How September's Looking

So my car died and my sister had a miscarriage and I didn't get a job to start the school year. I trusted that it wouldn't be all bad, though, and the first Friday of the first week of school, I got called for a 4 week fill-in job. Only 4 weeks isn't good, but 4 weeks of work at full teacher pay is badly needed. It's an "Adult Alternative High School" which means kids who dropped out of the normal system paying money to come in and work fairly independently on lessons to get high school diplomas. Almost all of the girls (15 and up) are pregnant or new mothers. At ten minutes to each hour, pretty much every student (all but maybe 3 of 30) goes out for a smoke. Extremely pregnant 15-year-olds smoking in low-cut tops and push up bras and sweatpants stretched drum-tight that say "Naughty" across the butt is starting to look normal and everyday to me. There are a lot of gauged ears, piercings and tattoos of all sorts, including several people with tattoos across their throats and up and down their necks. There's a lot of talk about visits from lawyers, police, abusive ex-boyfriends, parole officers and welfare people. Girls are scared that they'll be thought "bad mothers" and argue about who is a bad mother. I'm teaching a lesbian woman who my father taught in Grade 5 ten years ago. I'm teaching kids who are struggling with following the rules and jumping through the hoops to pass Grade 12 English, who write plays and poetry in their spare time and read John Irving for fun. I'm trying to get 18 year olds with kids named after Greek gods to read two pages of newspaper article and answer the questions, and they get bored and go back to reading "The Fellowship of the Ring" under the table, which they're halfway through. I'm liking it far more than I thought. In high school, I never heard the words "Can I PLEASE get the other books so I can do more work now?!"