It's all fun and games until someone loses a leg

I don’t condone violence of any sort. I’ve never been in a fight in my life and even boxing makes me a little uncomfortable, but being a high school teacher, I’ve seen my share of fights. Most of them are yelling or shoving matches that are broken up fairly quickly, but others are bloody and seem to last forever. In fifteen years I’ve had two fights in my classroom. Both happened on days when I was giving a test (perhaps they were planned).

In one of these fights, a young man got up in the middle of the test, put his pencil on his desk, calmly walked across the room and cold-cocked this other kid right in the face. He then grabbed the kid by the neck and maneuvered him into a headlock. That one was over fairly quickly. The second fight I should’ve known was going to happen. In the middle of the test, a young man took off the shirt he was wearing and put on a wife beater before he slugged the other kid. That fight got so out of hand that I had to have other teachers come in to help me.  They knocked over desks, made highlighters explode, tore pages out of dictionaries…they were going at it. I just remember trying to get all of the others students out safely (the one on crutches was the most difficult).

The best fight that I have ever witnessed was in Weldon, NC. I was sitting in the teachers’ lounge one morning, grading papers when I heard this awful screaming. When I walked out the door, I saw (and heard) the secretary screaming, “OPEN THIS DOOR RIGHT NOW! I SAID OPEN THIS DOOR!” while she was banging on it with both fists. When the door opened, I could not believe what I saw. Two girls were rolling around on the floor and the principal was crawling towards the door. I couldn’t figure out why he was on the ground until he was fully out of the way. Apparently he tried to get in-between the fighters and was knocked to the ground, but not before one of the girls yanked his prosthetic leg off of him and was using it to beat the other girl. I can still see the shoe and sock that were attached to it.

I know I should’ve helped the others who were trying to break up the girls, but I was paralyzed. I had never seen anything like that before in my life (and haven’t since then). All I could do is stand there with another teacher and laugh in disbelief. I felt horrible for laughing, but that was the last thing that I expected to see happen in a fight. The fight was stopped, the principal re-attached his leg and the day continued as normal, but that was the day that fights in school were redefined for me.

Tags: cat fight, fighting, North Carolina, principal peg leg, school girls, White Trash Tales