Textbook Graffiti day

Thanks to our beginning-of-the-semester teacher shuffling, we have a new middle school reading/ELA teacher. She has decided that she does not like the textbooks in her room; she think's they're too low level for her (ESS) students.

After much travail, last Wednesday I got a set of textbooks checked out for her, put them on a cart, and took them to her room. "Where do you want these?" I said. She asked if I could leave the cart while she found a place for them; she would get it back to me as soon as possible. "Sure," I said.

Shortly thereafter, her aide brought that cart, plus one additional cart, back to the library, piled high with textbooks, workbooks, and other miscellany. Apparently these were in the classroom, and the new teacher does not feel any need to keep them, as she doesn't plan to use them.

So I have spent all day Friday and all day today checking books in and noting the charming statements written in them, some in pencil, some in pen. I've erased the pencil ones, even the ones I didn't think were gang-related, just on the grounds that I'm too naive to be able to tell, and nothing should be written in the textbooks anyway. I need to go talk to one of the clerical staff who supposedly has some magical spray-on white-out that will take care of the ink. I almost wish I had a digital camera or a scanner, just to start a collection of poorly spelled profanity. "F*** all you haters with an a(backwards s here)es d***" is so bad it deserves to be preserved for posterity. Alas, for the low level of technology.

Unfortunately, even if the room hadn't been in the possession of a completely different teacher last year, there's no way to tell where these works of art have come from. Here at The Alternative School, students are not allowed to check out textbooks, since the administration feels (quite rightly) that any student who earns a trip to Alternative School can't be trusted not to destroy, sell, or just keep a textbook. So the teachers have a class set which each class can use while in the classroom. I guess homework doesn't get assigned out of the book. And I don't get to vent my righteous fury on the defacers of textbooks. *sigh*