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A TEACHER CONFESSION FROM 1995
I Broke Up a Hallway Fight by Farting.
Then I Became a Legend.
Did I ever tell you about the time I stopped a fight at school with a single fart?
Teachers stop fights all the time. Sometimes with just a look. I had perfected the hallway stare: one unimpressed eye, at a distance sufficient to suggest authority and a proximity sufficient to suggest consequences.
The trick, I learned, is arrival. You get there first, you are boring, and the whole thing collapses on its own. The kid about to swing can’t swing at a teacher in front of eleven witnesses, because swinging at a teacher turns a fight into a story that ends with a suspension, and no eighth grader wants to be a story that ends with a suspension.
A crowd was gathering in the east corridor, next to the faculty bathroom, between the trophy case and the vending machines that had been broken since 1991. Bryce Vandermeer had his back to the lockers. DeShawn Alvarez was doing the thing where he bounced on his toes and rolled his shoulders, which boys do when they are trying very hard to look like they are not afraid. Twelve kids ringed them in a rough circle.
For the record, what I had eaten at lunch was the cafeteria’s Thursday taco, which in 1995 was a taco in the same sense…
