to make each class. High School campuses between periods are large madhouses. Making it all the way to the restroom, locker, and attending class on time would be a herculean feat.
After lunch I noticed that I was supposed to be teaching French for 8th period. Needless to say, I was nonplussed. I don't speak French but the lesson plan provided called for extended babysitting. The only major incident involved a student not in the class calling one of my kids a "bitch". Usually, the kids let profanity slide, but the girl took offense because she didn't know the other student. Also he was an insufferable pest. I brought in another teacher who forced him to apologize in frontof the class and gave him a thorough reprimand. (Profanity is an extremely useful crutch. I just had to consult a thesaurus no less than three times for a word meaning "annoying person" and had to substitute reprimand for my favored noun - a** chewing. Being PG-13 is hard. Maybe I'll relent and just got to being R-rated as long as the sex, profanity, drug use, and violence is not gratuitous and has actual merit. The problem being that I love gratuitous sex, drugs, violence, profanity, and rock and roll.)