the painful expression - that's what thinking looks like

It's state testing this week, which is hours and hours of hell of keeping hormone-ridden hell-raisers quiet.

Yesterday when everybody finished I had 'em get on the computers and go to implicit.harvard.edu/implicit to check out their implicit biases.

Amazing the conversations that happened.

And today started with a particularly annoying (not mine) student saying, "So, I was really thinking last night about what we talked about, and here's what how I make sense of it ..."

STOP THE WORLD RIGHT HERE! IT'S TIME FOR ME TO GET OFF!

A 16-year-old gangbanger went home and thought about how maybe he doesn't hate white people as much as he thinks - and how even he questions the values of hate (his dad told him to kill anybody who's gay but just not get caught).

I did that. Me. Today, I rock.

Then I told little drug addict bitch to back off with her attitude, so it wasn't a full-rock day. Though she came around before the bell rang, because she saw how everybody else treats me. With deference. It's cool to be me somedays.

This girl came back from the other continuation school - she lasted a week and then she was back. "I didn't like it there," she said, and asked to hang out in my classroom every day this week. The look on her face when I said I'm not coming back next year - it would be comical if not a little sad. I don't know why she had never passed ANY English classes before in the past three years, but I do know that when I pointed out to her that that's STUPID, that suddenly she began passing them. They wouldn't put her back in my class when she reenrolled, but that's ok - she'll be fine.

The cattle prod may well be my superpower tool - but sometimes I use it for good and not evil.