one winter afternoon i came home from work and let the dogs out into the back yard. it's a small yard, a brooklyn yard, and the far side of it is only ten or fifteen feet from the near side. the far side is bordered by the fence that separates humanity from the subway cut beyond. on this day, perched on the fence was a fat raccoon. in my mind, all daytime raccoons have rabies so the dogs and i hurried back inside.
several months earlier, may or june, our school's front yard was host to a family of opossums, so when several students asked me today if i'd seen the raccoon on the roof i should not have been all that surprised. i looked out the window and there he was perched at the edge of a steeply pitched roof, four stories from the ground. from the elementary school's playground, to be exact. rabies, i said. stupid raccoon. but how does a raccoon get up there? plenty of people offered up brilliant ideas about how a raccoon gets four stories high. city folks just assumed the thing had walked up the side of the wall. my favorite was that he came in the building unnoticed and walked up four flights of stairs, somehow managed to get past several locked doors and leaped out onto the roof, only to find that it wasn't quite where he wanted to be. raccoons do, after all, have thumbs.
the police came. some fire guys came. they aren't really trained to rescue an animal that will probably manage to throw them off the roof if approached. animal control has been too busy and the raccoon is on a wait list.
i want him to come down. although i do not care for raccoons (up close, they are like giant, wide-hipped rats wearing bandit masks) i do not want to watch any animal slowly roast on a roof in plain sight of several hundred children. he looks sad and scared and although i know that this is because he is clearly the stupidest raccoon in the world and his death would strengthen the raccoon gene pool, it is in my job description an in my heart to champion the cause of those who sometimes make poor decisions. the city folks say that when it gets cooler tonight he will get back down the way he got up. i hope the maintenance guys left the door to the stairs unlocked.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
manhattan
ah, manhattan. manhattan, kansas, that is. settlement of the early free-staters. home of elvira, mistress of the dark and kansas state university. manhattan lies in the middle of some of the flattest land in the country. somebody from manhattan will try to correct me and will talk about the flint hills. don't. it's flat. pancake flat. a great place to study wind. or wind erosion, which is one of the things the folks at ksu spend some time on. in fact, they're fascinated enough by wind erosion they built themselves a nice little lab called the wind erosion laboratory. i'll bet they've been learning all sorts of things about wind and what wind can do. in fact, today the folks at the wind erosion lab learned more than they ever learned before about the power of wind because this morning when they arrived at their lab, it wasn't there. you see, the wind erosion laboratory was blown away by a tornado in the night.
Sunday, June 8, 2008
heat wave
today it is a million degrees. okay, it's really 96.1 degrees, beating out a record of 95 set back in 1933. this may not strike you as odd. it is summer and that's what happens in summer. but not in brooklyn in june. we don't have the technology to deal with weather like this. brooklyn, unlike most modern cities, was build way back before electricity and not rebuilt. everything is old. our own little neighborhood was built at the turn of the last century, which means there is no central air. this is the time of year when new york city's notoriously small apartments finally pay off. it takes just one window unit to cool most of these 400 square foot places.
we are cursed with a large apartment. this time of year we must make choices. we have three window unit air conditioners. they're small and are only on when the rooms are occupied. we close off the rest of the house to maximize cooling in the area where we lie around reading, knitting or watching tv. this leaves the kitchen and bathroom sitting in still, steamy isolation. the trip to the fridge to get a drink is like walking through the mouth of a dog.
although most subway cars are air conditioned, you are never sure until you step on the car and the doors close. if you're lucky, you feel a little shiver because nyc transit takes air conditioning seriously. if you're not, you can smell the armpits of every one of the 200 people crammed against you in the car for your entire commute. of course, waiting for the train is just as exciting. my train travel involves an elevated train within blocks of the ocean breezes. no kidding. however, most train rides involve going into a wretched hole in the ground with none of the glamor or temperature control of a cave. it is generally at least 15 degrees hotter in a tunnel station than it is outside. so today is 96+15=111 sweltering degrees. now, that 111 degrees bakes in the urine smells and other fine aromas of the underground tunnels. this is not the most brutal part of the day.
