This Place Is Bananas. B-A-N-A-N-A-S

So, first off, I want to say that you might get the impression that my school is completely nutso all the time. This is not true. In fact, if you strolled through at just the right time, you might think we are on the verge of normalcy. You might say to yourself, "that classroom is a little noisy" or "those two boys probably shouldn't be in the hallway" but---most of the time---you wouldn't recoil in horror at whatever it is you're seeing. Things can be downright pleasant sometimes. And a lot of what I write about are incidents that affect maybe a classroom or two...sometimes other people in the building don't even know about it.
NOT LATELY. We finished up the standardized testing Wednesday morning. It was the Math section this week and it was incredibly hard. Our kids FLIPPED THEIR SHIT. I am telling you, I haven't seen things quite like this in a long, long time. On top of that, it's beautiful outside--sunny and 70 degrees. Meanwhile, our heat is still on, so it's stifling in there.
First, there was that incident with the 6th graders I wrote about already. Then, yesterday, I broke up FOUR fights in the space of an hour. FOUR. When you hear screaming, you just have to run to it and get them apart. Those fights were pretty minor. It was just a lot of posturing and mouthing off then they would wait to really start shoving until they saw a teacher getting close. (This is so they can give the impression that they really would have beaten the shit of out of so-and-so if Miss Vinson wasn't holding them back.) But it still meant there was a lot of hostility in the air and too many kids riled up and excited.
Today I broke up two more and they were a lot worse. The first was between two girls and I could not for the life of me get the one girl to let go of the other girls hair. The teacher who actually teaches that class was just standing there the whole time and me and one of the other students were trying to pull them apart. The little girl helping me got blood all over her shirt.
About an hour later it was 7th grade girls and again with the hair pulling. This time it took me and another teacher to get them apart, and then one of the girls kicked the other teacher in the stomach!
Both times I had to drag one of the offenders to the office; so I'm lugging a good 80 pounds of uncooperative child down the hallway. It was exhausting!

And THEN, after school, one of the teachers calls me. He had already left for the day and saw a huge commotion at the intersection by our school. I went and told the office and they called the police officers to go down there. At this point, ANOTHER teacher calls me and tells me she sees something crazy going on too. Turns out, an eighth grade girl had been having some problems with two other girls--so she called her family to come up to the school and beat them up. And that they did. This will be the second day this week a child gets carted off to the hospital in an ambulance.

The general consensus among the staff is that this isn't near as bad as the other day because this girl "deserved it" and "needed to get her ass whooped." Apparently they had been walking down to this girls house and threatening her. The girl in the hospital IS pretty rude and disrespectful...but nobody deserves that. And also...(I feel like I say this a lot, but)...she's always been nice to me.

So, anyway, tomorrow is Friday. It's supposed to be hot and sunny. Lord help us make it through!