Teacher's Guilt.

I had to miss school yesterday for a dental appointment and was bracing myself for the fallout. Fortunately, yesterday went much better than I expected. One of the only sour spots came from some malicious note-passing: a favorite of little girls across the nation.

This morning, I was debriefed by a colleague who had discovered some pretty mean and inappropriate notes targeted at another girl in our class. Later, the story was reported to me by another colleague who let me know that an upset grandmother came in the morning and told her off. Apparently, little Jakiyah had not written the malicious notes, but rather Rochelle had taken her notebook and wrote the notes. This could have been fixed quickly had I been able to see the notes in question as I could have easily assigned the handwriting...but of course they were no longer available.

I was so disappointed at the prospect of bullying in my classroom that I was hyper-vigilant. When I saw the two bullying suspects writing furiously in their notebooks in the middle of a lesson while shooting each other knowing looks, I angrily ripped the pages from their notebooks and threw them onto my desk.

It wasn't until later that I finally got around to reading them. That's when I started feeling guilty. And I quote: "...Mrs. Long is a great teacher. She works hard to make us smarter. We should always listen to her so we can go to college." I wanted to apologize, but then I figured that it shouldn't matter what they wrote...just that they weren't paying attention while I was teaching. Right?

As a sidenote, Jakiyah did eventually confess to writing the notes herself. Just leave it to one minute of the ol' Long Inquisition.

Grandma was NOT pleased.