Work Stress

From Amber:

So people keep telling me that I need to keep my stress low for the baby. The problem is that I work in a crazy, crazy place. An elementary school. I happen to teach all girl fifth graders this year. This should be wonderful, and in many ways it is. The problem is that fifth grade girls are FULL of drama!

Most recently is a problem with she said she said garbage. The girls are not clique like in the classroom, but apparently they cannot get along outside of the room. This amounted to one of my girls bringing a knife to school this week. She stole the knife from her father and brought it in to use it against another girl. The knife was never seen by myself or admin; we know about the knife because the father brought his daughter to the AP and told him about the situation.

It is hard to know exactly what happened because, well, kids lie. But when the stories were hashed out from several different little ladies a few things became obvious. #1 the girl who brought the knife had been picking on one of my more 'immature' girls for a while. This picking on had led to her threatening the immature one. #2 the other girl threatened her back with her older cousin from a local midle school. #3 this led the original girl to bring the knife to school. #4 the knife lady was pulled out of school from her dad about 10 minutes into the day she brought the knife. She claims to have left it in her desk. We have no way of knowing if this is true.

She claims someone must have taken the knife from her desk while she was gone. I personally think she lied to her father and probably has the knife at home. In any case the AP and I spent an afternoon searching every girl's desk and bag. He had called school police, but they told us to do it. They didn't feel like being involved in the situation. Apparently a girl with a knife is not a dangerous situation. In any case, we never found the knife.

Now here is a frustrating tid bit. All of my girls know who brought the knife (they were told). They expect the girl to get in trouble. The problem is that the knife is no where to be found and the only reason we know about it is because her father told us. No evidence, no trouble. The most he can do is RPC (request parent conference) the girl. But, since he already talked to Dad, there isn't any real point in doing this. So to my class of ladies, it looks to them like it wasn't that big of a deal after all.

In better news, spring break is next week. Yippy!