i work in a public school. my classroom, like my apartment, is larger than i deserve. it is on a corner of the top (4th) floor and has two delicious window unit air conditioners. when i arrive tomorrow at 7am and the temperature and humidity are both hovering at 80, i will turn on both machines and shut the heavy wooden door. when my students arrive at 8am, they will say nice things about me, as will teachers on my floor and children i've never met who want to step into the room for just one minute. tomorrow we are planning to compete with 99 degree temperatures for the attention of high school children during the last week of school. none of the other classrooms on my floor have air conditioners. in fact, most of the classrooms in my school do not have air conditioners. although most classes have four or five tall (10+ feet) windows, most do not open, or have been modified to open a few inches to insure that children do not leap out. there are a few pedestal fans shifting hot air from one side of the room to another.
but, as i said, my classroom is a lush, cool exception. and these are the days my kids are on their best behavior. they will do anything to spend two hours with me. nobody asks to go to the bathroom or get a drink. nobody does anything that might require a walk to the sweltering dean's room. on rare occasions when it gets noisy, i tell kids i might need to turn off the a/c so i can hear. it gets terrifyingly silent. if you look closely, you can see their shivering bodies trying to store up the cold like a bear storing up fat for the winter.
we are cursed with a large apartment. this time of year we must make choices. we have three window unit air conditioners. they're small and are only on when the rooms are occupied. we close off the rest of the house to maximize cooling in the area where we lie around reading, knitting or watching tv. this leaves the kitchen and bathroom sitting in still, steamy isolation. the trip to the fridge to get a drink is like walking through the mouth of a dog.
although most subway cars are air conditioned, you are never sure until you step on the car and the doors close. if you're lucky, you feel a little shiver because nyc transit takes air conditioning seriously. if you're not, you can smell the armpits of every one of the 200 people crammed against you in the car for your entire commute. of course, waiting for the train is just as exciting. my train travel involves an elevated train within blocks of the ocean breezes. no kidding. however, most train rides involve going into a wretched hole in the ground with none of the glamor or temperature control of a cave. it is generally at least 15 degrees hotter in a tunnel station than it is outside. so today is 96+15=111 sweltering degrees. now, that 111 degrees bakes in the urine smells and other fine aromas of the underground tunnels. this is not the most brutal part of the day.
i work in a public school. my classroom, like my apartment, is larger than i deserve. it is on a corner of the top (4th) floor and has two delicious window unit air conditioners. when i arrive tomorrow at 7am and the temperature and humidity are both hovering at 80, i will turn on both machines and shut the heavy wooden door. when my students arrive at 8am, they will say nice things about me, as will teachers on my floor and children i've never met who want to step into the room for just one minute. tomorrow we are planning to compete with 99 degree temperatures for the attention of high school children during the last week of school. none of the other classrooms on my floor have air conditioners. in fact, most of the classrooms in my school do not have air conditioners. although most classes have four or five tall (10+ feet) windows, most do not open, or have been modified to open a few inches to insure that children do not leap out. there are a few pedestal fans shifting hot air from one side of the room to another.
but, as i said, my classroom is a lush, cool exception. and these are the days my kids are on their best behavior. they will do anything to spend two hours with me. nobody asks to go to the bathroom or get a drink. nobody does anything that might require a walk to the sweltering dean's room. on rare occasions when it gets noisy, i tell kids i might need to turn off the a/c so i can hear. it gets terrifyingly silent. if you look closely, you can see their shivering bodies trying to store up the cold like a bear storing up fat for the winter.
