Another long, annoying, demeaning year with New York City Department of Education is coming to a close – and not soon enough! But if there’s one thing I can say without even thinking about it, and this is something I already said to few friends at work, it’s that if there’s one thing that will stand out to me about this past year, it’s this stupid shit. I apologize in advance for not being able to find any clips under three mintues:
No shit. This is an actual fad right now and has been since probably before I went back to work. I remember seeing my idiot seventh graders throwing bottles up in the air in excitement during their recess on day one in September and wondering out loud if these dumb little shits seriously had nothing better to do over the summer but to throw around bottles and see if it lands on either end.
And for the longest time I never understood the point, being left to just assume they all lacked the common sense required to just leave their homes during the day and go hit the basketball courts. Oh sure, some of my kids explained to me at one point that the game is a “challenge”, but I still didn’t get it. That is until last night. I wanted to finally know how this seemingly global “phenomenon”/nuisance to all school teachers everywhere started. Then I found this link to the video that started it all:
http://fusion.kinja.com/a-teen-flipping-a-water-bottle-may-have-just-created-th-1793857082
Why the fuck wasn’t it obvious to me before?? Of course it was invented by some fuckin’ redneck down south – what the hell is there to do down there anyway? So, some redneck throws a fucking water bottle on to a desk at a talent show and suddenly it’s now being down in schools EVERYWHERE. Not only that: I was waiting for my girlfriend to run in the Central Park Spring Classic recently and while waiting I actually saw a GROWN ASS MAN flipping a bottle right in front of me. Pathetic. Hell, just look at the bottom video in the above link. This has actually become outlawed in most schools…unless the school in question is mine because my administration is absolutely SPINELESS. But that’s a different story.
So in the last nine months I’ve have numerous confrontations with students, sometimes my own, sometimes other kids in the cafeteria, who wouldn’t think twice about attempting to flip bottles onto high windows in our auditorium, flipping them in the cafeteria and then absolutely refusing to clean up their mess when the bottle opened up, flipping them in class – I’m talking right in front of their teachers. Oh here’s my favorite; sometime in December our kids were getting ready to go downstairs to lunch when five of them began running down the stairs in a stampede while screaming so fuckin’ loud. The other witness aside from me? Our principal. Not embarrassing at all.
We got them back up and, while at least four of them were smart enough to own up to their fuckups, they explained to us that they threw a bottle down a flight of steps to see how it would land and THAT was what set them off. This is literally the dumbest shit I’ve ever seen. The fifth boy, who I actually do get along with very well these days, has definitely developed an addiction of sorts. If he’s not flipping a bottle he’s taking markers in his math class and he’s flipping those too! Nothing is sacred – even pencils and pens!
How did it get to this point? Now, history has shown that kids have always had that one fad toy or object that they had no business taking with them to school or it’d get taken away…but then again, while I do work in the ghetto, I did grow up in the suburbs. I’m a child of the nineties, where most of the kids had those gay as fuck Tamagotchi’s (this was a legit digital pet that was released just in time for Black Friday in 1996; you actually had to feed it, and it would even die if you didn’t take care of it) and POGs. I loved POGs.
If you remember these then congratulations, you’re old. There were many, many different types of POGs. I simply chose to use this picture because if memory serves me right then I actually had this set in the fifth grade. Now this game was fun. Every pack of POGs had a nice, thick slammer to go with it. We would stack up as all of our POGs and hit them with the slammer, watching the POGs scatter. The player who’d slam them would keep whatever POGs were face-up, and each player would continue until the stack was empty, the winner obviously having the most POGs. But the difference between us and these kids today is that, as far as I remember, we weren’t stupid enough to play with our POGs IN CLASS where we’d clearly be seen as several milk cap sized pieces of cardboard go fuckin’ flying across the room. So, like fifth graders with common sense (GASP!), we simply waited until we got into the yard for recess. What a fuckin’ concept!
Now, I clearly don’t know how other schools or school systems nationwide are handling this situation but in NYC there are so many laws that were not in place twenty years ago regarding how we can approach children and I feel like such a target that I feel that if I just take the fucking bottle certain kids would do everything in their power to fuck me over. Problem is these kids definitely know their rights, courtesy of their enabling parents. And they’re very lucky because I’d totally love to shove those bottles down their fucking throats.
Honorable Mention goes to those so-called fidget spinners that nearly everyone in my school now plays with – in class. When I asked a few kids for an explanation for their playing with them in class one boy told me “they help with anxiety”. I had to call bullshit, considering that there was not one anxious kid in that particular group. None of them know what anxiety is. Upon doing research I read that they allegedly help students hold their attention in class, but I unfortunately don’t buy that shit one bit because in class I watch some of them just get lost with these stupid spinners.
Make sure to follow me on Facebook and Instagram for updates on new posts and random rants.
https://www.facebook.com/Confessions-Of-An-Angry-Metalhead-1237695776242081/?ref=aymt_homepage_panel
Confessions of an Angry Metalhead 