Oh crap

"So I hear you scared the crap out of one of your students."

I've walked over to a colleague's classroom to find out if the gossip is true. She looks startled. "What?"

"I heard you literally scared the crap out of someone last week," I say. She looks at me confused, so I ask, "Didn't some kid crap his pants in your classroom last week?" These are the kinds of things one hears. I try not to believe anything I hear, especially if a teenager tells me something juicy. But this one got me to leave the safety of my classroom, to brave the hallways, just to find out the truth.

"Oh my God," she says, and tells me the story. I thought it would be a funny one. But as soon as I figure out who the boy was, I immediately feel bad. This is an 18-year-old, very low functioning boy that I taught last year. Well, tried to teach. Something is seriously wrong with him, though I'm not sure what. Most kids steer clear of him, but I guess after the accident last week, right in the middle of seventh period, they've been merciless.

I don't know how I would've handled the situation. I've had kids pass out, have fits, bleed, run out of the room crying. But this? Just another thing that you can never be prepared for.