Saturday, June 7, 2008
freaktoe
warning: gross description of oozing dog wound
max is old and full of bumps. if you know him, you know this. if you read this blog, you also know he has suffered through two poisonings and a de-toothification of terrifying proportions. recently one of max's bumps began to develop its own personality. it ceased to be a little black dot on him and began to grow. because max's small body appears to be some sort of special growth medium for these bumps, we didn't pay it much attention. it was not unusual. it sat on top of one of his back toes, covered with fur.
max ignored it. it didn't hurt. it didn't interfere with walking. but the evil thing kept growing. i suggested maybe an undeveloped twin had migrated from his innards to his toe in an attempt to escape and start its own life. no one else seemed to like this idea, so i gave up on it for a while. but the thing kept growing. at first, it was a little flat, black, fur covered thing but by last week it was the size of a grape. we took him to the vet. they stabbed in a syringe and drew out what looked like an extra store of old blood. max was not happy.
the vet planned to test the hideous syrup from max's toe bump and sent us home. last night i noticed that his bump looked like a squished grape and all the toe fur on it was gone. max, who hates the vet, managed to find the hole the vet had punctured in him and siphon off all the remaining hideous syrup from the now-deflated bump. evidently gross toe growth syrup is tasty because max continued to lick his wound after he's slurped out all the insides of it until all the fur was gone. i am not a squeamish person, but this tested my limits.
the hideous bump immediately refilled itself with fluid and even swelled up a little. chris tried squishing some of the fluid out and was successful, but he also managed to crush something he described as being like a corn chip inside the toe bump. i returned to my original undeveloped twin theory, speculating that chris had just crushed the bones of max's tiny, freakish brother or sister .
we woke up early this morning (4:30am) to go upstate, to see two good friends and their small baby, to see my apple tree and to check on the peonies, which have been taunting me with ant-covered buds for weeks. max was grumpy. he hates driving, so when he's in the car it's tough to tell how he really feels because he really feels like he hates everything on top of whatever else might be happening. we got to the house and there were tiny apples just starting up on the tree and several fat, fragrant peonies in the yard. in the house max plopped into his dog bed and did his best impression of a dying animal. we looked at his toe and what had been a mildly creepy bump yesterday looked like a new internal organ somehow lost and wandering around on the outside of poor max. it was smooth and purple and shiny and looked like it would explode. and max was limping.
so we called all the vets in our little town and the nearby towns and nobody is open on saturday to care for animals. this seemed strange, but there wasn't much we could do but call our brooklyn vet who offered us an appointment at 4. it was 11am and we'd been on the road since six with just an hour to rest at the house. but max in pain is a terrifying thing to see, so we called the friends with the baby who were on the road to visit and told them to drive back home and we hopped in the car and headed back to brooklyn. max did not seem to notice.
back at the vet's office max tried to bite lots of people who were helping him and he had to wear a little blue cloth muzzle. when his teeth were decomissioned, he tried to maim people by writhing around and banging his head into them. he has a lot of faith in his own power. the vet took him upstairs to open his bulging wound and then wrapped it in red bandages. he has to go back tomorrow for more draining and bandaging and then surgery on monday. he has expressed his unhappiness about this numerous ways.
because this problem all started when max began devouring his own boo-boo, he got one of
those awesome satellite dish collars to wear. the woman who brought it out tried to hold it up and measure it against max's head and he tried to bite her. when max tries to bite, he involves his whole body. in this instance his short legs were flailing while his blood tipped tail (somehow the whole end of his tail was blood-soaked on his return from bandaging) whipped around and his long dachshund body writhed so that a person (me) trying to hold such a mess has quite a bit of trouble controlling things. chris and i both attempted to put the collar over max's head. this is another thing he hates. he whipped out the fangs of fury, which are all the more terrifying because one of the actual fangs is gone along with five other teeth, allowing max to bite deeper and more dangerously with some parts of his mouth. so i carried him to the car without the stupid collar. eventually, through cleverness and trickery, max found himself in the collar and he entered the house limping with a little red boot and swaying his angry head like a horrible bell of vengeance. guthrie and the cats kept out of his way.
