The Terrors of Eighth Grade

by A.R. McCord

On Halloween, last year, I was privileged to be a substitute teacher for an eighth grade class at Hidden Oaks Middle School. Some one told me that the regularly assigned teacher always took the day off because he didn't like the high jinks, costumes and general celebration by both students and faculty. I soon learned to sympathize with him.

They say that students take advantage of a substitute teacher. They know he (or she) is a brief and ignorant interlude in the school's routine, a short forgettable gap in the flow of knowledge. His evaluation of students is of little consequence. He is often inexperienced and often doesn't know the rules. Are students allowed to leave the room in groups to answer nature's calls? How much talking among themselves is permitted? How much movement from one seat to another?

So there I was among hyperactive boys and girls, they dressed like witches, magicians, vampires and zombies, their hormones raging, their chatter like the sound of magpies. And I wearing my best suit, my conservative prejudices and the weight of 73 years. It was perhaps inevitable that my patience began to fray.

In one class after another I faced students who would not stop talking. Others persisted in throwing crumpled up pieces of paper at one another and, when my back was turned, at me. A few times a conscientious student would identify a particularly gross offender and I would issue a reprimand. But more often, loyalty to their peers triumphed over discipline. At last, I began threatening to expel the most rambunctious. To my surprise, students understood the word "expel" to mean removed from school and, of course, I neither had nor wished for such authority. What I intended and carried out was removal to the school office of the most active celebrants of the carnival.

At one point, having lost my cool as the children say, I unthinkingly called a most ill-behaved boy the vulgar name for the posterior opening of the alimentary canal. He and I and the entire class were briefly in shock and I soon apologized to him before the class. He graciously accepted my apology. Later, upon meeting the principal in the hallway, I turned myself in, confessing my own severe lapse in deportment. Better she should hear of the incident from the horse's mouth than from a disgruntled member of the class. She seemed stunned.

During that stressful day of shame, I expelled ten students from four classes. Was that a right and proper thing to do? Was it unprecedented, as I feared? Is this and my loss of self-control the reason I have not been invited back to teach at either the middle school or the high school? Am I too old for this work?

My thirty years of college teaching did not prepare me for eighth grade. I take my hat off to our teachers who are able to cope, day in and day out, with the terrors of middle school. They should, no doubt, be given substantial bonuses for their hazardous duty.

Copyright © A.R. McCord 2003