I LIVE!

     I refuse to believe it has been a year and a half since I last posted.  There is simply no way this can be correct.  SO MUCH has happened since then.  I SWEAR I posted later than Sept. 2018.  Well, time to get to work!  The school year 2018-2019 was a year of trauma, drama, and more bullshit.  Unlike the first year, when I returned to school, I was horrified to discover that they had removed or relocated all of the monkeys!..NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!  The base had had enough and had hired a pest control company to rid the compound of monkeys, dogs, and cats.  They succeeded, for the most part, in completely removing the monkeys and dogs, the cats, not so much, but there were significantly fewer kitties.
     The school had made NO improvements, and life was back to "normal" in the boys' building.  It was loud, out of control, and a painful place to try and exist.  I would NOT call it living, it was existing....hanging on by a thread.  Prior to the start of the new school year, Zantika and I had, out of our own pockets, purchased a plethora of sporting goods, with high hopes for the new school year.  Zantika had officially been put in the position of teaching PE, and she was over the moon with high hopes and great expectations!  We purchased basketballs, soccer balls, 2 American footballs, badminton sets, baseball equipment, jump ropes, small cones, and other stuff.  The boys had been begging for equipment for ages, and we both decided they needed REAL physical education activities and not just soccer.  The school may or may not have possessed 1 or 2 very sad soccer balls prior to our purchases.
     It took the 9th grade boys less than a day to pop one of the brand new soccer balls.  They would kick it extremely hard with the toe of their shoes into the brick wall, or kick it over the fence into the street.  The ball was kicked into the street where it broke the window of a car.  It was dead before the end of the day.  Needless to say, within 2 weeks they had lost or destroyed almost every single piece of sporting equipment and decided they were rather just play soccer all of the time.  Zantika was CRUSHED, as was I.  We had previously withheld a right to go out for PE as punishment for misbehaviour.  That all changed when the principal decided to get more involved with the boys building.
     Did I mention they brought in vending machines to the boys' building only?  It was stocked with junk, phone cards, and more junk.  We were able to convince them to put a few sandwiches into the machine, so if a child actually had no lunch, they had real food options.  It created nothing but havoc as the middle and high school girls were outraged that only the boys got a machine.  Our explanations that the boys' building was a single story, they were on the third floor, and the building had no elevator, did nothing to assuage their anger.  The principal stated repeatedly that the boys were angels and the girls were horrible....to the students, so she cared not.  It took a high school student less than a month to bust out the machine and remove most of the items, and all of the phone cards.

     The teachers were at least happy for one less thing to deal with every day.  We had to fight with the students to only go over one at a time, to then come back into their room, and to only use it during their lunch period.  The second machine contained only beverages, so it was far less trouble to deal with.  At least the principal agreed that the machines were a nuisance.  And THAT was the last thing we ever agreed upon.  All of this in only the first 2 months of school.  Next post - Let's Talk About Discipline.