Laughing to Keep From Crying

On difficult days at the High, one of the highlights can be watching students sneak back into the school after leaving school grounds. Two other teachers and I share a prep period in an open room overlooking a grass lawn fenced off for safety. Here students sneak out, go to the park across the street, (get high), and abysmally attempt to sneak back in. They trip over the fence and get stuck between loose poles. They fall flat on their faces, rip clothing, and lose hats. Eventually they try every locked door along the side of the school hoping to get in. This fails every time unless a student in the halls sees them and lets them in through a door unlocked for emergencies.

Looking on from above we sit in our classroom narrating the students’ advances, providing dialogue, asides, and soliloquies for this comedy of errors.

“Oh, there goes his hat!”
“Well, those jeans just got a little baggier…”
“Oh man, what if we don’t get back inside in time for lunch?”

Sometimes the chaos, absurdity, and utter disorganization of the High become a constancy we take comfort in. The consistency of inconsistency.

A veteran teacher told me to keep track of the things in the beginning that seemed abnormal because they would become routine before I knew it.

I think about the leak in my roof. The teacher that had the room before me said it had been leaking for two years. I hardly even notice it anymore.