Crushed

I'm starting to lose it.

I don't know what it is about this year, but the kids are tearing me down, bit by bit. The year started off just fine-- I liked all of my classes. Now I dread coming to school. I get sick to my stomach, and the stress of it all has caused my cold to stick around for over three weeks. My stomach has a constant pang and I'm starting to think I'm developing another pre-ulcer like I had when my parents got divorced a few years ago. I'm disgusted. Furious. Exhausted. I'm so stressed out I can't sleep, can't focus, can't even write the way I used to be able to.

One of my kids said the other day "Miss J, you NEVER get mad." I laughed because by the end of almost every day, I'm outraged. I've just gotten so good at hiding it, at keeping everything I'm feeling behind a concrete wall so that all they see is a blank expression or a forced smile when I want to scream and pull out all my hair. Take a deep breath and go help the kid who just laughed in my face and interrupted me 10 times in the last two minutes.

And a few of these kids just won't stop-- they swear at me. They tell me they don't have to listen to a fucking thing I say. They disrupt the class every. single. day. Every couple of minutes, there's something.

And if I ask them to move to a different spot in the classroom, or go to a different classroom until they're ready to learn, they take 10 minutes to get out-- creating a circus the whole time while swearing at me some more. They instigate. They start fights. They bully each other, and I don't mean the gimme-your-lunch-money bullying. No. They bring it online and smear each other's names, call each other whores and sluts and make up stories about who's slept with who. And then they come back to school and beat the crap out of each other because of the stories they created. 8th grade girls, screaming at each other as they're coming back from gym, calling each other bitches and telling each other to keep "their fucking legs closed."

So many of them don't care. Don't try. Just sit there. Absolutely no effort. No motivation, and all the incentives and reprimands in the world aren't doing anything. While I bust my butt every single day to give them something that's broken down to their level, and try to make it interesting if I can, with the resources I have....they crap all over it.

I asked a kid to rejoin my class-- he was wandering the halls, and he should have been at lunch. He starts swearing at me, muttering and cursing and acting like I just told him he was a worthless piece of... I'm sorry. Am I being unreasonable? Is it wrong of me to ask you to eat lunch with the rest of the class? To follow the same rules?

I've always been able to find something about each kid that I liked or that I respected. Maybe they weren't academically gifted, but made me laugh, could draw really well, were really helpful, had an athletic gift....something. I've always been able to find something so that no matter what, I could come back and be happy.

I'm having a really, really hard time doing that right now.