here we are at home with an angry, snaggle-toothed dog who is in pain and is having trouble navigating because of the big plastic collar and i have to give him bright pink medicine in a syringe. chris holds max on his back so his face is in the bottom of a plastic collar funnel and he carefully peels back some very uncooperative dog lips. then he pries open the very dangerous snaggle fangs. i hold the syringe in front of max's mouth and press the plunger just as he goes into something like an alligator death roll. i get most of the medicine inside the dog, but there's plenty on his nose and ears and there are streaks of bright pink all over the inside of his funnel collar. the bright pink smells good. he begins to lick the inside of the collar, spinning it to get all the medicine.
max is old and full of bumps. if you know him, you know this. if you read this blog, you also know he has suffered through two poisonings and a de-toothification of terrifying proportions. recently one of max's bumps began to develop its own personality. it ceased to be a little black dot on him and began to grow. because max's small body appears to be some sort of special growth medium for these bumps, we didn't pay it much attention. it was not unusual. it sat on top of one of his back toes, covered with fur.
max ignored it. it didn't hurt. it didn't interfere with walking. but the evil thing kept growing. i suggested maybe an undeveloped twin had migrated from his innards to his toe in an attempt to escape and start its own life. no one else seemed to like this idea, so i gave up on it for a while. but the thing kept growing. at first, it was a little flat, black, fur covered thing but by last week it was the size of a grape. we took him to the vet. they stabbed in a syringe and drew out what looked like an extra store of old blood. max was not happy.
the vet planned to test the hideous syrup from max's toe bump and sent us home. last night i noticed that his bump looked like a squished grape and all the toe fur on it was gone. max, who hates the vet, managed to find the hole the vet had punctured in him and siphon off all the remaining hideous syrup from the now-deflated bump. evidently gross toe growth syrup is tasty because max continued to lick his wound after he's slurped out all the insides of it until all the fur was gone. i am not a squeamish person, but this tested my limits.
the hideous bump immediately refilled itself with fluid and even swelled up a little. chris tried squishing some of the fluid out and was successful, but he also managed to crush something he described as being like a corn chip inside the toe bump. i returned to my original undeveloped twin theory, speculating that chris had just crushed the bones of max's tiny, freakish brother or sister .
we woke up early this morning (4:30am) to go upstate, to see two good friends and their small baby, to see my apple tree and to check on the peonies, which have been taunting me with ant-covered buds for weeks. max was grumpy. he hates driving, so when he's in the car it's tough to tell how he really feels because he really feels like he hates everything on top of whatever else might be happening. we got to the house and there were tiny apples just starting up on the tree and several fat, fragrant peonies in the yard. in the house max plopped into his dog bed and did his best impression of a dying animal. we looked at his toe and what had been a mildly creepy bump yesterday looked like a new internal organ somehow lost and wandering around on the outside of poor max. it was smooth and purple and shiny and looked like it would explode. and max was limping.
so we called all the vets in our little town and the nearby towns and nobody is open on saturday to care for animals. this seemed strange, but there wasn't much we could do but call our brooklyn vet who offered us an appointment at 4. it was 11am and we'd been on the road since six with just an hour to rest at the house. but max in pain is a terrifying thing to see, so we called the friends with the baby who were on the road to visit and told them to drive back home and we hopped in the car and headed back to brooklyn. max did not seem to notice.
back at the vet's office max tried to bite lots of people who were helping him and he had to wear a little blue cloth muzzle. when his teeth were decomissioned, he tried to maim people by writhing around and banging his head into them. he has a lot of faith in his own power. the vet took him upstairs to open his bulging wound and then wrapped it in red bandages. he has to go back tomorrow for more draining and bandaging and then surgery on monday. he has expressed his unhappiness about this numerous ways.
