of gamers and grace

Sooo....for roughly a month and a half, the group I affectionately call "the dork brigade" has descended upon my room for every break and lunch to play their video games. I was of two minds on the issue. First, video games rot your brain and all that, and what the hell are these kids doing bringing their gamecubes and xboxes and playstations to school. Y'know? School. where you go to learn stuff. That place. The kids had beeen kicked out of the room next door for leaving their lunch plates, ketchup wrappers, cans, etc. on the floor after lunch. So they pleaded. Could we use your TV at lunch, Mr. Shaw? I considered, then accepted, provided they learned their lesson and clean up after themselves. After all, these are the outcasts, the orphans and widows of the school (see below), the kids others avoid, the ones with high GPAs and low self esteem, who experience cheap vicarious thrills through their onscreen avatars. And they all look like they spent the weekend staying up late at the Dungeons and Dragons table, but using frequent curse words to feel less dorky. Since then, an increasing number of students arrive in my room every day to play smash brothers death rattle 3000...or whatever. The mob is anywhere between 15 and twenty students and the noise swells to deafening levels when one student is about to defeat another or commits some other heroic act, such that the entire corpus of students begin yelling, whooping, laughing and carrying on. Now, teaching at an inner city school can be strenuous enough, even at a slightly more advanced one such as ours, with the constant resistance, inattention, seeming futility of getting 100 some odd fifteen year olds to improve their spelling, but the gamers are starting to give me a headache. When other students or faculty or staff come in to visit, it is not unlike trying to carry on a meaningful conversation at a night club, the bow-chick-a-bow booming in the background. By sixth period, I have a short fuse. Now, recently, I had a faculty meeting and had to leave the room. Unfortunately, I also left it unlocked. When I returned, there was a hole in the cheap wall right next to my door in the hall. One of the...less advanced students (who might have scored thirty a game for the JV kids if he had had the grades to be on the team, and who incidentally looks like he was dropped in bong water as a child, with perpetually squinting red eyes) decided to goad the gamers by flashing the lights off and on. In a school with no windows, this has a dramatically annoying effect. The gamers, being interrupted and hardly able to contain themselves, went berserk. Instead of hitting Mr. 4-20, and risking suspension, one of them smashed the wall instead. Now? Outcast or no outcast, have fun finding a new room. More than likely, for the students this is less of a blow than you would think, and they'll find another sap within a matter of Periods...tbc?