I'VE SEEN THE FUTURE

I've seen the future and it's back there. Back there could be in my past, but I do not think I will find it hiding in my secrets. I sense I find it each morning from the cab of my old pickup truck. The students begin arriving at high school around 7:00 A.M., about an hour after I do. After reading the little, nothing local paper I sit and delude myself into believing I'm psyching myself for the day. I enjoy reading the daily gripe column by a local reporter that obviously nurtures a long ago deep seeded negative reaction to school. This diagnosis will be as close as I should get to playing a doctor. I'm just a lowly behaviorist trying to make some kid's government school experience count for something.

Anyway, back to why I really sit in my truck watching the student herd migrate onto their eighty-eight acre preserve for seven hours out of the day. I watch the daily formation of the gangs, groups, cliques, teams, and outcasts gather along the driveway between the main building and the school annex. The parade of cars, trucks, and buses searching for a brief drop-off point or a choice parking spot. The girls playing games with the boys. Games that the superior maturing girls use to manipulate their immature boyfriends. Such games that consist of the type clothing that is worn to entice the boys, looks that are quickly cast to another boy that is sure to lead to a physical confrontation, or just the joy some girls have in ignoring any boy that desire their attention.

All of this is being offset by the boys games to strut, lead, follow, or "out-cool" the others. The male games mean little or nothing to the girls, but the boys from generation to generation never give up the hopes of impressing the right girl through the right move at the right time. I tried it, my friends tried it, and all males before me and after me have tried or will try, usually through desperation and immaturity.

An outsider can not visually separate the special education students from the regular education students during this morning ritual. Of course, the very disabled students are not part of this parade. They have their own morning rituals that I may explore at another time.

My portable classroom, in the midst of the government school trailer park, continued to be a haven through-out the school year. A haven for SPED'ers and regular education students. The one thing these students had in common all year; the portable was a preferable social situation compared to the one they existed in outside of school. Their extracurricular social lives can consist of; single-parent families, gang affiliations, petty criminal activities, felony criminal endeavors, periodic arrests, creative use of spray paint (tagging), writing the next million seller rap song, drugs, alcohol, searching for a place to eat and/or sleep, coming back to the campus after school to hang out, or sometimes stopping by my home to see if I'm an ass outside of school, and possibility many others not listed here.

I've neglected adding posts to this blog much of the past school year. Seldom does a day past that I do not think of writing. Each time I conclude I am gathering thoughts and experiences for new postings. At times I conclude I'm lazy. Surely it is a combination of these and many other factors. For several years I've seen the future as it parades in front of me each school morning. The future is the past as the past is the present. As the population of this government school grew from one-thousand-nine-hundred last school year to the current two-thousand-two-hundred, it will expand to two-thousand-four-hundred in the fall.

Through-out the school year I've mentally filed tales or stories I have every intention of writing about through the summer. By far, the situation of the ever exploding school population is my deep well of tales. Again, I must say, "I've seen the future as it parades in front of me each school morning. The future is the past as the past is the present."