Tuesday, February 02, 2016

Middle School Present and Past

Eva's ex-middle school is up at camp this week, with predictable results. For multiple reasons, middle school students always present more behavior problems than elementary school kids, and for some reason, the kids from Eva's old school are more prone to misbehavior than most. To add another layer of difficulty, we didn't have enough cabin leaders to cover the cabins, so three cabins were leaderless overnight.

One boy was reported to be sitting up in bed after bedtime, and not responding to requests to lie down. A boy nearby accused him of trying to scare people. His teacher and I pulled him out of the room and questioned him about it. He said that he felt "weird" and that he thought he might be possessed.

Okay then...

In the end, we decided that he was just feeling anxious about being away from home (he told us he feels that way every time he goes camping), and took him back to bed. That's when he discovered that he didn't have a sleeping bag or pillow. A boy nearby had an extra pillow, and another boy had an extra postage stamp-sized blanket. The teachers this week brought their own supply of extra blankets, so we added a bigger, warmer blanket to the bunk.

In the morning, the boy's sleeping bag turned up in the hands of one of my co-workers. I'm not sure where she found it. Maybe it was in the lost and found. Some kids just seem checked out of reality.

The other overnight issues were more pedestrian, and mostly involved people not shutting up and allowing their classmates to sleep.

This morning, since Scooby, who usually tells stories, is sick, I told the kids a story before breakfast. It was raining, and our usual rainy day spot is slated for demolition and inaccessible, so I told it inside the dining hall amidst the clattering of plates and silverware and tables were set up. It wasn't quite as distracting as I thought it was going to be.

Since we're on the subject of middle school, I guess I'll share a memory of when I was in middle school. The one that pops first into my mind is the time that our universally disliked vice principal, Mr. Boothe, had to put out a locker fire with fire extinguisher. I have no idea who started the fire, but it was grand entertainment watching our unhappy vice principal grimly applying the foam to the flaming textbooks and papers.

My train of thought has arrived at another memory involving Mr. Boothe. A friend and I were called into the office to talk to a couple of policemen who were investigating a nearby residential burglary. We were suspects because we had a paper route in the area (I can't remember now if it was my route or my friend's), and their line of questioning was pretty brainless. It consisted, in part, of showing us items of jewelry and asking if we'd seen them before, as if we'd actually say "yes" if we had. Of course, neither of us were guilty, so we honestly said that we hadn't. Mr. Boothe, jaded drone that he was, acted as if we'd already been tried and convicted, often admonishing us with statements like, "you had better tell the truth now!"

There seems to be a theme to my memories so far. I tended to get into minor trouble a lot, although for some reason school authorities often seemed to think I was a major criminal.

That said, I'm glad that I don't have to supervise a middle school like mine. By my adult standards, we were pretty out of control. At the time, we didn't think twice about how we behaved, and we got away with a lot. There were a lot of drugs and alcohol on campus, not to mention fighting. Perhaps some of those stories will appear here another time.

I have half a mind to drive by my old school, just to see what it looks like today. I'm not sure what the site is used for now.

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