Words to Live By...

Hey Terps,
I have to share this with you. We had a kid get busted for tagging a desk with gang graffitti, and I had him write about it. This is what he wrote. I think you'll find it....instructive.
Gangs are bad because if you go to someone else's territorie they can shoot you and you can die. I'm sorry that I wrote on your table putting VC I'm really sorry I just felt like writing stuff on table's but the gangs there not good there nothing it will change your life really bad stay away from them make it to college don't be in the street killing people don't do drugs there bad for you it can mess you up the blue, red, yellow, brown, and green are the bad colors the safe color is black so don't go to the streets With them gangs stay in school until you graduate. Taging is bad to if you do it on trains tunnel or other places and you get caught you have to pay a five hundred dollar fine.

Terps, I'd like to nominate the second sentence of this paragraph as the longest sentence in the history of the world. You know what else this is? A bunch of BS. Seriously. This is a kid telling me what he thinks I want to hear. He doesn't mean any of it. I mean, you can tell how much education means to him, right? By the time I was this kid's age I was reading Gone With the Wind and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Now granted, I'm a flipping genius, but still...
Has this kid ever been introduced to punctuation? He did manage to spell most of the words correctly, which is amazing...Sometimes, public education is so damn depressing.
Love, Confusia

Dear Confusia,
Being a public school teacher is bad, because if you go into somebody else's classroom, and ask them to shoot you, no matter how nice you are or how much you whine, they just won't do it. They like to see you suffer. Misery loves company. I'm sorry that I wrote on my application that I "like children" and think that being a public educator would "make a difference". I see now that I was just an idiot in desperate need of income. Let me lay it on the line for you, being a teacher is not good, it's real bad, it'll change your life but for the worst not the best, sometimes you'll think to yourself, "Did I really go to college for this?" and then you'll either start laughing hysterically or bawling and you won't know how to stop and then you'll probably get sucked into taking drugs just to make it through the day, you'll probably start with something like alcohol which you will sneak into your coffee and/or water bottle then the next thing you know your like Ms. Gerhauser, my high school French teacher, who go fired because she was caught shooting up heroin in the teacher's lounge, or at least that kind of rumor will circulate about you and you'll wish that your life was that fucking interesting, but no, you're just a middle school language arts teacher who sometimes comes to school wearing two different shoes because they are similar in appearance and you were half asleep when you left your house and didn't notice until you were standing in front of the class that one of them was brown and the other navy blue, but thankfully both of those are safe colors because they are neutrals, plus none of the kids is paying any attention to you anyway so you could be naked or dressed like a clown and they wouldn't notice. In other words, being a teacher is bad, and if you do anything like drink and drive or kill a kid or something (both of which this field can make you want to do) you might have to pay a fine or something.
Sincerely,
Ms. Terps
P.S. I tried really hard with the run-on sentences. I think my punctuation might be too good though. Sorry!
Yeah, it's hard to be bad on purpose when you're a flipping genius.
Overall, though, I think your essay is outstanding. So, where in the downward spiral are you, Terps? I haven't made it to the alcohol in the coffee stage yet, but I am at the "leave on my lunchbreak to go shoot up the nicotine" stage....ha ha
I haven't made it to any of those yet, nor do I have on two different shoes, but it's the kind of thing I could actually imagine happening. Thankfully testing will be over in 10 minutes and then I will be free from 10:45-12:40. (I love it when my planning period butts up to lunch!) I'm so OVER educating the youth of America...
Speaking of scandalous stuff...What have you been up to lately??? I miss the baseball euphemisms. You need to go do something naughty ASAP! We're getting too boring up in here.