Chapter 48

“Violence, Student Disrespect and Fighting in Schools”

Over the course of my 34-year teaching career, I had the distinct dishonor of breaking-up over 250 student fights, some of which were rather bloody and brutal. The sum total might seem to be excessive, but over 34 years, the number of actual physical altercations amounted to about eight per year.

The sacred Teachers Handbook states in regard to student discipline: “Since the success of a democratic nation relies on the ability of its citizens to exercise self-discipline, it is the purpose of the school to teach boys and girls our main objective, which is the philosophy of self-control.” Everything looks good on paper where democratic education in the comprehensive school is concerned but a tremendous Grand Canyon exists between educational theory and everyday public-school reality.

A core nucleus of seventy-five to a hundred nasty students are continuously disrupting the smooth operation of the average sized middle or high school and also suckering good kids into altercations and committing uncivilized behavior through peer pressure, intimidation, extortion and other tactics. Those hundred young barbarians are as self-disciplined as a colony of wild baboons. Educational psychology, the law and ultra-liberal democracy in a comprehensive school protect those seventy-five to a hundred terrorists from much needed reprimand and police intervention.

The public schools are dumping grounds for recalcitrant students that have been expelled from parochial schools and from private schools. The hands of school officials and teachers are tied when dealing with the riffraff so the standard approach is to tolerate their antics and attempt to rehabilitate them by being especially nice to the young thugs.

And then inequality in punishment (when it is meted out) in small community schools is a daily practice. Given the same offense the son of the village drunk is more likely to be suspended than the son of a prominent citizen is. The internal problems inside schools are often concealed, whitewashed and squashed while only the good tidings filter out into the newspapers. The only time bad news is published is when police reports are organized and available to journalists so that is precisely why school public-relations-minded administrators are reluctant to call in the local cops.

I remember one year when I was teaching at the high school that one of the boys’ lavatories was virtually demolished. The crime scene looked almost as bad as San Francisco after the great earthquake of 1906. Ceiling panels were reduced to what looked like shredded wheat, sinks had been yanked out of the wall and cherry bombs had rocked the commodes from their anchoring. The story of the vandalism had circulated around the community but since the police were not called in the destruction was only a rumor to the common taxpayer. Administrators want only the superlatives leaking out to the public and the chance of the total school picture being accurately portrayed in the mass media is very slim indeed.

I want to reiterate that I had taught is what is regarded as a model school district so I can’t imagine what’s going on in urban schools or in schools with bad reputations for violence and vandalism. One thing is for sure and that is fighting in any public high school with a student population of a thousand or more teenagers is as certain as death and taxes. But administrators regard student fighting as “business as usual” when the local police ought to be notified and come into the building and arrest the brawlers with assault charges being issued against the main perpetrator.

I once had the pleasure of intervening in a juicy brawl in the C-Wing corridor while I was on my way to cafeteria duty. One fairly large student had another in a headlock with his left arm while the lad’s right fist was riveting off the other child’s head and face like a jackhammer destroying an ancient sidewalk. The recipient of the brutal blows’ cheeks looked like crushed hamburger meat with a thick layer of ketchup squirted on.

I used the ice hockey official’s approach and waited thirty more seconds until the student that was hammering away finally became a degree fatigued. I sent the bloodstained victim to the nurse’s office for medical attention and then escorted the aggressor down to the main office where I had to write out Discipline Referral Cards on two students I didn’t even know.

That afternoon, I encountered the principal in the main corridor. “Just look at these bloodstains splattered all over my sport coat from breaking up that vicious brawl this morning!” I complained. “Do you think that the board of education would defray the cleaner’s expenses if I submit a voucher?”

“That’s okay,” the principal jokingly responded. “The red stains almost blend right-in with the cranberry colored jacket you’re wearing.”
At that particular moment, I vowed to my conscience that I would disappear into the woodwork the next time I would observe a student fracas erupting. “That’s just great!” I answered the high school administrator. “Tomorrow I definitely will be wearing my green leisure suit with no tie!”

A teacher might suspect that a student involved in a bloody altercation might be on drugs or maybe on alcohol. One time back in the mid-‘70s three eighth graders arrived at my homeroom hung-over from a wedding reception they had attended the night before. I dispatched the trio down to the nurse’s office for medical exams’ and verification of my theory. The nurse (under administrative suggestion) diplomatically had the boys sent home for “headaches” and for “feeling ill,” thus averting adverse publicity in the newspapers.

