The Megaphone; or, How Bryan Had a Conniption

By now you know that my middle school, the school I spend most of my time at, is a bit of a nut house. Sometimes I call it a zoo, sometimes I call it the Insane Asylum, and sometimes I can only imagine that all the students here are actually monkeys flinging their pooh at each other for hours on end.

Granted, yes, I have had some good classes here. Some of the kids here are amazingly smart and talented and great.

Others are not.

Several students in particular are doing everything they possibly can to drive me nuts -- i.e. Stealing the head 1st year teacher's chair and then racing it up and down the hall way in the middle of third period while I'm trying to run an activity. Oddly enough, he is pursued by no one. Teachers walk by him in the halls with nothing more than a "You shouldn't be doing that," and it isn't until yours truly steps in and grabs the chair out from under him that the other teachers stop, take notice, and do something.

Cut to fourth period, two students barge into the class and then climb out the window of the second floor to hang off the edge of the class. By this point my mind is unsure what to do, since the teacher doesn't do anything aside from... ask them to stop. As lunch time rolls around I'm wandering through the halls and find that, upon looking out a window, that about six or seven students have climbed up on the roof of the school shed and are playing sumo.

Walking away from lunch I see several students have made a mess in the hallway by throwing water balloons at each other, and one of the kids is cut up and covered in blood from his ascent up to the shed roof.

I stop some bullying in fifth period, throw a student out of class because I can't handle her screaming any more, confiscate some playing cards and a letter, I come real close to confiscating an iPod but the girl was a bit too quick.

But the pièce de résistance, the thing that finally throws me over the edge, is when I go back to my desk and see one of my little Hellions chatting with the teacher that sits next to me. Now behind me, sitting on the desk with other things we used for the field trip last Friday, is a megaphone.

A megaphone.

This Hellion sees the megaphone and picks it up. My "AW HELL NAH" radar starts to ping wildly, but I sit there as he's talking with the head first year teacher who's trying to convince the kid not to take the megaphone. "Surely," I think to myself, "SURELY this man has the foresight to see what's about to happen. Surely."

"No, no, just let me see it!" the kid says. And for a split second, in a moment of weakness, the teacher lets him have the megaphone.


In the blink of an eye the kid has run out of the staff room with one or two teachers trailing behind him and (while I'm making my way to my last class of the day) he begins marching up and down the hall way between 5th and 6th period announcing to everyone "It's 6th period! Let's hurry to class everyone! Let's get going! We've got one more class today!" with the teachers pleading desperately with him to stop as he evades their capture up and down the hallway.

At this point, I lose it. I can no longer contain my "This is serious and I disapprove" face and I simply burst out laughing, and I continue laughing for the next five minutes as I walk with an English teacher to class. I can't do it anymore. I just can't take anything here seriously anymore.

This is an insane zoo that I work in, and the only thing that's surprising is that every day that I come here I still managed to be surprised. And then when I tell people these stories, I'm surprised at their reaction because this has become my norm. I am accomplishing complete cognitive dissonance in feeling that this must be what working in every school is like. Right?

So my English teacher takes one look at me as if to say "Bryan, you're not supposed to think this is funny!" and as I continue laughing, he asks if I've had a rough day.

I have.

And then I taught him the word "conniption."

As in "I have completely lost it and am having a ____."