Letters from Lisa

It started, as these things often do, with a stray glance. Maybe not even that. But the teenage girl draped aggressively across her boyfriend’s lap, feet perched on the subway seat in front of her, thought she saw it, and straightened herself up to glare back.

“What are you staring at me for? What are you looking at, —–? You jealous of me and my man?”

The “man”, all of probably 17 years old, chuckled indulgently and pulled her back onto his lap, hoping to distract her into a public display of sensuality, but soon she jumped back up again. “Yes, you WERE looking at me, you fat —–! You ——- —–, don’t be looking at me! You wanna start something? Oh, you’re not scared of me? Tell me you’re not scared of me. Go on! Tell me you’re not scared at me. No. No! I wanna hear you say you’re not scared of me.”

The object of her rage muttered a reply. It hung in the air for several tense moments. Then she flung her paper cup across the subway car, splashing soda and eliciting sharp protests from the other passengers sitting around watching the spectacle.

That is when I jumped up, grabbed my bags, and ran to the conductor’s window to report that a fight was breaking out.

The conductor announced that the train was stalled in the station due to a “disturbance”, then came out to investigate. A crowd had gathered around the two combatants, trying to pull them apart. The instigator yanked her black Yankees baseball cap down over her face and her “man” escorted her quickly away, as the crowd zeroed in on the target to assess the damage. One man, whose leg was splashed with soda, leaned out from the train door to watch where the couple had gone.

The police were called over the loudspeaker, repeatedly. No one arrived.

After several minute ticked by, several officially dressed transit officers arrived and were shown the car where the assailant had tried to hide. She was taken away, while her target sat slumped on the bench on the platform and recovered her wits before walking away with the transit officers to report an assault.

A local train pulled in across the platform, and people raced to pile onto our train, having no knowledge of what had just occurred. The doors closed and we resumed our route, everyone avoiding eye contact with everyone else.

I took stock of the situation by the numbers.

One kindly middle aged lady had tried to signal the target of the rage to back down, get off the train, do something else other than respond, respond, respond and keep it going.

One brave young man, the man with the soda stain on his suit leg, stood in the middle of the car, trying to block the view, and ended up in the middle of the brief showdown.

Four or five people, all sitting right nearby, tried to pull the women apart and kept either from being seriously injured.

One person - me - reported the situation.

About 20-30 people sat there and did and said Nothing.

I’ve only ever seen, in all my years of commuting on the subway, one other fight. That one, many years ago already, was between a drug dealer and a client who owed him money. This one was different. This girl was spoiling for a fight. Of all the people on the train, she picked a target who was close in age to herself, same ethnicity, and most likely to respond to the verbal baiting. She was revving herself up, willing the altercation to happen. She needed to get into it with someone, and if it hadn’t been this target, it would have been somebody else. It felt dangerous to even sit nearby, even though I was well out of the line of fire (and out of soda-splashing range).

There is a lot of negative, scary energy out there. It wells up inside one angry person and then gets flung out into the world, free to infect others. It hung in the atmosphere of the subway car before a single curse was uttered or a single punch was thrown. People ready to “——- kill” someone over a glance.

After 9/11, New York City felt safer than this. You got the feeling that people were banding together, that if something went down, we would all rise up and handle it. Now it seems we can’t even handle ourselves.

Why have I been so quiet on this site? Maybe because I’ve been developing a new blog - with my kids! It’s called Crazy Mad Science (.org) and can be found here. They’re VERY proud of it. Twice so far we’ve devoted a class period to teaching them to use the site, so many of the comments posted there are from those sessions, but you’ll also see a significant number of comments posted from home, including over our recent spring break. One child went home from school, posted three comments that night, and then another two before getting on the school bus the next morning.

Since it’s a site for and by kids, you have to be a registered user at Edublogs to comment. This has been a great opportunity, besides working on science content and writing skills, to talk about internet safety with my students. I’ve made it clear from the beginning that our audience is primarily people who know and love us, but that what you post online is potentially viewable to anyone, and that it represents us to the world. The other day, as they were posting comments from their laptops, I turned on the smartboard screen in class so that they could watch me moderate the comments - I only had to delete two for being utterly off-topic. They giggled, but understood: we apply the “Kristy test”, which is “Would you want Kristy [the school’s director] to read this?” (If only the kids at Horace Mann had had me as a teacher when they were younger - all of the hoopla in the news could have been avoided.)

I also told my kiddos that I offer “free editing”, so if they try to post a comment that is hard to read because of spelling or punctuation, I will fix it. Some of them actually have better writing skills online than most stuff you see posted around the Internet, but of course, given their issues with reading and writing, some of it’s going to be a bit rough around the edges. I’ve done a bit of patching up here and there. Mostly, though, I leave well enough alone. I don’t consider their comments to be finished products worthy of editing and revision.

Posts directly to the blog or one of its pages, though, are a different story. Those get much more in-depth treatment. This group loves to come up with catchy titles and doesn’t mind mulling over revisions, like re-ordering sentences or substituting clearer vocabulary.

My other two classes in the same grade level are just starting out with their sites. It’s going to be a bit hairy trying to administer three separate sites all at once - next year we’ll bundle all three classes into one blog instead of giving each class its own. Live and learn!