If students are on drugs (illegal or prescription), it is more difficult to prove than when they have imbibed alcohol. Hazy eyes might suggest narcotics usage and the teacher is reluctant to report evidence of drowsiness, hyperactivity, depression or nervous twitching to the nurse because many students show those same symptoms normally every day.

If a teacher is daring enough to send a student to the nurse on suspicion of drug usage, and if the instructor’s observations prove to be false then the possibility remains that a lethal libel lawsuit might result claiming that the child’s integrity had been maligned. The lawsuit might be filed against the teacher by the parents if the instructor had written a note to the nurse. That innocent teacher memo’ could be used by the plaintiff’s attorney as evidence against the instructor’.

Once in the early ‘80s (after an intense high school home football game with a cross-town rival) one of the more eminent students was screaming a collection of assorted profanities at the opposing team’s players. An assistant coach on the home team yelled over to the child making the grotesque linguistics to stop in the interest of good sportsmanship.

The dastardly student resented being rebuked by the assistant coach in front of his equally obnoxious cohorts. The student then defied the coach by verbally bombarding him with a flurry of obscene idioms that are seldom heard in monasteries and convents. In seconds the assistant coach and the vile instigator wound-up on the ground hostilely flailing away at each other and thrashing around.
Coaches and players finally separated the two combatants. The student’s eyes were rolling around like cherries and lemons in a slot machine’s windows. The teachers on the faculty had long suspected for quite some time that the abusive student had been experimenting with drugs, but since his father was always quick to defend his son’s bad deportment no one was going to ever accuse the teenager of narcotics usage and then have to defend their position in court.

Daily cafeteria duty was without a doubt my greatest headache. Most high school teachers would prefer being trapped in an endless maze having a multitude of cul-de-sacs rather than being exposed to the cruel and unusual punishment known as the cafeteria. Just imagine two hundred and fifty howling adolescents bending spoons into goose eggs, tossing macaroni at each other and deliberately making messes to upset the teachers on duty. The poor head teacher’s incantations over the microphone are ignored because the PA system is weak’, the acoustics are bad and the microphone works every other time. Yet the teachers are responsible for an orderly dismissal.

I found that the best way to patrol the cafeteria was to revolve around the perimeter with my back to the walls facing the students at all times. When I was courageous enough to patrol the aisles between cloistered tables, then I constituted a convenient target for flying debris and miscellaneous (missileaneous) food chunks hurtling from behind toward my head and my back.

Sometimes my wife claimed that she could tell the school cafeteria menu that day by inspecting my sport jacket’s fabric. She saw and identified pea smears, string bean stains and carrot splotches on different occasions that had added a new exquisite design to my school attire.
The cafeteria is a mass situation where fights are most likely to flare-up in a hurry. In 1971 before Jack R. and I could stave off a student altercation, one teenage anarchist had hit the student sitting across the table with a sticky meat particle. The victim then escalated the stakes by picking-up a pickle slice and a handful of lemon meringue pie and hurled the food into the first student’s face. The crusaders that were supposed to be good friends then leaped-up onto the cafeteria table and started flailing away. That was a hard fight for Jack R., Tim A. and myself to break-up because the brawlers were standing above us on the table. Tim A. wound-up with his glasses being crushed and a swollen nose to boot.

Whenever a cafeteria fight is triggered, a sudden dichotomy of student loyalties develops, and if the teachers aren’t quick to intervene other students may enter the battle. A distinct occupational hazard indeed exists. The teachers have to focus their energies on immediately separating the first two junior (or maybe even senior) gladiators, yanking them down to the vice-principal’s office and then dutifully returning right away to the rectum of the school, its cafeteria.
In my younger days, I used to be more aggressive in stopping lunchroom altercations but after being involved in over two hundred and fifty different student fisticuffs over a span of thirty-four years I gradually became less assertive. And if the student that I despised more was getting the worse of it on the bottom while being pummeled, then I would make sure I got to the scene a little slower than I ordinarily would have.

In my school district, an effective cafeteria disciplinarian was usually awarded an asterisk next to his or her name on the cafeteria duty roster. The un-coveted star signified that the teacher with the asterisk was in charge of the cafeteria and responsible for keeping order during the forty-five-minute lunch period.

The asterisk did not bring any additional monetary reward for being the official charge d’ affaires. The only honor of being the possessor of the unenvied asterisk was having a defective microphone, of having a student audio-visual club (with the mechanical skills of the Marx Brothers) to repair the sound magnifier and the undesirable distinction of being abused daily by the merciless adolescent mob. The asterisk certainly didn’t qualify me to be a certified boxing referee.
Usually the same teachers pulled cafeteria duty each year while the balance of the faculty members were assigned to easier study hall situations. Several cafeteria-assigned teachers learned that when they had performed a mediocre job in the lunch-room they had been re-assigned to study hall duties the following school year.

