"There's a boat in the middle of my lab room," hence my poor co-worker G. cannot conduct his science classes very effectively. This is because our "boat-building" course, hey, let's call a spade a spade, shop class, was not able to move to another facility as planned and once again our over-crowded, triple-teacher to a classroom situation has rendered the day absurd.

Are other floors this crowded? Well, the newest school to the campus, the school that presently has only a 9th grade class, as with us, they will grow a new class each year. They have a HUGE floor. We were given no additional space because we are moving "any minute now". This has been the story for four years, and I'll give an "A" to the first bureaucrat to get us out of the hell hole that is our present state.

There are tensions among the staff and the principal and a.p.--our scheduled is taking advantage of the "we're a small school" philosophy and requiring beyond "above and beyond" and people are feeling pissy about it. Rightfully so. People above and below us are paid for extra meeting time while we're supposed to come because "face time" is important. Once in three years, I learned something from one of these meetings. But I forgot what it was. Most of the time, someone barks until we wimper and cover our ears with our paws.

Not that the teachers are a bunch of heroes either oh no. In the teacher's lounge today, I watched as our tech rep, my personal hero, debugged a computer because someone had been downloading crap videos and who knows what else. Earlier in the week, I watched a teacher print 200 pages of nonsense using up a laser toner while the teacher behind her waited to print out...her real estate prospects. Thank G. for the union?

Yes, because without the union, our boss would require daily face time until, who knows? 6:30 every night and there would be nothing I could do about it. As it stands now, our union is getting fragmented and the whole divide and conquer approach makes me nervous. How kind that they are willing to negotiate so that we don't have to come in on MLK Jr. day. Can you say distractor anyone?

My students, meanwhile, think I am an evil cow for imploring them to learn vocabulary words, read outside of class, and yes, dare I say it, think for themselves. Worse still? Act civilly towards one another. Yikes. Today was mild though because many of the louder cagey children fled the coop.

I read in the Times this weekend about some neighbors who, after much coaxing from a reporter, admitted that a certain student (later indicted for a crime) had "practically dropped out of high school,". The article went on to claim that people saw this child as mean spirited, vengeful and aggressive. Why is it acceptable to read about a kid practically dropping out of high school and in the same breath telling schools that they have no right to isolate disruptive, violent, aggressive children or suspend them or re-locate them to a facility prepared to deal with them? I don't get it. This is why our classrooms are such messes. We have to have every single kid come in, day after day, no matter how disrespectful or how many times an offense has been enacted. The best we can hope for is a two day suspension, which just makes everything worse because he (yes, almost always he) comes back even further behind and more angry.

I have a student, much like the one described above, who hates women. He is a totally different person with a male teacher but with me, he is rude and downright vile. I hate having him in the room because I can't wash his mouth out with soap and it makes me sick to listen to him. But he'll be there again tomorrow and the day after that and the following week too.

Teachers come to my room to make coffee in the morning and we share a small refrigerator. There is a steady steam of coffee traffic and the kids are all begging for some by 3rd period. Again, if only we could have enough space for a little privacy.

But we can't, and I wonder if we ever will.