I'm sitting at my desk, sneaking in a few peaceful moments & morsels of nourishment, when the air begins to tingle with excitement, and students are being pulled, as if by some magnetic force, out into the quad. That can mean only one thing.
Fight.
By the time I make it out to the quad, the assistant principal and security, out on lunch duty, have already separated the perps/combatants/adversaries, and are cleaning up w/ crowd control. Nothing for me to do here.
I used to break up fights when I taught in the middle school. Because I was younger, and because the kids were smaller, and I could pull them apart without much fear of injury to myself. Looking at fifty next year, I'm not likely to do that with the bigger high school boys, unless they are tiny, or it's still at the trash-talk stage.
I never intervene in girl fights: the emotions are so intense that getting seriously scratched up while one girl is trying to get through me and back to the object of her wrath is a very real possibility. That, and the idea of me touching a teenage girl in any manner, even to break up a fight, is problematic for a male teacher on its face. Better to wait for security unless someone is receiving an ugly beat-down and can't even fend off blows. Still, a judgment call, because it'd be difficult to see a woman, young or old, taking a decisive beating, whether from a man or another woman.
This path of non-intervention goes against my sensibilities and upbringing, but the legal realities trump ethics here, sadly. The fear of being sued by a student who is even slightly injured, or just uses the claim of injury as a pretext for a suit, while being pulled off another student he is committing aggravated battery against ( oh, the irony), is very real, and could be a career-ender. Her tooth vs. my career. Sorry, Sheila, but they can do marvelous things with dental implants these days.
