Idle Ranting, Revisited

To be honest, I am not much of a gangster. I never tried to be in High School, and something tells me I never will try. Not only do I not act like a gangster, but I do not look like one either. In fact, most of my kids think I am the exact opposite: a dirty hippie.

"Mister, are you a hippie?"
"Mister, do you surf?"
"Mister, do you ride a skateboard?"

So when I was called a gangster I was a bit taken. It was the class directly after lunch, and with mice falling through the ceiling, and the general school rule of no food in the classroom, I was really on my students not to be eating this period. Of course, some fat-ass mommy’s-princess bitch think she’s special. She is exempt from my rules, the schools rules, and probably anyone’s rules. As I said, she is special.

On her desk she had a bag of cookies. I told her to put them away. She said no. I took them. She looked at me in disbelief. Suddenly she was awed that some one enforced a rule and took her cookies. She was left struggling for words momentarily, and then she comes out with this wonderful bit:

Fat-Ass: "Mistah, you think you a gee or sometin’?  Cause I know you didn’t just steal my cookies."
Me: "No, I didn’t steal your cookies. I asked you to put them away, you couldn’t do that, and so now I’m taking them."
Fat-Ass: "Can I get ‘em back at the end?"
Me: "No. You should have eaten them in the cafeteria. You can’t eat them anywhere else. That’s why we have mice and rats."
Fat-Ass Friend 1: "Oh mistah, you a fuckin’ Starvin Marvin. Stealin’ students food."

At this point I’d had enough and so, walked away. Cookies in hand and I have to admit, they were pretty tasty.

I grew up in rural Upstate New York. Rodents were a common occurrence, be they in the house somewhere, running through the leaves or pushing up mounds of dirt in the middle of your lawn. They were never much of a nuisance, and I got used to them so when I came down to this cluster-fuck of people, concrete and pollution, the rats did not surprise me. The fact that people gathered on train platforms and watched and giggled at the rats playing on the tracks did surprise me.

So when my students were in an uproar about a mouse today, I could not seem to grasp their anxiety. All their lives they’ve seen big nasty rats playing on train tracks and rummaging through their garbage. Why then was a small mouse in the classroom something that put them all in an uproar. I understand that a mouse falling from a crack in the ceiling and landing on your assignment would be a bit frightening - it’d scare the shit out of me real quick for sure - but the students just could not seem to get over it. The best part about it is that the mouse was probably poisoned and tracked poison and nastiness all over my students papers that are now sitting on my table. Fucking awesome little mice.