The Beginning

We are not a ghetto school. This is something that gets said a lot around campus. Now, I didn't think that the school was too ghetto until I started hearing this. It seems to me that if a school isn't actually ghetto you wouldn't need to keep saying it over an over again, on the loudspeakers, in the middle of my English class.

Gangs and gang related things are not allowed on campus, makes sense. But yesterday I went all kinds of gansta'. I am white, not just pale, but very white, sometimes I do something that forces the students to point out how white I am. They will say, "Ms.... you are soooooo white!" Doing the running man while teaching, listening to "Juno" music as they call it, and saying that Hot Cheetos are, in fact, disgusting and way to spicy for me, are all things that have led them to the announcement of my whiteness. But they say it in a loving way, which is nice. They accept it because I am the nice white lady who will feed them PB&J sandwiches when they forget their lunch, and repeatedly tell them with upmost patience that double negatives are only ok in Spanish. 

Yesterday all my classes had to take a hearing test. I am sure there is an easier way to do this, but we are not a ghetto school, so we have not figured it out yet. Our plan is to take the entire class to the nurses office and wait our turn to get our hearing tested. The nurse can only have about 8 kids in there at a time, so the rest of us sit in a little hallway by the front office and wait. Now I don't know how many of you have tried to keep thirty 15 year-olds quiet in a confined space with nothing to do, but it is no easy task. I told them to whisper, to read a book, to listen to their music, but that all only lasts about 15 minutes. Their attention span isn't that long. Also, I am not sure how I learned to whisper, it seems like I have just always know how to, but apparently the next generation didn't get the memo. First period was ok, they always are, mostly because they are still asleep. But all bets were off by 7th. My 7th period class were getting rilled up, they were losing focus. So I started telling them about the awesome trends of my generation. Then they mocked me. They mocked us. So I did what any self-respecting teacher does. I mocked them back. I rolled up a pant leg, buttoned only the top button of my cardigan (cause that's super fly) grabbed a kid's hat and struck a pose. One of the vocab words this week was "askew" I told them that ganstas' like things askew, their hats, their faces and their walk (or swagga' as it's known to them). So they taught me to walk like a g, and I taught them how to whisper. They taught me to jerk, and I taught them the running man. We were probably too loud, we probably bothered the front desk ladies, but dang it, those kids are never going to forget what askew means. 

That's what teaching in a "not a ghetto" school is like. I love it.