Every Clout Has a Silver Lining

Wild day at East Brunswick High School-- but though it was ugly, some good did come out of it-- so during homeroom, there were some serious fisticuffs between two students (apparently over a girl) just down the hall from my room-- I watched the security guards and vice-principal break it up while I ushering kids into my room-- and then apparently some subsidiary fights broke out in other parts of the building (and there were all kind of unsubstantiated rumors about possible weapons) and it got so chaotic that the police came (and an ambulance) and we were locked down in homeroom for quite a while (40 minutes or so?) and I had one student in my room that belonged in another homeroom, but when there's a lockdown, you stay put-- so I wanted to call her homeroom teacher and tell her that the student was safe and with me, but when I checked my phone directory sheet on my bulletin board, I noticed it was from 2014-- and the room numbers have all changed since then (I also noticed that two of the teachers on the list are deceased) and so after informing my students of this (some students found this humorous, others started to question all the authority figures in their life) I had a smart student help me find and print out a more recent phone directory, which I tacked to my bulletin board . . . and then I called the other homeroom teacher and told her the location of her student and then I called my friend Cunningham and told her the good news-- the silver lining of these fights-- that they had motivated me to update my phone directory sheet and now I could call all different rooms in the school and chat with my friends and she said, "Dave! They gave us one of those on the first day of school!" and I said, "You're missing the bigger theme here."

6 comments:

  1. The title of this sentence isn't as witty as advertised but overall it's a sneaky good, quintessential SoD. It features a community (EBHS), violence, dead people, and difficulties getting communications to people in other places, themes that are both Shakespearian and Davidian. You proudly describe how you overcame an obstacle that is both of your own creation and easily overcome by people of average intelligence, and when your friend is blown away that someone so smart could be so stupid your response is that they don't understand the genius of your actions. I give this SoD 5 out of 5 dogfeet.

    ReplyDelete
  2. He proudly overcame the obstacle by relying on the efforts of the student who had to solve the problem for him.

    I believe this is the definition of “failing up”.

    ReplyDelete
  3. i think it's just good (late, but good) delegation. we would've also accepted 'every clown has a silver lining'.

    ReplyDelete
  4. maybe you guys don't get it-- "clout" means punch!

    ReplyDelete
  5. and clough means narrow valley. what's your point?

    ReplyDelete