Where for art thou Michael Burch?

I had a terrible revelation today at work, I was marking the roll in my photography class when I realised that Michael Burch does not exist. I mean he's a real guy and he's even a student at my school but he doesn't exist in so far as that he is not actually a student in my photography class. His name appears in my roll book and I have been calling his name out for the past six weeks (even marked him 'here' a few times?!!!!?!) and whilst no one has mentioned to me the error of my ways the biggest problem I have is that there is a mid-semester progress report headed for his letter box (as I write) with an attached photography report.


What's funny about this is that when I was faced with the challenge of writing a report for a student who didn't exist I managed to include what was possibly the most stupidly ironic (and inappropriate) comment on the page possible-

'Michael needs to take more initiative with his work and improve his attendance in this class.


I don't know whether it is time to laugh or cry!

School spirit

Alpha, step. Omega, step
Kappa, step. Sigma, step
Gangstas walk, pimps gon' talk
Oooh hecky naw that boy is raw


ME: "Amii, you need to calm sown, you need to put the stick outside and get yourself to the office before you do something really stupid."
AMII: "No, you go to the fucking the office, I'm gonna smash his fucking face in!"

There are those dead-end days, dragging yourself to work like so much meat on a stick. Eerily calm. The lights are on and no one's home... everything is going wrong and you know you won't win so you don't bother trying. A window gets smashed, a student is reduced to hysterical tears for no apparent reason when you ask him how he is doing with the work. It would be funny if it wasn't happening to you but it is. It's a living but it isn't much of a life, or so the saying goes (round and round in your head) as it gets harder to fall asleep at night, harder to wake up in the morning, you're waking up two or three times through the night in the grip of night terrors and it's hard to separate the nightmare from the darkness at 4:30am.


AKA, step. Delta, step
S G Rho, step. Zeta, step
Gangstas walk, pimps gon' talk
Oooh hecky naw that boy is raw


SAM: "Can I go get a drink?"
ME: "No, the bell just went, you know the rules."
SAM: "Yeah, but my dad had a heart attack. Can I go to the toilet please?"
ME: "What does your dad's health have to do with the rules I said no."

Sometimes you should keep your mouth shut, your not thinking straight and everything that comes out is the wrong thing to say. It's been bottling up inside and every word stinks sour with venom. The job won't sit right, you feel like a fuck-up and you can't reconcile with yourself all the ADHD and asbergers and parental neglect and poverty and teenage pregnancy and low self-esteem and serious drug abuse and teenage crime and unemployment and all the other serious problems to which there are no real solutions. How do you live in the world knowing that 'normal' is not the norm. If you worked at a good school in a rich suburb it wouldn't look like this but you have to face the facts... education for the rich, for everyone else it's about getting used to the disadvantages passed down by birthright, this is not a classless society, this is a society where the lines are drawn in invisible ink.


I feel a woo coming on, cuz. I feel a woo coming on, cuz
WOO
There it was
A some woos coming on, cuz. A couple woos coming on, cuz
WOO, WOO
There they was


I repeat; THIS IS NOT A CLASSLESS SOCIETY, THIS IS A SOCIETY WHERE THE LINES ARE DRAWN IN INVISIBLE INK.


I feel a woo coming on, cuz. I feel a woo coming on, cuz
WOO
There it was
A couple woos coming on, cuz. A couple woos coming on, cuz
WOO, WOO
There they was...

The Bing and I.

I have this student named David who suffers from Obsessive Compulsive Anxiety Disorder... he used to have a thing for Bing Crosby and so every time he felt he wasn't coping with the work in my class, or life with in general his work would start to feature pictures of Bing. The worse David felt the more Bing there was and sometimes he felt so bad that his essays started to look more like commemorative photospreads than English assignments. At the moment David has a fascination with the Adolf Hilter and so recently he has been unable to write anything without casting Adolf Hilter as a character, quoting Hitler or including a picture of him somewhere on the page.


The strangest piece of work David has ever handed me was a story where he had been hired by Satan to facilitate my nervous breakdown... in the story his relentless obsession with Bing Crosby reduces me to a quivering lump; David finds me hiding in the cleaners storeroom, hands me a gym-sack full of guns and tells me it is everyone else's fault... the rest writes itself! When I showed the story to the school social worker she said that it was great to see that David had finally found someone at the school he can open up to... I am not quite so sure about her optimism.

One banana, two banana, three banana four.

"Dude, you are so gay."

"So, you are two times as gay as I am."

'Bullshit, you are three times as gay as that!"