Administrators and school board members contended that teachers can command respect from students in the cafeteria, whereas, cafeteria aides cannot. Teachers are saddled with the ugly duty because the public believes that certified instructors know how to manage students in mass situations.

The truth of the matter is that there is little transfer of student respect from the classroom to the school cafeteria. The same students that love a teacher in English might emulsify the instructor in the cafeteria. Teachers seldom have serious trouble with children in their classrooms but in the cafeteria sometimes even the good kids go sour or bonkers. Instructors are continually getting into hassles with students over who threw the napkin on the floor, who left the tray on the table or who threw his or her silverware into the food garbage can.
Daily cafeteria duty is one of the best ways to ensure acid indigestion. And then when the students finally return to their classrooms after lunch, oftentimes they must face a strung-out exasperated teacher that had spent a very hectic forty-five-minute interval in the cafeteria dungeon. The emotions known as anger and frustration are not faucets that are easily turned off. A teacher must be careful to not carry his or her petulance from the lunchroom into the classroom. Several times I had overly admonished students in the classroom immediately after cafeteria duty and had to then contend with parent-initiated hostile conferences.

In the early ‘70s, two brawny high school students were really hammering away at each other in the cafeteria. By the time Jack R. and I hustled to the battle scene, boisterous students were shrieking and also scurrying to the brawl to add an additional dash of pandemonium to the mounting crisis. Jack and I tried tugging the brawlers apart, but they were interlocked in a clinch like two magnetized mastodons. By that time the cafeteria fight marathon sounded like a blend of the Kentucky Derby’s homestretch and the climax to the Roman Circus Maximus. The teachers’ inability to separate the grapplers added a dimension of slapstick comedy to the already exciting event.

The bigger student had the smaller one in a bear hug while the more diminutive child had his arms locked around the huskier kid’s head and neck. I leaped upon the bigger kid and managed to separate him from his opponent. The bigger student whirled around with the two-hundred-pound teacher attached to his back. I felt like I was a rodeo cowpuncher atop a berserk Brahma bull.
The larger student (with me on his back) re-entered the fight with the smaller child, who had broken away from Jack R.’s grasp. Siamese twins would have been easier to separate than those two battlers were. The other two hundred and fifty maniac spectators were raucously cheering the zany scene that was crazily transpiring before their eyes. Thank goodness a rescue squad of five male teachers zoomed into the cafeteria from the nearby teacher’s lounge or Jack and I would have lost what represented the main event of the day for the thoroughly delighted students.

In another cafeteria period, several enterprising students thought that they would evoke certain behavioral responses from the female teachers on duty. Two boys stripped the husk from a healthy-looking banana and in a gesture of inspiration they ingeniously stretched a prophylactic over the fruit, which was then placed perpendicularly on the lunch table for other students to rubberneck and admire. Perversions of that nature are designed to rattle or unnerve teachers, so the worst thing an instructor should do is act appalled. But if the bad cafeteria behavior is not handled properly, a heated argument between the teacher and the mischievous students might ensue.

I took the wind out of the violators’ sails by stating, “I didn’t know that bananas were capable of contracting venereal diseases!” I had successfully stolen the boys’ thunder and had reduced their queer impropriety to the level of “So what!” If one plans to last for thirty-four years in the educational field, minor occurrences like the banana/prophylactic incident should not ruffle a teacher’s feathers.

Students cutting into the cafeteria line could constitute a major daily challenge for lunchroom duty teachers. Many of today’s students belong to a peculiar breed. Besides thinking that Hamlet is some sort of new breakfast sensation (like an omelette), many children adhere to a unique relative morality where lying, cheating and stealing are acceptable modes of behavior. It might be easier to lasso a bucking bronco with a rubber band attached to a shoelace than to get the truth from an uncooperative student. Perhaps schools should teach more wisdom and less knowledge and more ethics and less irrelevant facts.

