Pass please

So I had my first teaching experience at the high school level (read about the experience here).

I did want to tell you about something funny that happened there. For about 35 minutes I had Hall Duty… which is really Bathroom Duty. It consists of sitting at a desk in front of the bathrooms asking kids if they have a pass. Kids try to go into the bathroom without stopping by me, but I always stopped them and asked them to show me their pass.

Everything was going fine. I was cutting up some color paper for an idea I had for a class, and just asked kids for their passes. The passes were just pieces of paper with something written on them… at least in the beginning.

At one point, one kid was going in and I asked him for his pass. He looked at me like “oh, I don’t have one…” and I asked him which room he came from. He said he didn’t know. Then he took a protractor out of his pocket and showed it to me, he said “here, this is what they gave me, this is my pass.” I looked at it incredulous, and looked back at him. He looked smug, like he was putting one past me (I was clearly new around here). I thought “what do I look like to you, stupid?” So I wrote down his name, and he went in the bathroom.

What to do? Nobody ever told me what to do if a kid didn’t have a pass! So I ran to the office (100 ft away) and told the Vice Principal about the situation. He said he’d take care of it, and I went back to my desk duty.

After about 10 minutes, the VP comes by and he asks if the student is still in the bathroom. I said No. He said “oh, I heard he got a protractor pass?” I was a bit stunned “yeah, he showed me a protractor.” The VP said that was in fact his pass: sometimes teachers have a pass that is related to their subject matter so that it’s clear what class the student is coming from. I told him I thought he was messing with me, but now I knew, and thanks for the follow-up.

A little while later, another student showed up and I asked him for his pass. He showed me a bottle of hand sanitizer — “Oh, that must be Health class,” I thought (LOL!). Another student showed me a paper-made megaphone; that must be debate class? The passes got more and more ridiculous! I was cracking up by the end of Bathroom Duty 🙂

ina