nonscents

About noon on Wednesday, I got whiff of an intolerable funk coming from the southwest corner of my classroom. After a while, when it did not go away, I confirmed the smell with the SPed teacher. We chalked it up to a student having bad gas (with 16 ten year old boys, these smells are not unusual) and figured it would go away at 3:30. But, after the students left, the smell lingered. I called a few other people into the room to make sure I was smelling what I thought I was smelling. They all confirmed that my classroom smelled like poo. But, nobody could find the source.
At this point, I have become obsessive. Where is this smell coming from? I searched every chair, under all desks, my own shoes (did I step in poo?) but I could not find it. Finally, the cleaning person came in and she said, "Yeah, it really smells in here." She started moving tables and..there it was. A turd-about the size of a baseball-under a computer table. I gasped and ran out of the room. Immediately, my mind fills with questions: How did the turd get there? Who put it there? Was it an unfortunate bathroom accident or a malicious act? If it was brought in to punk me, how did the student bring it to school? And, the biggest question of all, how did I not notice the turd being deposited in its current location?
So, I found the principal and she tells us to just clean it up and we will talk to the students about it in the morning. We are all in disbelief and yet, find the whole thing pretty hilarious. So, the next step is to plan the strategy to talk to the students. After much discussion (Do we come down hard? Scream and yell? Pull the old, "nobody is going anywhere until we find out who did this" scene?) we decided to not say anything. If it was an accident, that child does not need to be singled out. If it was done as a prank, that child wants to get a rise out of me so it is better to just let it lay low. I came into school in the morning and a fellow teacher gave me a card with a big ol' pile of poo on the front of the card. I strategically placed it on the bookshelf behind my desk so if any students were paying attention, they would notice it. And this is what I said to my students in the morning:
"I was here late last night dealing with the stinky thing somebody left in our classroom. If you did it and it was an accident, I am sorry that happened to you. If you did it on purpose, know this: you are a disgusting person. You know who you are and you are disgusting." So, of course the uproar starts: "what happened? who did what? What did you find?" I say nothing. About 30 minutes later, a student finds the poo card and says, "Who gave this to you?" I say, "Oh, Mrs. P. gave it to me this morning." When they ask why, I just shrug my shoulders and watch the chaos unfold. Somebody, somewhere, knows who did it and I will find out. Their little hearts can't keep this big of a secret forever.

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Every day I hear a story from one of my students that blows me away. Recently I heard that one of my students does not eat dinner because her mom puts her in her room (with her two siblings) and shuts the door at 7 p.m. and then parties all night with her friends. My student's words were, "there is really loud music and my mom has a lot of friends come over." In the morning, she gets up with her two siblings and grandma drives them to school. She said, "it is too hard to wake mom up." She lives part time with mom and part time with grandma and it is no wonder she comes to school without her homework. Sometimes she doesn't even have her back pack-mom or grandma just drop her off with nothing.

Here is the other heart wrencher for the week: One student (who never confides in me) asks if he can talk to me in private. This student lives with his grandmother, and his grandfather just died (not related to his grandmother guardian). He has been having a really tough time. Not the kind of hard time where you cry and are sad. He is having the kind of hard time where you punch kids and rip up other people's papers.
We go outside the room and he says, out of the blue, "My auntie died in 2004. She was shot in the brains." I reply (as if I hear this every day), "Are you thinking about her because of your grandfather and the funeral that is coming up?" He replies yes and I say, "How does it make you feel?" He says, "sad." I asked him who shot his auntie and he says, "her boyfriend." I asked if they caught him and he said, "Yes. He is in jail for fifty years." And I am supposed to teach him long division.