troubled youth

My mom is a teacher. She teaches special education in a middle school, where the students range in age from eleven to fourteen. If you happen to know a lot of teachers like I do, you'll be aware that this age group is incredibly difficult to cope with. They're full of hormones, unlike primary school kids, but unlike high-schoolers aren't compelled to buckle down and behave by the looming prospect of graduation, college, and adulthood. This is bad enough as it is, but on top of that my mom's school also has a very large demographic of students with serious behavioural problems, even in the mainstream population outside the special-ed kids. It basically takes an already difficult age group and makes it worse, resulting in outrageous misbehaviour. Within the first week teaching after being hired, a student threw a chair at one of the other teachers and injured her enough that she needed back surgery.

Over the years I've become pretty desensitized to all but the most extreme stories, but these two stuck out in my mind the most. And they're pretty outrageous--they have to be to grab my attention like this.

She once saw a girl showing her tattoo off to her friends--a child too young to even drive a car had somehow found a way to get a tattoo. Since no tattooist in their right MIND would work on anybody under eighteen, it was certainly some cheap and dirty back-alley tattoo artist. Which is not only really illegal but also really, really dangerous. You can get any number of infections or diseases from a dirty tattoo needle. And remember, NONE of the students were any older than fourteen. Not only did she get a tattoo, but obviously her parents were either oblivious and didn't notice or completely apathetic and didn't care. That's insane.

Two or three years ago there was a big to-do in the school involving child protective services and the police. A seventh-grade (twelve years old) boy turned up at school drunk. Not disoriented or discombobulated, but actually over-the-legal-limit-in-adults drunk. He managed to get his hands on some fairly potent alcohol without his parents knowing and brought it to school, where he shared it with another student who also failed a police-administered breath test.

It's astounding how little parental supervision these kids have. There are no words for how fucked up this shit is.