Ticking Eye

You get sick a lot, doing this job. Because you fill in for people who are sick, and the students pass it on to you. I have had some kind of coughing, sinus thing three times in the last four months.

Sixth grade again. I subbed at a school that has the same name as an insane asylum in New York. The class held twenty-four students and only six of them were quiet. The rest shouted out constantly, refused to raise their hands, talked among themselves, did not hear what the teacher said. I sent some to room eleven, the detention hall. One girl started kicking her desk before she left. At one point I was lecturing them about how they would all end up in jail!

Pretty soon even the good kids were sucked in to the chaotic mess, pulled down by their constituents. The P.E. teacher brought this class back inside because they would not obey her. Then the poetry teacher threatened to leave.

The poetry teacher did all the right disciplinary things according to school protocol. If a student talked without raising his hand, the poetry teacher wrote the student’s name on the board. Then if the student did it again, he was to get a check by his name. But so many were talking it was hard to keep up and the teacher was getting behind in his lessons.

During lunch, the keeper of room eleven (the detention room) tried to give me support. Another teacher laughed and inferred subs should expect trouble with sixth graders. Then she reminisced about her days as a sixth grader and how many subs her class got rid of one year. This wasn’t very supportive and when the principal came in I asked him to pay a visit to the class. The principal, poor man, had a severe, uncontrollable eye twitch. His eye was pulsing, bulging from its socket. I imagined I could almost see the veins around the backside of his protruding eye.

At the end of the day the students were to line up for the bus. Most of them just lollygagged on the benches. One frantic, impatient boy got very upset because I wanted everyone to line up (those were my instructions). He was afraid he would miss the bus and began shouting while pointing to the kids still sitting on the benches, “They don’t go home. They’re Cool School! They’re Cool School!” I thought he might explode on me so I moved the ragged-edged line along to the bus, fearing the perusal of the mighty principal, lying in wait.

Cool School is an after school program and about two-thirds of the class are in it. These after school groups grow close, often fondling one another like monkeys looking for fleas. They don’t get enough parental supervision and are very defensive.

The principal was out by the bus stop. I lied when he asked me how the rest of the day went. I told him, “Fine.” But during P.E. I could only get half the group to play kickball. I gave up and sat on a bench among the slackers. Some were lying under the picnic tables grabbing the others’ ankles and a few students who were trying to study complained about this discretion. “Don’t you care?” they asked me. “Don’t you care?” I just lifted my eyes toward heaven, to watch the birds.

As I drove home that night I passed plenty of hard luck parents waiting outside beat-up ranch style rentals, sitting on old tires scattered among oily car parts in front yards, smoking and holding beer cans for ashtrays.