I remember noticing a husky lass slipping into an already formed cafeteria line. I thought that her action had been unfair to the other students so I told the young lady to have a seat and then get up to be served last. Although the girl heard my directive she acted as if I had been addressing her from a soundproof booth. I repeated my command more vigorously.
“Man, stop spittin’ in my face!” she indignantly sneered at me.
“Sit down and then get in the back of the line!” I repeated.
“Fuck off bro’!” she snarled back, much to the amusement of her appreciative peers.
In the midst of a temper tantrum, I told the cafeteria brunhildas not to serve the girl when she came through the line. The student defied my authority by grabbing a platter and putting it on her serving tray and she then promptly proceeded to the cashier. I notified the office. The vice-principal was tied up with another discipline problem so the principal cruised into the cafeteria.
I explained the situation and the chief school executive told the bellicose girl, “Bring the tray back to the cashier because you didn’t pay her!” the principal diplomatically commanded.
The hysterical girl arose from her cafeteria seat and sauntered back to the serving line carrying her red tray. The perturbed principal followed the student into the serving area to ascertain that the girl would return her tray and then take a seat before moving to the back of the food line as I had directed.

A verbal exchange then ensued between the defiant student and the principal. The angry girl threw food particles from her tray that instantly ornamented the school official’s haberdashery. The administrator reached to apprehend the disrespectful girl and she took a wild swipe at his face. The female violator zipped out of the cafeteria and fled to a place of hiding.
The principal notified the police and the girl was found seated in a telephone booth in the main corridor, holding the door shut while calling home for advice and counsel. The principal and two policemen attempted wedging the door open as the young lady kept it shut with one hand while talking on the phone with the other.
I casually dismissed the craziness by thinking, ‘Our’ great American democratic educational system is for all the children and it is not just for the elite college-bound students!’

In the mid-‘80s, a juicy fight broke out in the middle school cafetorium. Two boys were really doing damage to each other’s faces. I separated the brawlers three times but then they continued their donnybrook. I became angry from the continuous fighting so I got the more aggressive student, flung him into the ice cream freezer, quickly put the lid on the refrigeration unit and then sat on top. The student inside was smashing the top from the frigid dark interior but could not move the covering with my body weight holding it down.

“Chill out!” I yelled to the trapped instigator inside the ice cream box.
A minute later, I opened the freezer. Several dozen ice cream sandwiches and chocolate pops had been destroyed during the bizarre fiasco. Another teacher on cafeteria duty then escorted the cooled-off violator to the main office while I enjoyed eating one of the lesser crushed’ chocolate ice cream pops.
Another time I was in after-school Office Detention with a seventh-grade student that had told one of his teachers to “Fuck off!” The student had to write a sincere letter to the teacher apologizing for his misdemeanor, so I was kind enough to depart from Office Detention policy (as prescribed by the administration) and allow the child to write the theme under my jurisdiction.

At the end of the Office Detention session, I commented to the student, “I’m glad you used your time constructively!”
“Blow me asshole!” he nastily responded.
Sometimes it just doesn’t pay to say anything at all (polite or otherwise) to a student. “What did you say?” I requested to know.
“I said, ‘Eat me raw asshole’!” the manner-less individual replied.
The student was given three additional days of Office Detention for using profanity directed toward a teacher. A week later the student got into a nice bloody fight in the cafeteria while I was on duty. I broke the boxers up twice but they still were going at it. The student that had used the obscene references in Office Detention again began swinging at his adversary.

In a fit of anger, I un-gently grabbed the aggressor and pushed him through the cafeteria doors. The student had been broken open with blood cascading down his face and cheeks from his forehead.
“Go to the nurse’s office right now!” I bellowed to the student bleeding profusely on the corridor floor.
“Fuck you!” The upset child yelled back as he got up onto his feet. Before I could utter another word, the child darted out of the building, scurried across the avenue and entered the police department to cite me for corporal assault just as Leonard Caro had done back in 1965. Luckily the police chief returned the brawler to school jurisdiction, but I recently read in the newspapers of a similar episode in a Pennsylvania school where the police came to the school and then arrested the teacher for assaulting a student.

In another cafeteria brawl involving two huge eighth graders, I forcefully pushed the main aggressor against the closed entrance doors in an effort to separate the fierce combatants. The kid hit his head against the wooden frame and some blood was trickling-down from a cut on his forehead. I quickly instructed the pugnacious student (who incidentally loathed me because he was failing my English class) to immediately go to the nurse’s office, after which I soon wrote-out a pass and then directed a better-behaved student to deliver the message to the nurse. The belligerent instigator, instead of going to the nurse, intentionally entered the downstairs bathroom and proceeded to slam his head against a toilet stall, thus making his head bleed excessively. The insolent kid then stepped across the hall and told the nurse that I had caused the head wound during the brawl. However, the time of the pass I had written compared to the lad’s appearance in the nurse’s office was a five-minute lapse. A half-hour later the janitor discovered fresh blood stained upon the bathroom stall wall, and thus I was exonerated by the school administration from the frivolous accusation of beating-up the defiant student in the school cafeteria.

