Boys will be boys.... sometimes unfortunately

Well it finally happened. A window was broken in my classroom. Ever since I heard I was in an all-boys school people have been telling me, "There won't be a window in your school that hasn't been broken." I should say that I didn't know I was in an all-boys school until I got here. With two days left in orientation I was told by a presenter that my school was all-boys and basically given a "Good luck" look from everyone in the room. The presenter summed up the life of an all-boys school with the handy phrase "There won't be a window in your school that hasn't been broken." I heard the phrase a few more times in the following days and was slightly nervous that I was entering Animal House.

Turns out, I was. This place is a zoo most of the time. Thank God John Henry was my only brother, but because I hadn't really grown up around all of this boy stuff I was a little out of my element at first. Without having the incentive of female attention to keep them on the straight and narrow, men are truly nasty. On a daily basis I see boys farting on each other, hitting each other (usually in the crotch), spitting, screaming, singing, biting.... the list goes on and on.

However, I was getting comfortable and beginning to think that the "window breaking" was kind of an extreme description of all-boys school. Until Friday that is. Everyday after classes the boys clean the school. I have six boys who come in and do a half-hearted job of sweeping, mopping and straightening up. When I went up to let them into my room on Friday, I found the door open, the padlock that should have been securing the classroom laying in a pile of broken glass just inside my door and about a dozen students milling around. All fingers pointed to one boy as the window breaker. Then they changed their story and said that some "pirst (first... they don't do "f") grader" did it. I sent the apparent culprit to get an English teacher. She came and hauled the boy away while the rest of us cleaned up the broken glass. In the meantime I found out that the key to my room is the same as the key for the homeroom of the boys who come to clean my room. So I knew one of them had opened the door... I assumed they opened up to clean the room and were goofing around when the window was broken.

Since it was Halloween, I had told students that if they came to my room and said "Trick or Treat" I would give them a candy. The glass was all cleaned up when some boys came trick or treating. I opened my desk to get some candy and to my naive surprise it was all gone, save one lonely candy. Now I'm angry. I open my other drawers to find that some stickers are missing. Not a huge deal except that I use stickers for bonus points. The more stickers you get, the higher your participation mark at the end of the year. Also, the board I use to keep track of class points had been tampered with before I had a chance to copy last weeks numbers into my binder. So, now I had no idea how many stickers were out there and no clue how many points each class was supposed to have.

Needless to say that the responsible class is going to have a sticker and candy famine for awhile.