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In New Orleans it’s called “mess.” That cancerous, manipulative drama that teenage girls get wrapped up in every year. We dealt with our share of it this year at my school, most of it within the seventh grade. It came to a head with two strong-willed young ladies yelling from behind their desks, exchanging threats and insults.

This past February, our school abandoned the traditional Valentine’s Day love note exchange, opting instead to encourage school-wide participation in a new activity we called the “Valentine’s Day Apology Note Project.”

In a recent discussion about a history reading, I asked students if they understood the need to think critically about what we read, even if the reading is labeled “historical.”

Rodrigue drove me nuts. He stood too close and talked too much. If his hand was raised and I didn’t call on him, his face would contort and he would put his head down on his desk. He answered questions with a “know-it-all” tone that the other students (and I) found obnoxious.

Karl paused at the classroom doorway, his thin face pinched with apprehension as he stared down the hallway. “Is everything all right?” I asked. Startled, he looked at me almost guiltily. “Uh—I’m fine. Everything’s fine.” Karl risked being late by the time he darted out.

It happened again today. I was standing in the cafeteria when I heard the dreaded sound of yelling, chairs scraping the floor and students scurrying for cover coming from the other side of the room. Food fight. Ugh. I rushed over to find french fries, ketchup and peaches everywhere and students complaining about another destroyed lunch.

The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq marked my first year of teaching. When one of my students referred to Iraqis as “towel heads,” I told him he had to do extra homework researching turbans and present a report to me the next day. It took him a week to complete the assignment, and instead of gaining insight and compassion for a different group of people, he probably just became more resentful. I now see this as a lost opportunity. As a precursor to our social studies unit on conflict in the Middle East, I taught a unit this year on world religions. We started off studying seven of the world’s major faiths and then narrowed it down to the three Abrahamic religions: Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

"Don't Be a Bystander,” says one of the anti-bullying posters created by Tualatin High School students. It’s an important message for students to hear. In an effort to combat the growing bullying crisis, Teacher Rachel Robinson showed her advanced digital arts classes Teaching Tolerance’s film, “Bullied: A Student, a School and a Case That Made History.”

In our kindergarten classroom, there are no desks. Instead, we have three large, child-sized tables, around which 20 children and three teachers can fit. We call it the writing table. Here, students can draw, write and complete phonics-based workbooks. One morning, Greta was drawing a picture of something that had happened the day before: She and her friend Lily had made bird nests during outside recess and had placed them all throughout the yard. Greta was illustrating herself and Lily making nests. Her classmate Ellie watched her create the drawing.

Emotions can be frightening for all of us, especially for children. But if students don’t have the vocabulary to express their feelings, they may turn to acting out. This fails to resolve the feelings and makes a teacher’s life much more difficult.