I have this thing about gum, in that it is absolutely NOT necessary when you sing. In fact, singing with gum in your mouth creates a situation where you are likely to get choked on it or at the very least, have a mad coughing fit from the excess saliva it creates. Once gum is lodged in your throat, it can be hard to get out. Being as I didn’t plan on ever sticking my fingers down a student’s throat to try to dislodge gum, I banned it in my classroom. Automatic detention, every time; no excuses, no exceptions.
Most schools didn’t allow gum to be chewed in the building anyway, so you would think this rule would have been easy to enforce. You would be incredibly wrong. At some point in every school, usually at the beginning of my tenure there, I had to sit in front of an administrator (or multiple administrators) and explain why this policy wasn’t irrational or disproportional or otherwise tyrannical. Then I would patiently explain that gum wasn’t allowed in choir for the same reasons it wasn’t allowed in gym class – in singing, you have to breathe deeply and sometimes those breaths are caught quickly. A quick, deep inhalation was the perfect circumstance to inhale a piece of gum and lodge it in your windpipe. Ergo, I didn’t want gum in my class because I didn’t want students choking, I didn’t want to try to get the gum out of anyone’s windpipe and I didn’t want to have to attempt using the Heimlich on anyone and hurt them further trying to keep them from choking. Usually this argument resulted in a light bulb moment for the administrator. Choking or Heimlich could result in a lawsuit, in which, inevitably, a lawyer would say, “But Miss, if gum is so dangerous, why was it allowed in your classroom at all?” See how this plays out? Think any administrator is going to go down for not allowing me to enforce my no-gum policy?
HA. No administrator has ever gone done for a teacher when they prevented this teacher from using good judgement in their classroom, not in all the stories I’ve ever heard from nearly a decade in education and all the colleagues and college classmates I have who are still in the trenches. Most of them won’t even be honest when their feet are put to the fire about their own ideas or policies, but that’s for another post.
Even though administrators understood this policy and claimed to support it, the application of this principle seemed irksome and they resented me for it. I regularly heard reports from students that certain administrators didn’t enforce these detentions and would just send the kids home or tell them they didn’t have to serve it. These same administrators didn’t seem to understand why their policy of dismissing my detentions actually made ALL discipline problems worse in my classroom, not better. This led to more detentions being written and more detentions they had to excuse (for consistency’s sake) and more chances of the kids telling me, in a fit of adolescent-hormone-driven tantrum, that they wouldn’t have to serve my detentions anyway, because I wasn’t a real teacher. Real teachers’ detentions didn’t get shredded (and they had a point). This inevitably lead to conversations about the number of referrals I wrote, which led to my asking which referrals weren’t deserved, according to the school handbook or my own, which had been approved by the administration prior to the start of term. That silence often led to me dropping a comment about the fact that some students assured me they never had to serve my detentions, which I was confident was inaccurate, but the belief might be a contributing factor we were missing. Then said administrator would get all huffy and just ding me somewhere else on my eval, based on absolutely nothing, in retaliation. I would write an eloquent rebuttal to the unreasonable, unfounded ding, it would be placed in my file and we would all go home to do this again another day. In the immortal words of philosopher Ron White, you can’t fix stupid.
All of the above had already played out 3 weeks into my teaching career (I had no idea how much deja-vous would occur on this point) and culminated one day with Assboy*. Assboy already had a history of physical aggression (both inside my classroom and out) and was generally regarded as a petulant brat who had taken the form of a 6’+ junior male. He wasn’t well-liked among faculty, staff or students (unless you partied with him) and had a smugness about him which usually comes from a doting parent who had spent the last 16 years assuring this child that everything was everyone else’s fault. I had already had him removed from my show choir, after he assaulted another student (picked him up & dropped him across a set of concrete steps while I was working on a lift with another couple; later, I witnessed him pick a fight with another student, call this victim racial slurs and proceed to try to throw the other student down the bleachers during a lunch duty – he was certainly not a problem ONLY in my classroom). Despite the righteous anger of the victim’s parents, Assboy got a slap on the wrist and removal from the extra-curricular. Principal Hugs-A-Lot thought it was important Assboy remain enrolled in choir, because his victim was in a different class period and he was confident Assboy & I could reconcile our relationship and make beautiful music together. Or something.
