BrandiBlog

Leap Day is always a weird one for me. It seems like every Leap Day unusual things always happen in my life that make it impossible for me to NOT remember it. One year I was involved in a fender-bender. Another year there was a horrific dog incident that resulted in the death of my neighbor’s toy poodle. You know, the kind of stuff that makes you think, “Thank god Leap Day only comes around once every four years.”

One of my most memorable Leap Day incidents occurred in 1996. I was halfway through my first year teaching and was working at a private school run by a company who had a few residential treatment centers for adolescents.

The students who attended my school lived in adjacent group homes and belonged to a demographic that I never even knew existed before I had already accepted the job and made it through my first day of teaching–they were adolescent sex offenders. Yeah, it would have been nice if the school administrators would have mentioned that to me during the interview process. But that’s another story for another day.

I had eight boys in my class between the ages of 14 and 17, and one girl who was 15. Her name was Stacey. Stacey was negative, volatile, and in the lower end of the intelligence scale. To be perfectly honest, there wasn’t a single thing that I could find that I liked about her. Every day that I had to spend in a classroom with her was worse than the next. I considered that year to be my “Intro to Classroom Management with Subversive Behaviors 101″. I, unfortunately, was required to be certified in Therapeutic Crisis Intervention, which is just fancy terminology for taking someone down to the ground who is physically threatening you. Good times.

That year on Leap Day Stacey was really on a roll, cussing and throwing things around the room. Every directive I gave her was followed by her response of, “Fuck you you stupid white bitch.” Aw, so sweet. Then she started spitting–on the walls, the desks, the carpet. Being a believer in natural consequences, I went and grabbed the bottle of Simple Green cleaner out from under the sink and attempted to give it to Stacey to use to clean up her spit.

She wouldn’t have it! She called me every nasty name she could think of. Then the worst part happened–she hocked a spit-wad onto my chest and then grabbed the squirt bottle of cleaner and sprayed me in the face.

I was in complete shock! In my stunned state, she ran down the hall towards the bathroom. Suddenly my adrenaline started pumping. I took off after Stacey, yelling to the boys, “Do your math!” as I ran down the hall after her. Right as I got to the bathroom door she was trying to close it on me. I leaped forward, right foot in front of me, and kicked the door open Bruce Lee style. The door slammed Stacey to the wall and I flew into the room next to her.

I grabbed her hands behind her back, stood her up against the wall face-first and put my body weight up against her to keep her from turning around and decking me. The boys were at the door, peeking in and asking, “Are you ok, Miss?” Stacey was crying and I turned towards them and said, “What does it look like?”

The police were called, Stacey went back to juvie and I, thankfully, didn’t have to deal with her for the rest of the year. And the bad behaviors of the boys surprisingly disappeared after that day. Whenever someone would start to get a little obnoxious, the other ones would say, “Hey, remember what she did to Stacey on her birthday?” Oh yeah, I failed to mention that Stacey had turned 16 on that fateful Leap Day. And I turned into a Bad Ass Leaping Motherfucker who didn’t have to do another restraint for the rest of the school year.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 2:45 pm and is filed under Holidays, Teaching. You can follow responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your site.