Today’s Grace Is Brought to You by Snake Eyes

Last week, a student got his cell phone (which he was using in school) confiscated by another teacher.


The following hour, in my class, he ranted and raved about the unfairness of the system (most of my students are against “the man”-which is synonymous for whoever they are angry with in the moment). Somewhere on the tail end of this tirade, the student approached my desk and demanded I call my unfair phone pilfering colleague and find out whether she was willing to sprint over to return the phone to him.


After getting the rest of the class started, I dialed up my fellow teacher to find out how the student could retrieve his phone. She said, don’t send him to get it now. I’ll bring it to him at lunch.


I repeated her words to him.


This is when he called me a lying b**** who had purposefully thwarted him in getting his phone back.

When I told him he’d won an all-expense paid trip to the “time out” room, he added a few colorful words before pointing out that sending kids to the time out room was exactly the sort of thing that lying b****es do.
(Darn. Foiled again.)


Instead of going to cool down in T.O., he skipped out of school and into a five day suspension from our security team.


This brings me to today, his first day back from suspension, in which he sends two dice flying across the room in his first couple minutes back in class.


Dice, like phones, aren’t allowed out in the classroom not because we’re down on Parker Brothers, but because the kids use them to play “dice” (a version of street craps you can google) for money. This brings in the big betters, the couple high rollers carrying suspicious wads of dollas not earned through their parents rewarding them for As on the report card. :) As you can imagine, someone cheats or someone accuses someone of cheating, and then there is a small scale war between those who back the two opponents.


The kid watches me walk over to the dice.  “Now she’s gonna take ’em.” He says. I know this is my moment of power, the kind people in authority have over people under them–the kind that can be sickly satisfying to wield. I can send him off for the next concurrent suspension for violation #745,190 to live up to my b**** title.


I look down. Snake Eyes. Double ones. What are the chances? And what are his chances? Especially if I and others take every out to toss him from the classroom rather than finding a way to penetrate his current approach to school.


I hand them back to him and tell them to keep them in his pocket. He is shocked. I can tell I am less b****y in that moment than he expected. And then he smiles. It doesn’t make him do all his work, study for his test, clean up his act, or add economic vitality to the neighborhoods around us. It doesn’t make me the perfect teacher who never snaps, gets frustrated or lectures to listen to my own voice bounce off the walls. But its a tiny slice of given and received grace that I sometimes miss, but want to foster more of.


Today, the odds were in our favor. We rolled double ones of grace. Hopefully we’ll figure out how to do it again tomorrow.