On the Lost Art of Knife Fighting

In which stories are told, scars revealed and no actual fighting takes place.

When people find out that I have worked, in a number of capacities, with middle school students¹ there are usually two responses.  Response #1: Wow, that’s amazing, I could never work with kids that age.  Response #2: I hated middle school.  Usually, response one is tied to response two.  But let’s focus on response one for today.

There are certainly times when working with middle school students is a huge headache.  But there are times when they do or say things that make it all worth it.  This week…worth it.
On Tuesday I had a mole removed from just under my right eye.  In order to keep me from, you know, bleeding to death some stitches were utilized to close up the wound.  The result was as follows. So now I’m walking through the hallways and lunchroom rocking this sweet stitched up gash.  I figured at some point one of the students would ask where the stitches came from, it finally happened during lunch.  When the first kid asked I told her that I was in a fist fight, she didn’t believe me.  Another table of guys asked me what happened and I told them that I had been in a knife fight.  Now I really didn’t think that they would believe me, it is pretty preposterous.  ‘Really?’ they asked me.  I stuck with my story and told them yes.

Other questions followed.  Did I win? Who was the guy?  Where did we fight?  Is he dead?  My answers: I won, some dude, over on the west side of town, and I wasn’t sure I didn’t stick around to check.  I didn’t really think anything would come of the conversation but later in the day I was helping out with a gym class and one of the kids asked me, “Did you really get those stitches in a knife fight?”  I told him absolutely I did, the kids turned and said to his friends, “Oh man, he said that he did.”  It was pretty great.

Jumping to today at lunch the same table of kids that I had the first knife fighting conversation with asked me if I was in a fight club.  I told them no, I wasn’t.  Later I was covering a science class and one of the kids was from that table and way jazzed that I was there.  When a different student asked what happened he, and some others students all announced, “knife fight.”  The class then spiraled into a conversation about my knife fight.  They wanted to know what type of knife I used?  A knife fighting knife.  Was it long or short?  Short, long knives are swords and it wasn’t a sword fight.  Who did I fight? François Le’Monjello.  If they google the name will it come up?  Well, now it might. They asked me again if the other guy was dead.  I stuck with I don’t know.

So now I am the knife fighting teacher. Which, in the realm of things to be known for by students I could do a lot worse than the teacher who knife fights.  I’ll be interested to see how long this lasts, and how long the story can keep going.  I’ve decided to come up with some pearls wisdom to pass along to anyone who asks².  Here is what I have come up with so far.

Lessons about knife fighting: 1) Don’t bring a knife to a gun fight³. 2) Don’t google image search “knife fight,” ever⁴. 3) The idea of a monkey-knife fight always makes me laugh.  That’s pretty much all I have right now, I’ll let you know if I come up with anything else.
I’m also considering spreading the rumor that I had to get stitched up because while I was juggling kittens one got away from me and caught me with a claw.
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¹ Or junior high students if you are one in the early 90s.
² I actually won't tell the kids any of these.
³ You're muck'in with a G here, pal!
⁴ You did it didn't you.