Thursday, October 28, 2010

Wouldn't Have Believed It If I Hadn't Seen It

So, today, one of my students dropped a bag of candy on the floor.

It was rather a big bag of candy. He likes to tote lots of it around, even when it is not about to be Halloween. He dropped it. It was an accident. 100 individually wrapped Warheads (little sour things), hit the floor.

I looked up. I said, "Oh, dear, hon, we need to pick those up." I walked toward him.

I saw several kids start to move. I thought, because I am a MORON, "Oh, they'll help."

Then they dived onto the spilled candy, pushing, shoving, screaming, and cramming handfuls into their pockets.

One boy was flat on the floor in front of me, prone, kicking his feet, and protecting his loot with his body.

These are eleven and twelve year olds from middle class families, attending a 'nice' parochial school.

The kindest thing I can say is that they looked like a group of four or five year olds after Dad or Uncle gets fed up and breaks the pinata with a couple of purposeful whacks.

It was far more remiscent of a pack of animals closing in for the kill on the Discovery Channel.

It was, to be honest, disturbing as hell.

2 comments:

Friar Yid said...

The same thing happened to me once while subbing at a Jewish Day School. Except it was a piece of lunchmeat that someone's Mom had accidentally packed into their sandwich. The campus was officially vegetarian in order to maintain some semblance of kashrut. Within seconds, I had eight middle-schoolers jumping all over each other like professional rugby players, physically fighting for the right to chow down on secondhand baloney.

Pretty weird.

BBJ said...

Oh. My. God.