I don’t know; maybe it’s just me. I read in today’s Detroit Free Press about a mom who shoved her 4-year old daughter in the oven. “I’m sick,” she told the 31st District Court.

And rightfully so: She’d been cut off from her expensive antipsychotic medication and, in her daughter’s words, “tried to bake me like a turkey.”

As sad as this is, I don’t want to prejudge anyone. Instead, I want to talk about the controlled environment I work in called PRISON.

I had my first full week dealing with mentally disturbed inmates. I’m not sure exactly how us academic teachers are supposed to react, but given the circumstances, I think we coped fairly well.

Maybe it’s just me, but I’m not sure placing these inmates into our classrooms before their files arrived, before they’d had their orientation (if they’ll have one at all), was such a great idea. Maybe it’s just me, but I think I would’ve waited to make a more informed decision about enrolling them in school.

When my new students arrived, we were cautious. One student in a short-sleeved shirt, obviously a cutter, displayed his self-inflicted wounds, and smiling, pulled his skin taut with 10-inches of stitching along his rightside cheek. He lasted one day. Since I’m responsible for my students’ whereabouts and he never showed for Day 2, I wrote his name on the absence list. Here’s what I got back: Needs to be re-evaluated. Upon further investigation I found out that he kept pulling those stitches out of his face.

On my third day of class one of my heavily medicated new students fell out of his chair and had a seizure. My students made sure the tables and chairs were cleared away while I rolled him onto his side and made sure he had a pulse and could breathe. When the nurse showed up she asked me if he’d been known to have seizures. I’m sure you already know how I wanted to respond—Fuck if I know, he just got here—but I said nothing.

I could go on, but I won’t. It is was it is and I do get paid.