Murphy's Law - Tuesday

After monday’s charades, there was a noticeable tension in the air. Again first, second, third, fourth periods and first lunch went fine, and second lunch, during my planning period I had to go to a professional development seminar. When it concluded, I was walking back to my classroom when one of the hall monitors, one of the sweetest ladies I have ever met, said with a smile from ear to ear, "Mr. Ware, you wear your running shoes again today?" to which I said somewhat jokingly, "haha why Ms. Campbell, they fightin' again?" and she replied, "sure are, look at 'em". Suddenly I realized they were in fact fightin' again, so I bolted out to the scene to find a recently ended girl fight. As I tried dissipate the crowd and herd the students toward their classes, another girl fight broke out of equal magnitude, thus sending things into frenzy again.

This would have all been enough for tuesday, except Tuesday morning I noticed that the air my cooling unit was blowing was not exactly cold. If you’ve been following my blog, you know that a relatively common thread throughout my time here is non-trustworthy air conditioning. Some places that would be fine, maybe even pleasant. Mississippi in August is not one of those places.

The first four periods were still “cool” enough that the students didn’t complain (and sweat). After lunch it was definitely hot enough outside for my classroom to be downright uncomfortable.

So with fighting on the mind and an abundance of heat and humidity in the air, I tried to teach trigonometry. Most of my students put up with it and things were going ok until the academic coach came by my room and told me that the school was temporarily on lockdown. “Oh lockdown? How splendid” I thought to myself. Turns out these girl fights were related and the police were in the process of investigating it. While they did so, we were to hold our students where they were to prevent further fighting from taking place.

Luckily, ingenuity kicked in in the form of manilla folders (or vanilla folders as one of my students said). Manilla folders are not only helpful for general storage, but can also serve as a makeshift fan quite easily. Before long I had my students determining the cosecant of 7π/6 with as much of a breeze as their wrist could afford. All in all, there were two fights, 0 air conditionings, who knows how many tardies and many frazzled teachers.