Noteworthy.

I had the worst tour of my (admitedly rather short) touring career some time ago. I went down and pickup up a group of Special Ed. kids between the ages of thirteen and seventeen who were in summer school from flags to take them on a tour of the Museum. One thing that I have to explain; there are two kinds of Special Ed. kids in the public school system: the first is the kind where they're perfectly good kids who just need a bit of help learning, and the second is the kind who are basically juvenile deliquants who can't be trusted to be in the same classroom as normal kids because they cause too much trouble. These kids were of the later kind. As I took them to the first exhibit--never let it be said that I didn't answer when duty called--two of them almost got into a fight. One of them accidently brushed up against another and before I had the chance to blink they were standing on their toes, chest to chest with their arms out to the side getting ready to duke it out right then and there (if you've seen it before, then you know what I'm talking about...otherwise you have to see it in person to get the idea), shouting "you wnna mess wi me? you wanna MESS?" Anyway, between myself and their teachers we managed to get them to calm down enough to not hit each other and kept moving into the whale room. Things in the whale room went pretty smoothly, but trouble struck again in the hall of biodiversity. One of the kids got distracted by one of the computers and started playing with it while I was talking when his teacher told him to stop and pay attention he turned to her and started yelling, "I'll kill you! I'll Kill you! I'll KILL you!" apparently this wasn't unusal because it didn't bother her much.
I'm just lucky that I went to Wagner for a while. At Wagner, they don't really bother sepparating these kids from the normal ones any more than they have to, so I learned how to deal with them...and it served me well here. My friend Noelle who got the other half of the tour group wasn't so lucky. She's an ivy league college girl who has never set foot in a public school in her life. She's also about five feet tall. The guys kept on hitting on her, draping their arms over her and saying stuff like, "you can take wherever you like, girl." Basically, she got eaten alive.