Sometimes you just can't stop the violence

"Advisory" is what our school calls homeroom, and it lasts for 25 minutes every day. We're supposed to read with them or do some test practice and stuff, but they know very well they don't get a real grade for this class, so I gave up trying in the third week.

Now they play a game every day called "beat the crap out of each other with paper bats". The boys roll construction paper up into baseball bat shapes and attack each other with it until they all collapse. The girls watch. Then five minutes before the end of the period, they clean up. It is the funniest thing I've ever seen. Today I laughed so hard I was in tears. And I'm so much less stressed out than when I tried to get them to learn every day. There's no malevolence in their beatings. They smile the whole time, and they never attack anybody who's not armed.

Sometimes, as a teacher, you just have to go with the flow. If a lesson ain't working, let it go and try something else. The boys aren't really learning anything, but they're getting out a lot of their pent-up energy so they can concentrate in other classes. And now they really look forward to advisory every day.

If there's a lesson to be learned from this for writing, it's that I have to stop working so hard for every scene to mean something. I usually spend so much time focused on a scene's significance that I'm unhappy with everything, or devoted to an idea that doesn't work. But I really should just relax and let the story tell itself.

Because sometimes, boys just have to beat the crap out of each other.