Two Incidents from School Today

Can't make this stuff up...

1) Overheard as class is wrapping up...

Girl 1: "See, this is why you're failing. Mr. [Frazier] taught all period and you didn't pay attention at all. You did other stuff!"
Girl 2: "I'm not failing, I'm underachieving!"

Awesome, awesome line. Self-aware, true, and funny. Perhaps a pre-planned line, not entirely ad-libbed, but the first time I'd heard it.

2) After school ended, I'm walking down a long empty hallway in my school and see a container of lip balm. I absent-mindedly kick it halfway down the hallway. A female student I've never talked to before rounds the corner at the opposite end of the hallway, sees the lip balm careening down the hall towards me, walks up to me, and loudly and angrily says:

Her: "Why are you kicking my lip balm down the hallway?"
Me: "Is that your lip balm?"
Her: "Yes, and I don't know why you're kicking it."
Me: "Are you serious?"
Her: "Yeah!"

I reach down to pick it up but before handing it to her, annoyed that I am being talked to in such an angry tone by an irrational teenager, I reply in ...

Me: "Ok. I suppose I just assumed that because it was laying in the hallway in the middle of nowhere with nobody around, that it must be garbage. I apologize. Next time, I'll wait to see if a student I've never seen before comes out of nowhere to claim a lip balm that was laying in an dirty empty hallway before I kick it."

I walked away. She turns to a friend and mumbles something (probably rude) under her breath. I smile smugly to myself.

This incident was so bizarre - not that the incident itself was weird, but that it happened - just surreal.

How kids feel about going back to school

"Conversation" at rehabilitation session for my knee yesterday...

Situation: the room has one physical therapist and several patients of both genders and all ages scattered around going through their exercises. An 8-year-old kid comes in with his mother, and the therapist, who is an outgoing woman in her late 20s, is leaning over talking to him the way you'd imagine one talks to a little kid.

Therapist: "So, are you excited to be going back to school?"
Kid: (shy shrug)
T: "Are you sad that school is starting again?"
K: (shy shrug)
T: "Or do you just show up when they tell you?"
K: (shy shrug)
T: (laughing) "Ok, well, let's get started..."

Inside, I laughed at the concept "You just show up when they tell you" and thought ahead to school about to start back up. That seems to summarize the attitude of a large number of the high school kids I've seen in the past 9 years. They just show up when we tell them. Not excited, not sad. Just there.

Here's hoping that we can get some of them more motivated to do more than just show up when they are told...