Central casting here. As students read various roles from the adaptation of the Odyssey, there was a crackling of pimply excitement in the auditorium. The rhymes were apparently "wack," but even though any of them could "smoke those rhymes," they decided that, well, overall it was "a'ight." Enough so that at the end of the day, many were "chillin'" in the halls waiting to see what part they'd received. The big stoner asked me if he had to "audition" for the lead or if he would just get it. I told him, that, well, he would need to come to school more often and less high if he wanted to even get a speaking line. Kind of amazed me that he thought he might get the lead. Meanwhile, one of the big ol' bloods read so well. He was perfect. Nice typecasting on my part, but, well, it works.

There was a lot of chatter about the costumes and the music. Overall, they are pumped. Expectations are high. Now if only, if only, we could get a little discipline in between all those egos. Sheesh. We didn't even make it through the cold read. Took nearly 20 minutes to decide how a script might be different than a poem.

Oh well. Three days until vacation. Not that I'm counting or anything...

Boredom. Today, the cyclops was defleshing some of Odysseus's buddies, you would think that this would be somewhat interesting to a bunch of violence-loving teenagers, right? It was, for the boys. But the girls had their heads down on the desks or shuddered in obvious disgust. I either get the boys or I get the girls. Romeo and Juliet gave me them both, but only briefly. Sure, I try to have them mime out what they read, draw pictures of what they see, take turns reading the voices of the characters, stop to discuss the action or the questions of character, but they are still bored, bored, bored. What can I do? How can I compete? I do not have a science lab where they get to create experiments and blow things up. Nor do I have simple right or wrong answers as they receive in math. Worse still I am asking them to read and think about what they read. And refer to the text to prove that what they read supports their opinions. I am the evil dictator. And I'm miserable. I feel like a complete failure. Nothing I do seems to generate anything other than resentment or pleas for trips to the bathroom. How many times can you go to the bathroom in one forty minute period anyway? Sure, I can enrich with media or comics and other kinds of text but at the end of the day and English class will always involve reading and writing, two tasks which my students dread.

The like it if it isn't challenging. If it doesn't push them to be creative or to question or to make an effort. But if it does, forget it. And that is enough to make me just want to crawl under my desk and cry. I loved my English classes in high school and I had a lot of teachers who did nothing except say take out your books and turn to page 226 and read. That's it! I was hooked. But nothing, absolutely NOTHING that I do encourages these guys to savor a sentence, or chew on a phrase.

HELP ME OB1 HELP ME.

One of the other teachers in our school has been playing the flour baby game. You know the one. Students walk around carrying a sack of flour for the week. The kids dress the flour up and bring it to their classes. They can pretend to be married to other students or to be single parents. Of course this simulation is about as realistic as say practicing swimming in a desert, but the kids certainly enjoy it and love to disrupt classes with the various baby comments. I try to do my best to play along, shouting out that so-and-so's baby is crying but apparently today a student was suspended because she "murdered someone's flour baby." HA! Real consequences for imagined responsibility. How likely is the suspended student to come and get her homework after school?

On the radio on the way into school this morning, I was listening to NPR and some "liberal" churches in the West are starting to offer a course that encourages abstinence but exposes kids to preventive measures such as condoms and birth control. The conservative groups found these church programs to be radical and insist that they send mixed messages.

Meanwhile, we have several spring pregnancies and an abundance of STDs, HIV-positive and who knows what we have that's undetected or unknown.

Most states insist on abstinence as the only discussion a teacher may have with a student. Most students meanwhile are sexually active by about 14. It's so frustrating to live in a country that creates policies that hurt the population they intend to serve. Is it intentional?

Psst! Hey, kid, want some credit candy? Just don't tell anyone who gave it to you.

It's bad enough that kids who previously did nothing for a year can come to school for a week to "recover" their credits. I thought I was keeping my hands clean by having nothing to do with it. I thought I could just turn my back and say, well, at least I'm not the one letting Johnny out when he can't write a simple paragraph.

Well, it's not that simple. It turns out to be much more sinister and underhanded than I could have possibly imagined. The guidance counselor is altering the transcript from the failing grade to read "CR" and so the official records imply that the very teacher who failed little Johnny has now miraculously passed him.

That's right. Our names are listed as the teachers who passed the same students we failed.

This all came up in a meeting where we finally shared our objections to these proceedings. We had to "insert" the item onto the agenda because information about this whole process has been kept very quiet.

One teacher brought up the important point that these students coming in for a week of credit were not sitting for the legal number of hours required to obtain credit in an academic subject area.

To which the response was something like, "well, they did the chair time the first time around."

But that's not really true. Many of these kids failed BECAUSE they didn't show up, or rarely showed up. But who is going to actually go back and check the attendance records of these students?

I feel sick.

Recently, I asked one of the top students how he felt about one of his friends who suddenly is on time to graduate. I asked him, "does it bother you that this guy has done nothing and that you've worked your tail off and yet you are both getting the same diploma and graduating on the same day?"

He said it did a little, because it didn't seem fair, but that he also understood that his friend was never going to go to college and so they weren't really in the same competitive pool.

I am so impressed that my students are more mature than I am.

But I am still sick.

I know that the bosses are being pressured from above. Still, I'm having trouble making eye contact. I feel a little dirty.

It's all I can do not to say to the kids, "Ya know what? Who cares about Shakespeare. Let's watch movies and play video games all year, and then, I'll come in for one week in April and we'll do a packet. What do you say. kids?"

Or how about if we just stay at home all year except for Credit Recovery Week where we show up with our trusty packets in hand and pass out the credits? Talk about easy money. If that's the end game, maybe I should rethink all this hard work.

Fire! There was a fire today because someone lit a bulletin board on fire. The whole school smelled of smoke and the poor board was charred to pieces, little remnants of border paper clinging to the edges of the frame, or drooping to the floor in a defeated sigh. They struck me suddenly as tragic, these brightly lit facades coating a dark place with pastel colors promoting hope where there is nothing but despair.

Ok, fine. It was "just a bulletin board," but it means someone was willing to set paper on fire and wasn't too worried about the rest of us in the building. It was real. And just a little creepy.

Fire alarms on the other hand, are as common as curse words and as such we have all learned to disregard them. I rarely notice the blinking lights or hear the glaring beeps. They go off at least twice a day, sometimes more. The danger with this "selective hearing" is of course the story of the boy who cried wolf. I was so sure that this fire alarm was just another kid pulling the lever and like everyone else, I told my class to keep working. It wasn't until security came around saying that it was real that I got the kids to calmly exit. We are four flights of stairs up and had the fire spread, our futures might not have looked so bright. Or they would have looked really bright for a few seconds and then...well, extinguished. Our evacuation time as a campus was abysmal because no one believed it was real.

Someday, there will be a serious fire and people will get killed but until that happens, procedures will continue as they did today with a little "reminder" from the administration on the importance of exiting the building, crossing the street to get out of the way of the fire trucks and to do the best to stick with your class of kids, count 'em, and walk them back inside when it is all over.

It's enough to make me want to teach in the 'burbs.