Let’s start with this morning….

Girl comes in and asks if I’ve already taken the attendance and marked her absent. I told her yes. So, girl storms our of class and says she’s going to the office. I’m like, whatever. Same girls rages back in class, flips over a table with the classwork on it and goes to sit down with another group of girls who aren’t doing their work.

Teacher who escorted her back says: “If you have any problems out of her, send her back down to the office and we’ll take care of it.”

My response: “You mean, the one that just flipped over the table? You can take her now.”

Him: “No, she’ll calm down in a little bit. Any problems after that, just let us know.”

Right then and there I knew this girl was a problem.

Anyways, she sat there in an angry fit and the other girls gathered and talked to her trying to figure out what was going on. I gave the class all of twenty minutes to complete there work (which was basically, transferring their answers from the test to the scantron). Needless to say Problem Girl didn’t do it and she drug the whole group of them down with her because when the timer went off I picked up all of the work, finished or not.

Luckily, the teacher is on campus for training so he’s still here in the building, and he had given me advance warning about his classes and how unruly they can become. Dealing with mainly Fourth graders, I thought I could handle a little unruliness. I said to myself: “No problem, I got this.”

The lies I tell myself.

Because I didn’t have it. I didn’t have it at all.

Then, as if she were an adult and I was a child, the Problem girl came back into the classroom one period later and said: “You told the teacher I flipped the table over and that I was mad?”

I looked at her as one would look at kitten barking at a Rottweiler. Because for a moment. Yes, a brief moment while she stood there over me as if I was supposed to back down. Maybe respond with: “Oh no, Problem Girl, i-I didn’t tell your teacher anything. I merely sung your praises on what a great student you were…”

Yeah, right.

I’m an adult and I stand behind everything I say.

Gahh, I don’t think I’ll be walking a middle school hallway for a long time!