I can't make this stuff up

So I was greeted today as I walked around the main school to the modular building where the middle school is located by two of the other teachers telling me we couldn't get in. I thought, oh, no one has a key or something. No. Vandals had literally broken the door handles clean off of the doors. They had also tried smashing some windows. Apparently the alarms had gone off last night, but the Armenian Cultural Center (from whom the school rents the building) had had a party last night so it was thought that they had tripped the alarm accidentally.

We rounded up all the middle school kids and dumped them into a room for about 45 minutes. We tried to show them a movie but there were just too many kids to deal with. Finally they ended up ripping out the crash bars and just propping the doors open. We finally got into the building in time for me to have study hall. So no prep on my first day. I did get some kids to help me carry the stuff in from my car (not that I had any time to unpack it). Of course, the kids were pretty riled up already what with the holiday coming and this pretty much sent them over the edge. Not that they were BAD, they were just incapable of focusing on much of anything, especially the 6th graders. The 8th graders I saw were actually really good, which was not at all what I had observed last week. I was very pleasantly surprised.

I was pretty frazzled by the end of the day, mostly due to getting up so early and then trying to muddle through the day with only the haziest idea of the routine. The kids' names are proving to be less problematic than I thought. One of my tasks over the holiday is to make seating charts, which will help not only with discipline but also with learning names.

I am hoping that next week will be less eventful, but you know what they say about being careful what you wish for...