Implosion!

You all know me pretty well by now. When relaying a story or reporting events, I am not in the habit of exaggerating or sensationalizing things. I'm not much for adding details for dramatic effect. In general, I tell it like it is. You also know I spend  lot of time telling about my life as a teacher. Readers of this blog are familiar with my challenges of teaching low-income students in an inner city school district. Since the first day of this school year, I have been working my tail off keeping my sixth grade students on task, learning and trying to avoid situations where they want to take each other's heads off. In short, these kids fight ALL THE TIME and most of my day is spent trying to help them get along (a task I usually fail miserably at). This has been an uphill battle all year long and every day is a delicate balancing act. With that being said, I can tell you things are beginning to crumble around me. The best word I can think of to describe what is going on is IMPLOSION. My sixth grade class is imploding before my very eyes (despite my best efforts to prevent such happenings).

Webster's dictionary defines implosion as: an inward collapse from the effects of outside pressure.

Any shaky supports that have kept this class together throughout the year are now beginning to fail. It started slowly at first, but the implosion has increased in speed and intensity within the last week or so. I have sixth graders biting each other (yes, I'm serious... biting), choking each other (yes, I'm serious about this too), fist fighting, pushing, shoving, kicking and constantly arguing. I feel like I'm always rushing around putting out fires. Then as soon as I put out one fire, another springs up behind me. Then when I put that fire out, another one flares up... and so on, and so on, and so on.

I'm no mind reader, but I bet I know what you're thinking. "How in the world can you get ANY teaching done with all that going on?". I only have one reply... good question! How indeed!

I hope you don't think I'm being dramatic. As I stated before, that's really not my style. It's just a sad commentary of my daily reality. Things are imploding around me and I feel hopeless and powerless to stop them.