Teacher vs. teenage furies: The floor always wins

I’ve never been much for fisticuffs.

I was beaten up often enough as a child by my loving older brothers that I didn’t need to go roaming the streets looking for trouble.

Of course, in Drexel in the 1960s, I could have roamed the streets for weeks looking for trouble and never found it.

We did have a nekkid woman run down the middle of Main Street one warm summer evening back in ’66 or ’67, but that’s a column for another day.

My physical size was also prime motivation for me to be a man of peace.

My freshman year in high school I stood 6-foot-3 and weighed maybe 120 pounds.

Fear in an opponent I would not inspire. Break me in half with little effort, he could.

The only fight I can ever remember being a part of was with my friend Larry Settlemyre in front of the long-since torn down Drexel Elementary School in the spring of 1965 when we were both in fourth grade.

As I said, we were buds, and I have no idea why we suddenly were swinging at each other while a quickly gathered crowd of raucous rabble and loathsome degenerates stood in a circle and cheered us on.

Things must have de-escalated quickly for I don’t remember being seized by the gendarmes and hauled to the principal’s office.

My life went along peacefully — barring the summer afternoon when a neighbor kid sliced open the side of my head with a well-aimed rock — for the following 34 years.

And then, I became a public school teacher.

Hired by principal Rick Sherrill at East Burke High School in the summer of 1999, I was told my primary duties were to teach writing and composition, literature, and public speaking.

Not mentioned was another primary chore — serve as the first line of defense to keep students from killing each other when the inevitable brawl erupted in the classroom, the cafeteria, or the crowded hallway.

I taught for the next 18 years. And each year, I was in the middle of a couple of fights a year.

And nearly all of them were “girl fights.”

One memorable incident at East Burke saw me struggling to separate two girls who were pretty darned serious, especially the one brawler who had removed one of her high-heeled shoes and was ferociously pounding the other pugilist in the brain with it.

We all three ended up on the floor.

Another dreary winter afternoon, with a pounding rain falling, saw me hurrying along the covered walkway between the math and social studies building back to the friendly confines of the English Department.

Focused on making it to my next class I was oblivious to the violent episode happening 20 feet to my right until a student grabbed me and said, “Mr. Poteat, you better do something.”

There, in the rain, a young woman, enraged by jealousy, was doing her very best to beat her “boyfriend” to death.

For a moment, I hesitated.

The temp was in the 40s. Rain was falling heavily. I was warm. I was dry.

Duty won out over good sense. I hurried to save the boyfriend’s life.

We all three ended up in the mud.

Fast forward a few years and I’m now at Draughn High — a smaller and supposedly safer school.

At class change, I was headed from the media center back to Room 615, rounded a corner, and walked straight into a girl-on-girl brawl.

This one, however, was serious.

One girl had a sawed-off pencil wedged between the middle fingers on her right hand and was trying to punch the other girl in the face with the weapon.

I was struggling to wrench the pencil-wielding assailant away from her victim when Brett Huffman, a young social studies teacher, came to my aid.

We all four ended up on the floor.

Took me a while to get over that one.

My final altercation came in the late spring of 2016. I was 60 years old.

My class of senior honor students, whom I really enjoyed, was in the media center, preparing for their senior project presentations in just a few short weeks.

I was kneeling beside a student, going over her PowerPoint presentation with her, when I heard a ruckus behind me.

Two girls, neither one of whom I would have thought capable of violence, were going at it tooth and nail.

I wrapped the one nearest to me in a bear hug and began dragging her backward. As she struggled to escape my grasp and return to the fray, we both fell, hard, on the thinly carpeted floor. My back would be sore for weeks.

Looking back on it now, I suppose it’s a little ironic.

A fellow who spent most of his life avoiding a good fight somehow managed to spend nearly two decades right in the middle of them.

Not by choice, mind you. When teenagers decide to settle their differences with fists, high-heeled shoes, or sharpened pencils, the nearest adult automatically becomes part of the proceedings, whether he likes it or not.

I never won any of those fights. I never lost one either.

Mostly, I just ended up on the floor.

Which, when you think about it, is probably the most accurate job description of a public school teacher that nobody ever bothers to put in the contract.