Granted, this duty is a little more stressful and trying with older students who present more of a threat to a fight mediator. I still feel like more of a teacher on this side of that incident.
A particular child in one of my fourth grade classes was not paying attention. Instead of helping to recite the months of the year and instead of demonstrating knowledge of ordinal numbering in dates, he was using a compass and protractor to crush what I think was pencil lead but looked like it could have also been terra cotta—children will always have their mysteries. After the fleeting thought questioning what the hell he was doing passed through my head, I confiscated the protractor and the ground led/terra cotta. As I was returning to the raised podium at the front of the class, another child (sitting directly in front of the one crushing the mysterious substance) said something in Chinese and handed me The Crusher’s compass. I took it and attempted to resume class by throwing a ball to yet another student and by asking, “What day is your birthday?”
Before an answer, The Crusher had gotten out of his seat, assumed a look of ire, and had seized the lapel of the student who had gotten The Crusher’s compass confiscated as well. (The second child’s self-appointed name, by the way, is Bobo: “Like the clown!”) For a few milliseconds, I bemusedly reflected on how traditional of a way this was to start a fight. For a few more milliseconds, I expected to hear The Crusher shout something like: “You swine! I challenge you to a duel, you nefarious fiend.” And for a few more milliseconds, I placed internal bets on how quickly the fight would end given the fact that The Crusher was one of the smaller children in the class (maybe 4’ and 40-ish pounds) and that Bobo was one of the heftier children in the class (maybe 4’ 5” and 80-ish pounds).
Still, not a second passed before I jumped off the raised podium and began pulling The Crusher off of Bobo—who was barely exerting effort to resist The Crusher’s challenge. The tenacious Crusher through a punch that landed right on Bobo’s left ear; still seated, Bobo pushed The Crusher into the desks across the narrow aisle. I stepped up my intervention a notch, seeing that my restraint of force for the sake of not accidentally hurting the students may actually result in them hurting themselves through an escalation of force.
I pried The Crusher’s hands off of Bobo’s lapel and lifted The Crusher by his own lapel with my right arm while holding Bobo back with a stiff-left-arm. As The Crusher thrashed futilely while dangling in the air, the class laughed at his expense. The Crusher punched me in the chest.
