Ignorance in Your High School Principal; My Trip to His office

I walked into his office. The look on his face was distasteful. He made me feel inferior to him. Not the way you should feel around your high school principal. I didn’t feel welcome, or even accepted. His beady eyes burned holes in my skin. I sat. He gazed into my tired eyes, and he asked me the following, "What’s going on?" How am I supposed to respond to this sort of question? If I say "nothing," it’s a given that there is something. However, if I try to speak with him about anything, it will be like talking to a brick wall. Authority figures never have any compassion. They care only about the person that rules them. In this case it would be the superintendent.

I reply with a comment which is very versatile, "Not much, and yourself?" He gives me a look of disappointment. The kind of look you get when your parents find out you’ve been skipping school for the whole first semester. He turns his back to me. I hate it when they do that. They always think you are going to be sitting there waiting for them to turn around. Like you think they are the most important person in the world. I don’t do that though, I just admire all the hoaky pictures and quotes on his white walls. Yeah, if he actually believed in all these sayings he wouldn’t be working here, I think.

Suddenly, I feel my ears begin to burn. I try to do a play by play in my head of what I am going to say to him. I don’t know why I do that, it never helps. I always end up shooting off my mouth, and getting into trouble. He turns back around and informs me that I was absent this past Friday. LIKE I don’t know. He tells me I have to serve seven hours of detention. "Excuse me, Mr. Principal, Sir..." I begin. Only to be cut off with another, "I don’t want to hear it." I shut my mouth and let him ramble on. I have a lot of better things to do with my time, I think to myself. Listening to people you really don’t care to listen to is quite boring. So, I let my mind wander. I think of how many runs I could be snowboarding down at this very moment. I think about what I need to get when I go shopping tomorrow after school. I think about what Katie said about skipping. Finally, I become increasingly bored and begin to conjugate everything he is saying to me, from English into Spanish. I am always doing this. It’s like a game for me, I like to test myself, and believe it or not, it helps me in class.

When he is through with his spiel I speak up again, "Sir, I had a note for Friday." "Yeah, we’ll see about that." is coldly shot back into my face. This is the part I love. I know that I turned in a note to him, and now he is going to be wrong. Something I always like to witness, I like to see people like him show some humility once in a while.

After waiting in the office for what seams like hours, he returns. "Oh, you did have a note for Friday, nevermind about that then." he says. He doesn’t even apologize for wrongly accusing me. What a jerk. The nerve some people have. So there I sit, the bad little girl in the principal’s office. The girl with the attitude. The girl with the "chip on her shoulder." The girl with the screwed up family.

He regains his position in his desk. He hides behind his little playing field. His desk is cluttered with detention, ISS, and make-up slips. It’s truly a disaster, how unprofessional, I think. He informs me that I have five hours of detention to make up. He would like to schedule them now. I think for a minute. I can’t schedule them, because I don’t even know my own schedule. I sit there, and he repeats himself, "When do you want to make these up?" As with all other authority figures, he repeats himself. I sit. "I can come in tomorrow morning and schedule them. I am very sorry, but I don’t know my schedule at this point and time." Again, he repeats himself, "I need these scheduled now."

I look up at him with a "Who are YOU?" look. I don’t even know this person, and he is telling me that I have to schedule these detentions now. I once again remind him that I don’t have my schedule for next week yet. He won’t take my answer. I feel my face begin to burn. I feel all of my frustrations from the past six