because this problem all started when max began devouring his own boo-boo, he got one of
those awesome satellite dish collars to wear. the woman who brought it out tried to hold it up and measure it against max's head and he tried to bite her. when max tries to bite, he involves his whole body. in this instance his short legs were flailing while his blood tipped tail (somehow the whole end of his tail was blood-soaked on his return from bandaging) whipped around and his long dachshund body writhed so that a person (me) trying to hold such a mess has quite a bit of trouble controlling things. chris and i both attempted to put the collar over max's head. this is another thing he hates. he whipped out the fangs of fury, which are all the more terrifying because one of the actual fangs is gone along with five other teeth, allowing max to bite deeper and more dangerously with some parts of his mouth. so i carried him to the car without the stupid collar. eventually, through cleverness and trickery, max found himself in the collar and he entered the house limping with a little red boot and swaying his angry head like a horrible bell of vengeance. guthrie and the cats kept out of his way.here we are at home with an angry, snaggle-toothed dog who is in pain and is having trouble navigating because of the big plastic collar and i have to give him bright pink medicine in a syringe. chris holds max on his back so his face is in the bottom of a plastic collar funnel and he carefully peels back some very uncooperative dog lips. then he pries open the very dangerous snaggle fangs. i hold the syringe in front of max's mouth and press the plunger just as he goes into something like an alligator death roll. i get most of the medicine inside the dog, but there's plenty on his nose and ears and there are streaks of bright pink all over the inside of his funnel collar. the bright pink smells good. he begins to lick the inside of the collar, spinning it to get all the medicine.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
pretty
some important info-1. i knit, especially things for babies. this is because everyone i know is of childbearing age and has decided to pursue childbearing aggressively.
2. i have two dachshunds.
3. sometimes, these two things collide.
guthrie has no shame and is roughly the size of a newborn-3month old. although his legs aren't ever in the right place, sometimes i slap a dress on him just to see how it will hang. this is some dreamy yarn- 100% silk from italy. there are bloomers to match, and although guthrie's hindquarter are pretty meaty, he's got that bothersome tail so those never fit him. the dress ties at the back of the neck and this hound simply wouldn't sit long enough for the tying. still, he's a pretty good sport to model such things.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
hayden carruth
hayden carruth puts a man in a poem who curses his father "in words i wouldn't whisper into a pit". he draped those words at the end of a poem about being in what he called "the hatch". it is not his best poem, but, oh, that phrase. i can't get over it. i just want to hear it over and over. "words i wouldn't whisper into a pit". mercy!poetry hits harder than other combinations of words. i'd like to say plenty about a bunch of poems and then slap them up here all smug but i don't even know where to begin. i am lovesick for them. i have the sorts of crushes thirteen year olds have on these strands of sense. i am horrified when i think of how many people won't get to read some of the poems i have wedged in my head. it's not fair. i'm being serious. carruth is one of my biggest crushes. he's 87 and continues to write in plain, wonderful language. i took a class with him when he was still teaching in syracuse and he'd bring in old jazz records and a turntable. he'd talk about words and what they do when you hear them a certain way, how bad jazz and poor wording are the same and how that rare jazz tune worth listening to will get in your head and stir everything you know around the way words put together right will. i will keep my own blatherings to a minimum. i want you to swoon over his words without me shuffling around in the background. there are three poems. two long, one short.
Ray
(a poem written on the death of his friend, ray carver, a brilliant fiction writer and a poet. another of my crushes. "our heads full of language like buckets of minnows standing in the moonlight on a dock".there is nothing better than this, except maybe chocolate pie.)
How many guys are sitting at their kitchen tables
right now, one-thirty in the morning, this same
time, eating a piece of pie? - that's what I
wondered. A big piece of pie, because I'd just
finished reading Ray's last book. Not good pie,
not like my mother or my wife could've
made, but an ordinary pie I'd just bought, being
alone, at the Tops Market two hours ago. And how
many had water in their eyes? Because of Ray's
book and especially those last poems written
after he knew: the one about the doctor telling
him, the one where he and Tess go down to
Reno to get married before it happens and shoot
some craps on the dark baize tables, the one
called "After-Glow" about the little light in the
sky after the sun sets. I can just hear him,
if he were still here and this were somebody
else's book, saying, "Jesus," saying, "This
is the saddest son of a bitch of a book I've
read in a long time," saying, "A real long time."
