Special Forces - November 5, 2007

I feel like a menstrual woman. This is the distance school has pushed me.

I have experienced all the symptoms.

A)I have had kidney stones. This is often likened to the pain experienced by women at childbirth.

B)I stress out and get flashes of heat from nowhere. Sweat will begin pouring down my face for reasons unknown.

C)Irritability explodes from its cavernous shell, like a pimple on the back of your neck. It waits silently for the perfectly bad time to show its form; when it does, watch yourself.

D)Tears began to accumulate in my eyes when I watched a video my brother sent me about an autistic boy who loves the game of basketball, and lives his very own dream. True story and many tears.

What is happening to me? To make things even worse than I had originally believed them to be, I decided to send out the video to all my law school friends in an attempt to share my happiness. Manly-men do not send out heart-felt, touching videos to their friends.

I am staging my own intervention. I worry me.

I did, however, rule the eighth-grade world today. I walked into the class, ready to lay down the law as only Chuck Norris could. Much to my surprise, the teacher had prepped the five-year-olds in eighth-grader bodies.

The teacher makes me laugh. She is the image of underpaid frustration. She makes me laugh. Today, she walked up to me and whispered into my ear the following:

“Anybody who says that middle-class, white, suburban children are well adjusted have not met these kids.”

How do you not laugh at that? She then proceeded to ask me how much better I feel about being in law school in relation to being with those kids. She alluded to the fact that teaching in the class is just about as bad as it can get for somebody. I told her, “not so fast,” that I could be persuaded to be there if law school was removed from the picture.

“Really,” she said. She looked at me as if I had just told her that aliens really do exist. Head went back, lips smacked together and went to the side and her eyes were wide open. She could not believe it.

I would use a new tactic today. I turned my back to the aneurysm-makers, and wrote the word “contempt” on the board. I asked the children what the word meant. A hand excitedly went up. The hand was connected to one of my favorite kids in the class (I think I have two who I like). I called on her, and was told that contempt was “like, you know. Like, contempted murder and contempted suicide.” I chuckled, probably noticeably, and told her that I think she meant “attempted.”

After explaining that the judge had the authority to punish people who did not follow rules by sending them to jail or through monetary means they gave me the same perplexed look their teacher gave me earlier. I told them that this is important to remember because today I was the judge.

This actually seemed to work. I was surprised at their ability to keep their mouths shut. I would not be amazed for long. One of the girls was giving me a very hard time, as she always had, and today would be payback for me. I would not however employ normal tactics. No. We are in war times, and Marshall Law was declared. I used psychological warfare to take her down a notch.

She began to tap on her desk incessantly. Her pain-in-the-behind friend, sitting on the other side of the room looked at her. She then looked at me and began to tap. That was it. Time to deploy the Special Forces. I told her to get out of the classroom. ‘But Mr. H,” she said. “Give me another chance.” I told her, again, to leave. This time she complied, but the initiator of the crime was not taking this silently.

She stood up and said, “This is not fair. It was my fault. She did nothing wrong.”

I replied with the mustard gas. “Okay. You can go to the principle, too.”

“No. No. That is alright.” She said as she said back down.

I won. Eighth graders were the object of my wrath and power.

I was surprised that they were able to pull off the trial given how irresponsible and disrespectful they were. They phrased their questions correctly and were able to impress me. What will they think of next?

I had a total of four hours of class, three meetings, and one extracurricular activity today.

One of the meetings was pretty heated, and words were mixed. It is pretty unworthy of note, but to say that I won the debate.

I am experiencing the calm before the storm, so to say. In one week, I will be without a life and with much stress again.

Pray for me?