Chaos

A student in the class I was covering as a sub got sick today. He threw up in the trashcan. He was drunk, it seems. My heart goes out to this kid for whom school is so painful he needs to be intoxicated to get through it.

There were other sources of chaos at school today. There was a fight and several teachers were absent. At the end of the day, a secretary shook her head and said, "Well this has just been a crazy day. What's going to happen next? We just stand back and laugh at this point."

In the Bronx, where I used to teach full time, one fight, one drug incident and 10% of the faculty absent constituted a well-neigh normal day. We were always surrendering to the universe, throwing up our hands, shaking our heads at the absurdity of it all, and wondering what in the world was next.

Chaos, you see, is non-linear. 10 absent teachers causes a spillover of chaos and triggers other sources of chaos. It's a cascade. In the Bronx, we had lots of little sources of chaos, but what we perceived was not a little chaos coming from here and a little coming from there, but rather the ever- and omnipresent phantom of chaos haunting every corner of the school.

The street kid's credo--you can only count on yourself--became each of ours. Because you really couldn't count on anything or anyone, ultimately. You assembled a group of like-minded coworkers around you for protection and did your best. But come across a cache of curriculum supplies and hell yes I'm going to take it, and horde it. We've all got to grab to get ours. That was how it was, because of the pervasiveness of chaos.

I suffered a rejection today. I expected it, but it came earlier than expected. Hmmm, well, looking on the bright side........It's a good thing I'm not perfect, cause I'd be damn unapproachable!