To Hell and Back

So the past three or four weeks I've been teaching without air conditioning. That's right. It's May. No air conditioning. A little background: as some of you may be aware, JPS passed a bond referendum this past schoolyear. The vast majority (maybe all?) of the money my school is receiving is going to renovations, which I think is a pretty good move. One of the first things we're doing is fixing the air conditioning. Our current air conditioner blows. Not literally. Pretty much all the knobs are torn off, so you have to use either pliers or a key to turn the air conditioner on and off. The school cannot control the air either. We have to make a call downtown, get it approved, and they have to change it at central office, which usually takes at least two days. I don't know if they don't pay attention to our requests, or we don't make the requests, but half the time the air conditioner is doing the wrong thing. It was turned onto heat when it was still burning up in October. It was turned onto air in early March. So we're finally going to be getting control over our own air with this new system, but it takes 60 days to redo the old system. So we had a choice: no air in May, or no air in August. We chose May. This means that for about 3 weeks, starting at about 10 am, it was probably at least 85 degrees in my room. And I had to teach. To kids who had already taken SATP tests. And who already fall asleep when we read. It was fun. I mean, the kids already thought school was finished. And, apparently, they were finished with work in their other classes. So if I tried to teach a lesson, I got several variations of the same basic response: "Man, I ain't doin' no work when it hot." Sometimes it came with more vulgarities to preface it ("GawdDAMN, when you gowna leave me 'lone?"). Sometimes it came with just a roll of an eye or a swing of an arm in the general direction of my voice. But invariably, it came. I think I started to push my luck, and would walk around to poke sleeping students in the face with paper or pencils. Much to the amusement of myself, I don't think the joviality was reciprocated.
Nevertheless, at one point during one of the worst hot spells (and expectedly, during my last and hottest class of the day), the administration came over the intercom to make an announcement that went something like this:
"Good afternoon faculty and staff, and please excuse this interruption. There has been a water pipe in the building that has just broken. We are in the process of shutting off all the water in the building. Please do not allow any students to leave your class to use the restroom or go to the waterfountain. Thank you."
This was at about 2:15, which means we still had another hour and twenty minutes left in class. And we had just come back from lunch. And I had four pregnant girls in my classroom. Ah, the joys of teaching.