In class, Assboy was a constant undercurrent of disruption (he was in the 83 student class at the end of the day) and a constant stream of under-his-breath disrespectful comments. Needless to say, no beautiful music was coming from this relationship. In fact, I don’t know that I ever heard him sing at all. Like most spoiled children, he was, at his core, painfully insecure and he didn’t want compassion from me, because I was obviously the enemy. He also was a regular gum-chewer. After a short adjustment period to my new policy, I had taken to keeping a stack of detentions on my piano, already filled out with the reason being “violation of classroom policy – GUM”, ready and waiting for the date and student’s name. Early in the week, Assboy had earned himself a detention for chewing gum in class, which he mouthed off about and I let go – our administration didn’t seem to think that disrespectful behavior when receiving a consequence was worthy of additional consequences. Why beat a dead horse?
Thursday came and the class change occurred to bring my last class of the day into my classroom. The hallway in the dungeon where my class met was maybe 8 ft wide and the 4 minutes between fourth block brought my 80+ choir students & another 100+ band students into this tiny hallway, which also housed cabinets for storing instruments. My office had a window to said hallway and I looked up just in time to see Assboy with his tongue plastered to my office window, pinning a piece of gum into my line of sight. He then pulled back from the window, leaving the gum and a copious amount of spit behind, and yelled through the window, “I SPIT MY GUM OUT.” Disgusted, I grabbed a few tissues, fought my way out my door into the hallway where he stood, gloating. I held out the tissues and said three words, “Clean. It. Up.” and turned on my heel to return to my classroom. Because of the ridiculous (and likely fire-hazardous) level of congestion in the hallway, I turned on the spot toward the hallway wall where my office window was, trying to complete my 180-degree turn.
Before I could do so, I was slammed into the wall by what felt suspiciously like an ass. Said ass proceeded to rub me from bra strap to mid-thigh, while pinning me against the wall. When I was released from the wall, I was greeted by a packed hallway of astonished high school students who had just witnessed the assault and there stood Assboy, grinning like the Cheshire cat. I had two words: “OFFICE. NOW.”
I walked calmly into my classroom, waited for the bell to ring so I had a chance of being heard, pressed the call button, and intentionally, in front of the class (who already knew what had happened first- or secondhand), and clearly told the secretary that Assboy had assaulted me and I wanted him emergency removed from my classroom. The secretary asked what I meant. I replied, ‘He assaulted me.” When the secretary asked again what had I happened, I clearly stated, in front of 80+ high school juniors and seniors, “He pinned me face-first against the wall and rubbed his butt on me. That’s what I meant when I said he assaulted me.” The secretary scoffed at me – apparently, I was too vague at first, because the use of the word assault wasn’t clear enough…? and then I was too crass for their delicate sensibilities at School #1.
How would you have responded? What would you have done?
I didn’t have a choice. I still had 85 minutes left where I had to focus and attempt to teach something to the remaining 82 students in my classroom. Can you imagine being assaulted and then being dismissed by a secretary in front of a room of 16-18yos and then trying to maintain your composure, let alone teach a solid lesson? Especially being undermined by aforementioned secretary in front of a class you were still attempting to get under control from the circus you’d inherited from The Church Lady? Trying to teach the same class of kids where the senior boys asked you which senior boy you were going to date after graduation (because that’s what single teachers did at this high school) or if you would buy the keg for their next party after you’d been sexually assaulted by one of their own?
(To be continued)
*Assboy isn’t the nickname I gave this particular student; I prefer not to say his name at all, so I won’t. Assboy is the nickname given by my friends, the ones who were horrified any student anywhere would assault a teacher over gum.
Donita Westman 