And the thing is, he knew we'd be saying this
about his book, he could just hear us saying it,
and in some part of him he was glad! He
really was. What crazies we writers are
our heads full of language like buckets of minnows
standing in the moonlight on a dock. Ray
was a good writer, a wonderful writer, and his
poems are good, most of them and they made me
cry, there at my kitchen table with my head down,
me, a sixty-seven-year-old galoot, an old fool
because all old men are fools, they have to be,
shoveling big jagged chunks of that ordinary pie
into my mouth, and the water falling from my eyes
onto the pie, the plate, my hand, little speckles
shining in the light, brightening the colors, and I
ate that goddamn pie, and it tasted good to me.
(i force 9th graders to think about this. read it out loud in your grandpa's voice. the 9th graders do.)
The first chainsaw I owned was years ago,i could take (this is a love poem that isn't full of stupid, sappy, sentimental trash.)
an old yellow McCulloch that wouldn't start.
Bo Bremmer give it to me that was my friend,
though I've had enemies couldn't of done
no worse. I took it to Ward's over to Morrisville,
and no doubt they tinkered it as best they could,
but it still wouldn't start. One time later
I took it down to the last bolt and gasket
and put it together again, hoping somehow
I'd do something accidental-like that would
make it go, and then I yanked on it
450 times, as I figured afterwards,
and give myself a bursitis in the elbow
that went five years even after
Doc Arrowsmith shot it full of cortisone
and near killed me when he hit a nerve
dead on. Old Stan wanted that saw, wanted it bad.
Figured I was a greenhorn that didn't know
nothing and he could fix it. Well, I was,
you could say, being only forty at the time,
but a fair hand at tinkering. "Stan," I said,
"you're a neighbor. I like you. I wouldn't
sell that thing to nobody, except maybe
Vice-President Nixon." But Stan persisted.
He always did. One time we was loafing and
gabbing in his front dooryard, and he spied
that saw in the back of my pickup. He run
quick inside, then come out and stuck a double
sawbuck in my shirt pocket, and he grabbed
that saw and lugged it off. Next day, when I
drove past, I seen he had it snugged down tight
with a tow-chain on the bed of his old Dodge
Powerwagon, and he was yanking on it
with both hands. Two or three days after,
I asked him, "How you getting along with that
McCulloch, Stan?" "Well," he says, "I tooken
it down to scrap, and I buried it in three
separate places yonder on the upper side
of the potato piece. You can't be too careful,"
he says, "when you're disposing of a hex."
The next saw I had was a godawful ancient
Homelite that I give Dry Dryden thirty bucks for,
temperamental as a ram too, but I liked it.
It used to remind me of Dry and how he'd
clap that saw a couple times with the flat
of his double-blade axe to make it go
and how he honed the chain with a worn-down
file stuck in an old baseball. I worked
that saw for years. I put up forty-five
run them days each summer and fall to keep
my stoves het through the winter. I couldn't now.
It'd kill me. Of course they got these here
modern Swedish saws now that can take
all the worry out of it. What's the good
of that? Takes all the fun out too, don't it?
Why, I reckon. I mind when Gilles Boivin snagged
an old sap spout buried in a chunk of maple
and it tore up his mouth so bad he couldn't play
"Tea for Two" on his cornet in the town band
no more, and then when Toby Fox was holding
a beech limb that Rob Bowen was bucking up
and the saw skidded crossways and nipped off
one of Toby's fingers. Ain't that more like it?
Makes you know you're living. But mostly they wan't
dangerous, and the only thing they broke was your
back. Old Stan, he was a buller and a jammer
in his time, no two ways about that, but he
never sawed himself. Stan had the sugar
all his life, and he wan't always too careful
about his diet and the injections. He lost
all the feeling in his legs from the knees down.
One time he started up his Powerwagon
out in the barn, and his foot slipped off the clutch,
and she jumped forwards right through the wall
and into the manure pit. He just set there,
swearing like you could of heard it in St.
Johnsbury, till his wife come out and said,
"Stan, what's got into you?" "Missus," he says
"ain't nothing got into me. Can't you see?
It's me that's got into this here pile of shit."
Not much later they took away one of his
legs, and six months after that they took
the other and left him setting in his old chair
with a tank of oxygen to sip at whenever
he felt himself sinking. I remember that chair.
