Why sixth graders can't be spies:

Like every teacher in the world these days, I have trouble with kids taking out their phones and texting when they are supposed to be working on something else.  Frankly, I'm not much of a stickler for the no-phones-in-class rule, but it is a school policy so I follow it.  I have one student who is super sneaky.  I never see her texting, but the girl who sits next to her, (I'll call her A), does and it bothers her that the texter gets away with having her phone in class.  So A came up with a system for the texter to get caught.  She stayed after school one day and worked this out with me, (all her idea.)  She said, "I am going to give you a signal when B is on her phone.  What should the signal be?  It should be something subtle, but obvious to you.  Hmmmm.  What should it be???  How about if she takes her phone out I will scratch my forehead like this," and she scratched her forehead like a meth addict. I agreed and then promptly forgot about it.

The next day during quiet reading time, A had apparently been scratching her head like crazy because she did an obvious "Heh HMM!" and I looked up and her forehead was all red.  She gave me the eye that said, "WATCH ME!" and then she went back to reading.  Apparently the phone wasn't out right that second.  So I watched.  Soon A scratched her forehead so I quietly asked B to come up and see me.  I was going to tell her to give me her phone until the end of class and rock her world by letting her know that I knew she had it when she was so sneaky.  Then A interrupted and said, "Oh no!  I just had an itchy head that time!" 

Cover blown. 

Sometimes I'm pretty smart

I had a stroke of brilliance at work last week.  I have this kid who I love, but who honestly, drives me absolutely nuts.  He is anal and needy and a total butinski.  Because he is so anal, he is super organized and always has his work done.  This leaves him lots of time to point out everyone else's flaws which drives his classmates NUTS.  If he sees a discrepancy between what another student said they did and what they actually did he literally cannot stop the loud, annoying, tattling words from spewing out of his mouth.  He MUST correct the situation.  His neediness manifests in asking me a question every 1.5 seconds no matter what else I'm doing (talking with another teacher, teaching the whole group, working one-on-one with another student, going the the bathroom, etc. etc.) which drives me NUTS.  I bet he has said, "Mrs. Lindahl...Mrs. Lindahl...Mrs. Lindahl...Mrs. Lindahl...Mrs. Lindahl...Mrs. Lindahl...Mrs. Lindahl...Mrs. Lindahl..." a billion times this year. But generally, he is a sweet kid and a good student.  Just annoying.

I have another student who I also love, but who also drives me nuts.  He is a very bright kid, but is so slow-moving and dreamy that he is always ten steps behind the pack.  I passed out lists of missing work last week and this kid's list was looooooong.  I was trying to motivate him to do his missing work, but every time I turned around he was off in La La Land again.

How could I get Kid 1 off my back for two seconds and get Kid 2 to finish all his work?  The solution:  Assign Kid 1 to "help" Kid 2 finish his missing work list.

As soon as I proposed the idea, they both thought it was brilliant.  Kid 1 went from being on my heels every second of class, to tenaciously nagging Kid 2 in ways that I'm sure nobody has ever been nagged and cajoled and browbeaten ever before.  The result were wonderful:

1. Kid 2 finished about 2/3 of his missing work, bringing his grade up considerably.
2. Kid 1 was off my back for a few days which was a welcome relief.
3. Kid 2 was WORN OUT after a few days of having someone relentlessly dog him about every little thing.
4. Kid 1 and Kid 2 both privately expressed maddening frustration in having to deal with the other every day which gave me unbelievable satisfaction because I successfully deflected their annoying behavior off of me and on to each other.

Brilliant.

Jail: Part II

St. Louis County Jail is maximum security.  Meaning that to get to the where the prisoners are, you have to go through three or four guarded steel doors.  To get in to the first door you have to go through a metal detector that is so sensitive that it always beeps so then you have to be wanded by a guard with one of those metal detecting wands.  There is a long list of things that can't be brought in to the area where the prisoners are even if you don't plan on having them get their hands on it; sharp things, phones, poison things etc, because prisoners are cagey (ha ha, no pun intended) and can do a lot with a little.  I loved working at the jail because it was so interesting, for one thing, and I really loved the women I worked with who ran the activities program for prisoners.  The leader of these women was Robyn.  She was strict and I think now is the big boss at the jail.  


