Wisdom on my part, methinks

So two boys just beat the living izz-h out of one another just outside my door. I was supposed to be at my door but a student had asked for something that I was getting for them in the back of my classroom and literally 30 seconds later my class was all crammed up at the door. I pushed through, forced them into the classroom and barked, "Sit down or else." Most obeyed. I pulled others into my classroom in the ruckus.

I stood at my door and took note of the other 5 or so female teachers also smart enough to not try and break up two football player sized boys, both much stronger than I am and in adrenaline-infused 'fight or flight' mode, throwing furious fists around and smashing one another's heads into the wall. I chose to make sure the fight had been called in... just as girls were starting to shriek, "Break it up!" (seriously... smashing a head into a cylinder block wall does not look or sound pretty, and it was a pretty evenly matched fight with both boys busting into the other one... I can't believe how much damage was done in a simple sixty seconds) two male teachers ran through and pulled the boys apart. I returned a shoe to one of them and started yelling, "Get to class!" as students immediately broke out in excited chatter, retelling every. Single. Little. Tiny. Detail. Of what they saw. Praise God that somehow my kids settled in quickly and now are silently reading their novels (The Giver) for the first 20 minutes of class.

It's scary that two boys were just seriously busting one another up literally 5-20 feet from where my students sit.



Wow. I forget that this isn't supposed to be normal.

EDIT: So I just heard that not only was there another fight in the cafeteria during lunch, but then another one almost broke out down the hall from my room literally five minutes later with two different kids. The cause of the fight outside of my room? One kid accidentally bumped into another on their way to class and it escalated into a brawl. The two kids don't even know one another.

Like I said, this isn't supposed to be normal, commonplace, sane. It's insanity embraced and accepted by the fast majority of students at my school as an enhancement to the average day. I call it a tragedy, particularly because every single kid involved was a young, black male. My stomach is literally sick that it's even becoming part of the usual routine for me to see this happen.