Stan reupholstered it with an old bearskin
that must of come down from his great-great-
grandfather and had grit in it left over
from the Civil War and a bullet-hole as big
as a yawning cat. Stan latched the pieces together
with rawhide, cross fashion, but the stitches was
always breaking and coming undone. About then
I quit stopping by to see old Stan, and I
don't feel so good about that neither. But my mother
was having her strokes then. I figured
one person coming apart was as much
as a man can stand. Then Stan was taken away
to the nursing home, and then he died. I always
remember how he planted them pieces of spooked
McCulloch up above the potatoes. One time
I went up and dug, and I took the old
sprocket, all pitted and et away, and set it
on the windowsill right there next to the
butter mold. But I'm damned if I know why.
i could take
two leaves
and give you one.
would that not be a kind of perfection?
but i prefer
one leaf
torn to give you half
showing
(after all these years, simply)
love's complexity in an act,
the tearing and
the unique edges ---
one leaf (one word) from the two
imperfections that match.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
police
today the police came to put handcuffs on one of my 9th grade boys and took him away. i did not see this but a heard a variety of versions of this and the events that led up to it. i will tell you what i know, but it's pretty sketchy. you see, my school administration believes that no news is good news and the less we know about dangers in the building, the safer we are. children are prone to exaggeration when violence is involved. so are adults. they're no help, either.
remember back when i said that generally when 9th grade boys get in trouble, it's' not for stabbing or something big? well, sometimes it is. here's what i know. one of my 9th grade boys (in fact, one you've met in previous posts) and another boy brought something to school. it might have been a slingshot but was more likely a bb gun. at some point the boys and their weapon interacted with the face of a third boy. this all happened before 10am because my student didn't arrive to class at all and everyone was pretty quiet about why. they were scared. good. they should be. the third boy may have been hit near the eye or may have lost an eye completely depending on who you believe. he was taken away in an ambulance most likely. i am sure this is not how the boys expected things to turn out. none of them is very coordinated. my 9th grader's handwriting looks like a drunk first grader's. he could not hit someone in the eye with a bb if he held the gun against someone's closed eyelid. this just makes the whole thing that much more stupid and annoying.
i don't think anyone is going to address any of the issues here. my school's administration has not yet discussed the situation with the staff or students in an attempt to foster healthy communication. the child's parents will not discuss what happened with him, just like they refused to talk with him about the fact that he steals from other children and plagiarizes all his written work. i worry that all this lack of focus will allow the child to be hurt next time he does something stupid. i do not worry about him becoming a career criminal. that would require his parents sitting down with him and talking with him about how he needs to improve his motor skills. and that just isn't going to happen.
remember back when i said that generally when 9th grade boys get in trouble, it's' not for stabbing or something big? well, sometimes it is. here's what i know. one of my 9th grade boys (in fact, one you've met in previous posts) and another boy brought something to school. it might have been a slingshot but was more likely a bb gun. at some point the boys and their weapon interacted with the face of a third boy. this all happened before 10am because my student didn't arrive to class at all and everyone was pretty quiet about why. they were scared. good. they should be. the third boy may have been hit near the eye or may have lost an eye completely depending on who you believe. he was taken away in an ambulance most likely. i am sure this is not how the boys expected things to turn out. none of them is very coordinated. my 9th grader's handwriting looks like a drunk first grader's. he could not hit someone in the eye with a bb if he held the gun against someone's closed eyelid. this just makes the whole thing that much more stupid and annoying.
i don't think anyone is going to address any of the issues here. my school's administration has not yet discussed the situation with the staff or students in an attempt to foster healthy communication. the child's parents will not discuss what happened with him, just like they refused to talk with him about the fact that he steals from other children and plagiarizes all his written work. i worry that all this lack of focus will allow the child to be hurt next time he does something stupid. i do not worry about him becoming a career criminal. that would require his parents sitting down with him and talking with him about how he needs to improve his motor skills. and that just isn't going to happen.
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