One time Kira found a teeny tiny bunny out in the grass in our yard and brought him in the house and said she wanted to keep it.

It was so small I thought it was a mouse or a baby squirrel or something.  I've never seen a bunny that small.  I didn't think it would live, but I got it a tiny bottle, some kitten formula and read up on bunny raising.  They need to be warm and fed about five hundred times a day.  I thought I was up to the task and I kept up the pace for a few days but then came the one day of the week I was supposed to work at the jail.  I would be gone for 8 hours and I couldn't leave the bunny for that long. The following week we were supposed to take a family vacation to California and I still hadn't figured out what to do with the bunny while we were gone because you can't take a little wild bunny on a plane, can you?  What was I going to do with this little bunny that I had totally fallen in love with?  Kira couldn't be trusted to take care of it, and Mitch wouldn't so I really had no choice but to see if I could smuggle it into the jail. I figured if I could smuggle it in to the jail, I could easily get it past airport security.

I put on my hideously ugly overalls, stuck some velcro on the top of the chest pocket so I could close it so the bunny couldn't poke his little head out and give us away, I put the bottle of formula in another pocket and off I went.  I went through the metal detectors and of course the clasps on my overalls set it off so I had to be wanded.  Thankfully there is no bunny-detecting wand!  I got in and felt like I had just broken out of Alcatraz.  I beat the system!  Now I had to avoid detection for eight hours.

About every 20 minutes I went to the bathroom and fed the little bunny.  I got through the first six hours and was feeling pretty smug.  I wanted to tell someone!  I was just so proud!   Before my last class I went in to Robyn's office with a ridiculous smile on my face. She knew I was up to something.  She said, "...what.....WHAT?"  and I cracked.  I reached in my pocket and brought out the tiny bunny.  The look on Robyn's face was PRICELESS.  She was  stunned, and pissed, and overcome with the cuteness of the little bunny.  She gave me the obligatory lecture about contraband (but Robyn, nobody said anything about baby bunnies that need to be fed every 20 minutes) but then she couldn't help but say, "OOOOOOO!  HE'S SOOOO CUUUUTE!"  and she reached into a drawer and pulled out a perfect sized plastic cage for him and stuffed it with tissue so it was all cozy and comfy.  Apparently I'm not the only one who smuggles in cute animals.  She said I couldn't take him into my last class and I would just have to leave him in her office.  Fine with me.  I gave her the bottle and she snuggled him in her arms and fed him and said, "What were you thinking!"  I told her all about how this was a test run to see if I could get him past airport security and she gave me another lecture about how irresponsible it would be if I did that and he got taken away!  What would happen to him!  She would take care of him!  Jesus!

I went and taught my last class and when I came back to her office it was dark.  I thought she was gone, but she was sitting in there, in the dark, with the bunny.  I said, "What are you doing?" and she shushed me and told me the bunny was sleeping.

So if I can smuggle a mammal into the jail on my person with nobody being the wiser (and notice I said ON my person, not IN my person) what else is being smuggled into jail??? And HOW???  Believe me, you do not want to know.  I'll just tell you one little story.  This guy got arrested and was waiting to be processed so he was sitting on this out-of-the way bench in the booking area and he was handcuffed.  Apparently he was a plan-ahead type of guy, because he was prepared for just such a dilemma.  There was a camera trained on him while he got his pants down and grunted out the handcuff key he had shoved up his anus earlier that day? week? part of his morning routine?, and he unlocked his cuffs. TA DA!!!  It was quite the production which the guards were so fascinated by that they let it go on to see if he could get out of the cuffs.  And then they took his disgusting key away from him and recuffed him.

Jail: Part I

My friend Anne wrote to me and said:

"Hi Sarah!  I have a special request for a blog posting from you.  Will you write about your experiences teaching prisoners?  (you really did that, didn't you?  I mean, I'm so gullible that I'd probably believe you if you said that you taught ASL to chimps.) (which would also be a fun post)."


