So, things are going along pretty well at work, with the exception of the colleague I refer to as “Mr. Sir”. I call him that because his behavior is remarkable similar to the guy by that name in the movie Holes.

Mr. Sir is abusive. He gives me crap every single day, and I either ignore him or give it right back to him, often laughing as I do so. I can deal with it, even though it doesn’t exactly add sunshine to my day.

Last week, a student who had done very well in our program was ready to go back to his high school. He had been looking really forward to his last day. However, on Friday, he looked pretty glum. It turned out that his mother hadn’t attended the last mandatory parent meeting the day before.

My kids don’t always have responsible parents. Or perhaps their parents are responsible folks, but are overwhelmed by their minimum-wage lives. At any rate, none of this is the kids’ fault.

So, Mr. Sir walks into my room, sees the gloomy kiddo, and says, with a large shit-eating grin on his face, “So, I guess you won’t be going back after all! Looks like you’ll be here with us a while longer, heh heh.”

He turned around and left the room. The kids looked at me and said, “Did you hear that Miss? Did you hear what he said to Pedro?”

I nodded my head, and said, “Yeah, that wasn’t right.”

That story had a happy ending, as my principal has some sense and let the kid go back to his school rather than holding him on a technicality.

But…Mr. Sir continues to treat the kids with disrespect. This is BAD, because the kids are often in my school because they have shown disrespect to teachers. If there was an alternative workplace for disrespectful teachers, Mr. Sir would surely be in it.

One of my kids, JT, came back into my room from Mr. Sir’s math class shaking with anger and with tears in his eyes.

“I want to talk to Mrs. Principal right now,” he said. “I came this close to punching Mr. Sir right in the face,” he said, holding his fingers about a millimeter apart. “He told me that I was always going to fail and made fun of me for being in ninth grade again. I’m not going back to that man’s class.”

I told JT that since the chances were slim that he could speak to Mrs. Principal immediately, that he should write his account of the incident down on paper and that I would give it to her when I went by the office during lunchtime.

JT wrote an eloquent plea to not have to return to Mr. Sir’s class. I gave it to Mrs. Principal and let her know that I would be okay with JT staying in my room and working on that subject there. She said that it would be fine if it could be worked out between Mr. Sir and myself.

Later that afternoon after the kids had gone home, Mr. Sir came by my class, said some derogatory things about JT, and said that since Mrs. Principal was going to be gone today, JT would have to attend his class, like it or not. He said that there wasn’t going to be anything Mrs. Principal could do about it anyway. So, um, there wasn’t any “working it out” between ourselves.

I called Mrs. Principal after work and asked her what she wanted to do. After a few minutes of discussion, she said, “Well, JT is going to have to learn how to get along with difficult people.”

JT has been living with abusive, “difficult people” his entire life. I strongly suspect that is why he is in my program. My principal usually has both sense and a spine, but I suspect she is backed into a corner on this one. Mr. Sir is a bully, and he alluded to alerting officials that the curriculum wasn’t being followed if JT wasn’t forced to attend his class. What he meant is that since I am not certified to teach math, and he is, we would be out of compliance.

I wouldn’t want to be in either JT’s shoes or my principal’s in this case. I don’t like being in mine, either. I failed as an advocate. I stayed home today because I couldn’t bear to make JT leave my homeroom and go to Mr. Sir’s class to be berated yet another time in his life.

What to do???

By the way, usually when I make comparisons, I exaggerate, because it might be funny. Believe it or not, I am not exaggerating much with the Mr. Sir comparison. It is really scary.

Two of my previous students have committed capital crimes. One of them robbed and murdered a prostitute, and the other raped and murdered a five-year-old girl. Most of the time, I don’t dwell on this fact. Obviously, I wasn’t the teacher who changed their lives and led them to better pastures.

The thing is, you never know who they will be. The latter was a kid I really liked. He seemed really sweet. I had no idea who he really was. The former, well, he was cold. It was no surprise.

Today, I was playing a vocabulary card game with four of the kids. One of the kids mentioned that he likes to hurt animals. I shut him down real fast. I made it clear that he would get me 97 kinds of pissed off if he kept talking about it. Of course I’ll refer him to the counselor, who will do nothing.

This kid looks like a tweaker. He has sores on his arms and face. He is skinny, unwashed and apparently never sleeps. He’s funny. I like him, actually. He’s a bit like a young Billy Bob Thornton, at least how I imagine Billy Bob might have been. Scrappy. He’s got some pluck that he probably shouldn’t still have at this point. I like that.

I have a wooden cat that sits on my desk. It has arms and legs that move back and forth. Yesterday, he picked it up and its arm went backwards at the elbow. He looked at this toy in that unnatural position and said, “Its mom must have been real mad at it”.

I have no idea what kind of hell this kid lives in.

He says mean things to others. His peers called him out on his remarks today. He was confused. I told him that he said mean things to others frequently, and that I would point it out each time he did it, whether the other person noticed or not. Surprisingly, he agreed.

Monday, we were discussing the (il)llegality of marijuana, a topic that seems to arise often in my group. I asked, “Since you can obtain marijuana easily in the Netherlands, why are so many people strung out on drugs like heroin?”

“Because, Miss, life sucks so much that pot just ain’t enough to get rid of it all,” he volunteered.

What on earth can I do besides model what it is like to be treated respectfully as a human being?

I wonder who he will be? I think he has already fathered one child. Will he be a horrendous parent who passes cruelty along to his child? Will he continue to look at other living things from the distance of one who has been so abused that he must remove himself from as many feelings as possible? Will he kill someone someday? Himself? Or will he pull himself up by his emotional bootstraps and save himself, looking back on his life when he’s 40, passing on wisdom hard-learned to others?

I guess you never can know.