Fighting is not only limited to the cafeteria. Brawls erupt in the halls and in study halls too. A large study hall in the lunchroom can rival the treachery of cafeteria duty. On several occasions fistfights had broken out in the cafeteria study hall before I could arrive there’ from my classroom on the other side of the building over three hundred feet away through crowded corridors.

I have had as many as a hundred and fifty students crammed into a cafeteria mass study hall and out of that number only about fifty of them are genuinely studying. Study halls in public schools are generally vast educational wastelands that operate on maybe a forty-percent efficiency level. Teachers are constantly taking attendance, moving talkative students to specially isolated seats and correcting those infidels that are determined to violate the sanctity of the forced silence the teachers are trying to maintain. And one time during a student study hall fight an anonymous craven child spectator had punched me twice in the back while I was frantically attempting to separate two determined combatants.

A fight may erupt in the halls while a teacher is casually en route to his or her next class. In 1999 two eighth grade girls liking the same boy got into a real fingernail hair-pulling catfight. I was exiting the main office with a hundred and forty worksheets in my hand that I had just Xeroxed. A short substitute teacher was already on the scene trying to intervene in the fracas but he was taking as much of a beating as the two combatants were.
I dropped my papers on the corridor floor and assisted the substitute teacher in his grave enterprise. I yanked one of the girls off but she raised her feet and was savagely kicking away at the other cat-fighter. The student in my clutches then kicked the fire extinguisher attached to the wall and it tilted sideways, mixing its chemicals and then giving off a noxious spray. The corridor was filled with choking students and the chemical vapors swirling in the air looked like a miniature atomic mushroom cloud. The vice-principal exited the office, lifted one of the combatants onto his right shoulder and next carried her into the office like Little Abner eloping with Daisy May on Sadie Hawkins Day.

I remember one instance where a school janitor attempted to break up a fistfight between two pretty big students and the custodian wound-up in the hospital getting stitches and being treated for multiple lacerations.

Finally, I recollect a really terrible girls’ fight that had erupted outside on the asphalt playground between an eighth grade child bully and a new seventh grade transfer student. When I arrived the two girls were really pummeling and mauling one another in what amounted to a vicious battle with wicked hair pulling and the scratching of faces and arms.

Charlie S. (an affable math’ teacher) and I separated the felines three times but the marathon battle ensued. It was one of the most difficult struggles I had ever dealt with, and it took Charlie and me five full minutes to restore order among the shrieking student eyewitnesses.
Three weeks after that horrible ordeal, Charlie S. died from a massive heart attack. I have often wondered if there had been any connection between the stress and strain of separating the two girls in that terrible fight and the passing away of my good friend and colleague.

I really still consider it a minor miracle that I had managed to survive in public school teaching for thirty-four years. Student fighting comes with the total teaching package and it has nothing at all to do with either teaching or with learning.

But today’s school fights are not always one-on-one with fist against jaw combat. The “wolf pack mentality” is presently pervading many urban schools and students are now employing the herd attack practice in rural high schools as well. Four children will now fight maybe six students. Sometimes a student will be knocked to the ground outside the building or to the floor inside the edifice and five or six members of the assaulting wolf pack will stomp and trounce the ribs and face of the unfortunate recipient of their collective hostility.

If a student fight happens first thing in the morning, it could set the tone for and ruin a teacher’s entire day. Fortunately for the already encumbered instructors most days are more tranquil than those dates that are tainted with wall-to-wall student conflicts. On those chaotic mind-boggling days (usually before extended holidays like Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter) public school teaching could seem like the Wild, Wild West.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

I firmly believe that all students between the ages of thirteen and eighteen should be required to spend six weeks of each summer vacation involved in community service in order to develop a spirit of commitment and responsibility so that adolescents could realize from experience that there’s more to life than the all-too-prevalent “me first” attitude that most egocentric teenagers of today assume and practice. A strong sense of purpose among juveniles could drastically reduce the number of student fights that currently take place. And administrators and boards of education should treat school fighting as serious assaults and batteries worthy of police investigation and not as business-as-usual events resulting in mere student detentions and suspensions.

Also, I think it would be beneficial to our great American society if each high school graduate be put on hold and have college delayed for two years so that every eighteen and nineteen-year-old could fulfill a societal contribution by either serving in the military or by assisting in their communities as voluntary helpers given assigned missions. Then perhaps our college dropout rates will be diminished when more mature, more disciplined and more ethically minded twenty-year-old freshman students enter those hallowed university halls to finally engage in serious academic pursuits.

Google: Jay Dubya books
Bing: Jay Dubya books
Yahoo: Jay Dubya books