Anne, I really did teach prisoners at the St. Louis County Jail.  I really really did.  I taught them computer basics and poetry.  We even published a poetry newsletter!  I was trying to think if anything really blog-worthy happened while I was working there and I guess I have a few stories. 


I taught a two hour class of basic computers for the men, and then a two hour class of poetry for the women, and a two hour class of poetry for the men.  The guard would escort about 8 or 10 people in to my classroom and then leave and lock the door behind him.  Locking me in the room with a bunch of inmates.  If anything happened I was to use the phone and call for help.  Or just scream.  I don't think I was ever in any danger, but one time during the women's class a couple of the ladies got into a shoving match which threatened to turn into a full-blown fist fight.  I got in between them and broke it up.  Does that sound brave?  It wasn't.  They were both tiny and weak and one was about 6 months pregnant, and the other was about 8 months pregnant. They both had big bellies and they were willing to get in a fist fight.  I couldn't believe what I was seeing.  I thought I was on candid camera or something.  I only had to step between them and say, "Seriously??? You're going to fist fight while you're pregnant?  Really???"  Then they sat down and called each other horrible names until the guard could come and bring them back to their cells.  


I really liked talking to them about their lives.  They were very interesting people.  Some were quite intelligent, but had lives where if there was a chance of bad luck, they got the bad luck.  And some of them were incredibly stupid.  One guy came in and told me that he was so mad that he is in jail because he got busted for being in possession of Oxycontin or something like it.  He said he was already on probation and then he got the Oxy and took it but he didn't get high because earlier that day he smashed his thumb with a hammer and the Oxy only took the pain away from the thumb, and didn't get him high.  He was more upset about not getting high than being back in jail.  Idiot.  


There were some murderers in there with me too.  Guys who killed their girlfriends.  They creeped me out.  There was one guy that was there for over a year.  He was soooooo creepy.  He was in for being 28 years old and having a 14 year old "girlfriend."  I think they call that "rape."  He says they had a beautiful relationship.  I say GROSS.  He was skinny and pale and had a devil beard and he became obsessed with me.  I can't remember the exact details of all the creepiness, but I arranged it so he wouldn't be brought to class anymore and then he wrote me letters.  Ick!  The ladies that worked at the jail were really good about not letting him see me or anything, but in the break room they called him my boyfriend and laughed and laughed.  


One guy was there because he went nuts one night when he was high on meth.  He was having paranoid hallucinations and thought someone was after him so he stripped naked and ran down the fire escape and broke into another apartment and took the baby that was in there and he ran.  Can you imagine how terrifying it would be to see a naked guy come into your apartment and take your baby?  In his drug addled brain he thought he was saving the baby from the people who were after him.  I don't know exactly how it turned out, but I know the baby was returned unharmed and he had to go to prison for about ten years.  Whew!  I actually liked that guy when he was off the drugs.  He looked a lot like Jesus and he had a calming effect on the other inmates. Sometimes they would be rude to me and he could totally defuse any impending conflict and make everything calm and peaceful.  I was really glad to see him every week.  I'm sure he would have scared the crap out of me when he was on drugs.  


There were a lot of drug addicts in jail.  Meth was usually the drug of choice and let me tell you, Breaking Bad makes meth use look glamorous.  It's not.  At all.  It's disgustingness can be summed up in two words; "meth mouth."  People that smoke lots and lots of meth have little, smelly, rotten, black stumps where their teeth are supposed to be.  Apparently it is incredibly addictive because when a new meth head would come to jail, covered in scabs from compulsively scratching at his/her skin while high, the other meth heads would "buy" (with whatever the currency is in jail) the new meth head's scabs, yes SCABS, because apparently if you eat a meth head's scabs, you can get a little meth bump.  Here's a little advice for you; if you are ever in the presence of a bunch of meth addicts in withdrawal and they tell you they are willing to eat another person's scabs for a taste of meth; don't say, "Wow, and what would you do for a Klondike Bar?"  They don't think it's funny.  


I have another jail story but this post is getting too long so I'll save that one for tomorrow!  See ya!