A week of working with thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds comes to a conclusion. Three thirteen: the announcements are about to come on, and an almost palpable sense of relief comes over me. Twenty class periods of laughter and frustration, of hard work and hard moments of disorder or even disrespect — all come to an end, and the two days of freedom from all these stresses shimmer like a mirage that I’m only now starting to think might not be a mirage after all.
A boy skips down the corridor into the neighboring academic team’s area of the hall (something I’m charged with preventing), and instead of calling the kid back, I let him go. It’s Friday — I’m exhausted and not looking for a confrontation. A girl yells up the hall to a friend, raising the volume of the hall noticeably: I should say something, but I don’t. A kid out of dress code walks by me, but it’s three fourteen, so what’s the point even if the kid has managed somehow to make it through the whole day in dress code violation. A girl chases a boy down the hall, screaming after him to give her phone back: they’re not supposed to have their phones out until after announcements are concluded, and she shouldn’t be screaming and adding even more to the eighth-grade cacophony, but it’s Friday and easier to ignore this.
