Blowing off Steam

3rd period ended 10 minutes ago.  We finished abouuuuuut 10 minutes of material?  Maybe?  In my 54 minute period.

I don't know what caused it (does anyone ever?) but I had two students who decided they were going to start fighting in the middle of the period.  I looked up, and all of a sudden they were just going at it.  So I rush to the back of the room, pull them apart, and try to maintain what semblance of control over the situation that I could muster.  After I finally get them apart, I call the office (busy, of course), the counseling center (no answer), their parents (1 disconnected, the other no answer) and then back to the office.  They finally answered this time, and they send down a security guard who pulls my students out of class, and takes their referrals to the office.  But of course, my class was all excited over what had just happened, and getting them to focus again was nearly impossible.  In fact, due to how excited they all were about the fight, I ended up having to write 3 more referrals to get specific students out of class.  If you count the one student I had removed before the fight began - that's 6 referrals in one period.  6.

Each referral takes about 2 minutes to write, which totals 12 minutes, and if you add the 10 minutes to sort out the fight itself, and the 5 minutes of trying to get a hold of SOMEBODY, that's already 27 minutes (1/2!) of my class.

And then to make matters better, one of the students left in the classroom tells me "This is why I hate this class - you spend so much time writing referrals, calling parents and giving warnings that we never get anything done."  In my head I'm thinking "I completely agree with you."

She continues to say "This is what you get for breaking that fight up."

Are you for real?  This is what I get for breaking the fight up? And the alternative is...?  Let them keep fighting?  These kids absolutely LIVE for the fight!  I don't understand it at all!  They LOVE it for some reason, and I KNOW that I'm going to hear about it all day, and kids are going to tell me that I should have let them keep fighting.  Maybe next time I'll just join in the fray - I sure feel like it right now.