for the love of a woman...

A few weeks ago I was with a special ed boy in another second-grade class at another school. It was “math day”, meaning the classes rotated between rooms for 30-minute sessions of fun math games using dice and dominoes. Fun stuff. The air was filled with math facts, but also an undercurrent of love-triangle intrigue. I caught wind of the facts a little at a time. Davage was planning to fight Tyler at recess for the attentions of Mia. Riddick, Davage’s best friend, was planning to protect him, although Tyler was intending not to protect himself, thinking it to be futile anyway. I did what I could to tone down the escalating animosity, pointing out that no girl was worth it, in these modern times Mia should choose herself and would probably be turned off by their fighting anyway, and they’d both be in trouble (no stranger to either one of them—I’d been around them both enough to be sure of that much). I suspected this was mostly all talk, and that nothing would really happen at recess, but I alerted the teacher as to what was coming down, since I would not be with the class then. When the class came back from recess, 15 minutes late, I wondered what had happened. The whole class was miffed. But all talk of fighting had ceased as everybody’s “miffness” was directed toward Jhalissa, the girl who ignored the bell and kept on playing, costing them all their afternoon recess. Perhaps that was the best outcome of all, uniting the feuding boys against a common enemy. I just hoped they didn’t plan to gang up on Jhalissa after school…