How About Them Apples? (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
applespice) wrote2010-12-15 09:02 pm
applespice) wrote2010-12-15 09:02 pm
LJ Idol - Week 7 - Brouhaha
In my line of work, you can almost always see a fight coming. With very few exceptions, high school students (well, people in general I suppose, though my experience with fights is pretty firmly entrenched in the high school setting) follow a prescribed set of rules before getting physical. The idea is to catch them at it and squash the drama before the blood and hair start flying.
1. Trash talk. This starts slow, and is the hardest to catch because half the time trash talk is barely different from the way students usually address each other. "Bitch" and "motherfucker" are common endearments, so teachers have to train themselves to pick up tiny differences in tone and body language. Or, you know, at least look away from the open Ebay page on their computer. As retorts get snappier and the students start to move out of their seats, we move to phase two.
2. Posturing. Posturing is your typical personal space violation. Students in the posturing phase move closer to their opponent, often leaning in very close to their face or touching them in small but annoying ways - flicking hair, pulling at clothes, or swatting lightly at shoulders and chest. Trash talk continues, but is more aggressive and is obviously hostile. Naturally, this leads quickly to...
3. Escalation. At this point, shouting is imminent. Gone are the subtleties of the argument - the combatants are now screaming obscenities at each other. What may have started as a game is now deadly serious (or at least minor injury serious). Girls toss their heads like wild horses, clap their hands for emphasis, and raise their voices to a pitch hardly decipherable to human ears. Boys push at each others' chests, lunge forward aggressively, and move into fighting stance. If you, the teacher, have allowed it to get this far, you're basically fucked.
4. Melee! It's on now! The last chance you have of avoiding bloodshed is if other students get involved and restrain their friends or if you buckle on your balls and jump in between the opponents yourself. This does not always work, and I would suggest not getting in between two girls unless you're willing to take some physical damage. It's a nearly universal truth in teaching that while boys will usually calm down if a female teacher stands between them, girls have a longer fuse and a bigger payload, so by the time they come to blows they are going to keep at it until they draw blood no matter who gets in their way.
Keep in mind that the minute other students realize a fight is going on, 90% of them will completely lose their minds and race to the scene, causing a maelstrom of adrenaline and cell phone cameras, so you need to move fast if you plan on breaking it up. At this point, your best recourse is to call down for a principal and the school resource officer. They live for this, so don't feel too badly for imposing on them.
5. Fallout. The fight is over, but now you have to deal with the drama it has left in its wake. If it all went down in the hallway during class you may be able to salvage your lesson, particularly if you managed to keep your students safely ensconced in the classroom while you busted things up. If it happened during passing period, you will have to endure high spirits and a deep interest in blow-by-blow analysis for at least half of your class period - longer if any of your students knows one of the combatants. If it happened in your classroom, you might as well give up now. There is no way the students are going to want to back to reading Act III of The Crucible after they've just watched two girls go at it cage-match style in the middle of the room.
Of course, if you actually had a fight break out in your classroom, things look pretty bad for you anyway. The key is catching things before they get that out of hand and crushing them under the steel-toed boot of authoritarian bitchiness. Of course, there are justifiable cases (gang rivalries, for example) where there is really nothing you can do, but most of the time a teacher's action or inaction is what draws the line between garden variety high school drama and a shitkicking beatdown.
Secretly, I get my own thrill from watching a fight go down. It's my chance to go into decisive, professional mode, and I get to pretend for a few minutes that I don't spend most of my day toiling away trying to fight eleven years of low expectations and second-rate administration with frustrating results. For just a moment, I get to bark orders, jump into a fray, and act as badass as I can probably hope to get as a high school English teacher.
1. Trash talk. This starts slow, and is the hardest to catch because half the time trash talk is barely different from the way students usually address each other. "Bitch" and "motherfucker" are common endearments, so teachers have to train themselves to pick up tiny differences in tone and body language. Or, you know, at least look away from the open Ebay page on their computer. As retorts get snappier and the students start to move out of their seats, we move to phase two.
2. Posturing. Posturing is your typical personal space violation. Students in the posturing phase move closer to their opponent, often leaning in very close to their face or touching them in small but annoying ways - flicking hair, pulling at clothes, or swatting lightly at shoulders and chest. Trash talk continues, but is more aggressive and is obviously hostile. Naturally, this leads quickly to...
3. Escalation. At this point, shouting is imminent. Gone are the subtleties of the argument - the combatants are now screaming obscenities at each other. What may have started as a game is now deadly serious (or at least minor injury serious). Girls toss their heads like wild horses, clap their hands for emphasis, and raise their voices to a pitch hardly decipherable to human ears. Boys push at each others' chests, lunge forward aggressively, and move into fighting stance. If you, the teacher, have allowed it to get this far, you're basically fucked.
4. Melee! It's on now! The last chance you have of avoiding bloodshed is if other students get involved and restrain their friends or if you buckle on your balls and jump in between the opponents yourself. This does not always work, and I would suggest not getting in between two girls unless you're willing to take some physical damage. It's a nearly universal truth in teaching that while boys will usually calm down if a female teacher stands between them, girls have a longer fuse and a bigger payload, so by the time they come to blows they are going to keep at it until they draw blood no matter who gets in their way.
Keep in mind that the minute other students realize a fight is going on, 90% of them will completely lose their minds and race to the scene, causing a maelstrom of adrenaline and cell phone cameras, so you need to move fast if you plan on breaking it up. At this point, your best recourse is to call down for a principal and the school resource officer. They live for this, so don't feel too badly for imposing on them.
5. Fallout. The fight is over, but now you have to deal with the drama it has left in its wake. If it all went down in the hallway during class you may be able to salvage your lesson, particularly if you managed to keep your students safely ensconced in the classroom while you busted things up. If it happened during passing period, you will have to endure high spirits and a deep interest in blow-by-blow analysis for at least half of your class period - longer if any of your students knows one of the combatants. If it happened in your classroom, you might as well give up now. There is no way the students are going to want to back to reading Act III of The Crucible after they've just watched two girls go at it cage-match style in the middle of the room.
Of course, if you actually had a fight break out in your classroom, things look pretty bad for you anyway. The key is catching things before they get that out of hand and crushing them under the steel-toed boot of authoritarian bitchiness. Of course, there are justifiable cases (gang rivalries, for example) where there is really nothing you can do, but most of the time a teacher's action or inaction is what draws the line between garden variety high school drama and a shitkicking beatdown.
Secretly, I get my own thrill from watching a fight go down. It's my chance to go into decisive, professional mode, and I get to pretend for a few minutes that I don't spend most of my day toiling away trying to fight eleven years of low expectations and second-rate administration with frustrating results. For just a moment, I get to bark orders, jump into a fray, and act as badass as I can probably hope to get as a high school English teacher.