Pencils

So the school where I teach is by no means a low-income school. Most of my students come to school everyday wearing their North Face jackets over their Guy Harvey shirts, sporting their Sperry's, talking on their cell phones with unlimited text and data packages, and listening to their iPods. I write all that to make the point that obviously I have students whose parents can afford to buy them things. Apparently, their shopping trips for their students never make it to normal, reasonably priced items, however, because my students never have pencils.

I decided to order some pencils and have the word "pencilnapped" along with my name put on them. I thought that this would discourage students from borrowing them and not giving them back or that at least other teachers would take them away and return them to me. This has not worked. I ordered 24 and only have about 8 left. Well, on Friday, I did have a student "return" one of my pencilnapped pencils to me. Here is how it happened:

It was during my last block class, which means I was generally feeling discouraged and wishing it were 3:30 already. I had one group in the back who was supposed to be working on a group presentation, which they of course were not. Instead one of them was trying to show the others the new moves he had learned in Brazilian jujitsu (which I know because he did not even try to hide the fact that he was off task--instead he yelled at me across the classroom, "Do you want to see what I learned this week in Brazilian jujitsu?" Thanks student for the announcement, the fact that your foot was trying to get up by your head wasn't a sign that you weren't doing Language Arts). They were being loud and ridiculous, and I wanted to cry. Meanwhile, I'm trying to teach 5 students the proper way to use punctuation when you're writing with dialogue. 3 of the 5 are talking to each other instead of listening to me. By this point, I have basically decided that I could leave school at 1:30 because I'm not really doing any work anyway.

So I'm sitting there, trying to get 5 kids to do a dialogue activity when it happened. The kid sitting to the right of me is tapping one of my pencilnapped pencils against his desk. He was supposed to be using it to underline tags in an excerpt from a novel but whatever. So he's tapping away, and I guess somehow lost control of his/my pencil because the next thing I know, it has flown at me and hit me in the face right above my right eye. The pointed lead part. It hurt. It left a mark. Just in case you haven't picked up on it yet, this class makes me a little crazy. I almost cried, but I kept it under control. Barely. I decided to leave the mark on my face because as soon as class ended I walked to my friend's room to show her and then went to show my assistant principal.

Class finally ended, and my final class came in (it's like Study Hall for the last 30 minutes of the day). I was in a horrible mood, feeling useless and discouraged. A student wanted a pass to go visit my roommate who teaches 6th grade. Students know that if they want to go somewhere, they need to write a pass and bring it to me to sign. They also know that if they want it signed, they better bring something I can sign it with because I never have a pen or pencil handy. So, this student comes to me with his pass written out and hands it to me along with a pencil. I sign his pass, give it back, and he starts walking away. I tried to get his attention to return the pencil he had handed me to sign his pass. I guess he didn't hear me because he kept walking. I looked down at the pencil and it had this written on it: "I Have Jesus in My Heart." Seriously.

Some people say that God speaks to us in mysterious ways. Sure. But sometimes He uses a pencil.