Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire How to Stop Kids from a Fist Fight

Anybody that knows the words to "I'll stand by you" should have a mancave

you live in nola they were probably black you should have given them a gun and got them started off right,

Folks who ain't done it commonly underestimate the complex set of skills needed to operate a school bus.

I quit driving when they wanted to do random blood pressure checks and then insist you take medication if you were what they thought was over. That and the fact that they started to charge the usual $50 an hour for the bus even if you drove it yourself (used to be $0.65 a mile if I drove myself, and a school bus is the PERFECT vehicle to haul a bunch of kids and camping gear).

What always got me was traffic lights. Empty, a school bus practically stops on a dime. Fill it with 40 high school kids and its a whole diff'rent ballgame. A light could turn yellow a ways out and it would STILL be all you could do to stop before it turned red.

Birdwatcher

Good job.

My route is 30 (well it's 9 miles to my first stop, so it's 21'ish with kids aboard) miles and not a single stoplight the entire route. Brakes are air brakes, which helps a bunch.

My bus also has air conditioning, which is also a STRONG motivational tool.

Indeed, matter of fact me and another teacher hauled thirty kids to the coast just last weekend. Seven hours total on the bus, no air conditioning..... but on the innerstate with the windows down it ain't so bad.

Beside no A/C, for years school buses had unsynchronized manual transmissions; lots of double-clutching and gear-grinding on them old monsters. Driving it in town you'd spend so much time wrestling with the transmission rather than watching the road and the kids that I always felt it was a major safety issue.

Got mixed feelings about giving it up, but driving just on field trips maybe five-six times a year I never did drive enough to get really good at it and from the driver's seat on them longer buses it seems like that back end just goes on forever.

Once up in Fredericksburg on a field trip I was backing a bus around in a McDonald's parking lot while the kids ate. This old farmer passing by in a pickup suddenly starts honking his horn. I hit the brakes and looked all irritated at him, he just looked back at me like I was retarded.

I looked back to reverse some more and I was like two inches from taking out a streetlight pole in front of the kids, some parents and a couple of other teachers. Don't think I ever would have lived that down.

Birdwatcher

I was going to link Roger Miller's Kansas City Star song but something is haywire with my computer and I am not getting any sound and I did not want to link until I listened. It is one of my favorites by Roger. miles

And yes the volume is turned up, some other glitch.

I don't think there is such a thing as a bad Roger Miller song. And everyone of them is easy to sing. Dad used to sing King of the Road all the time and we always sang along. That's probably my favorite.

When I was a kid, the bus driver would assign bad kids the the seat directly behind him.

Seems that by the second week of school, that's where I always sat....(GRIN!) Borne to be baaaaad....

Virgil B.

Gotta hand it to you Scott. There is a special place in heaven for school bus drivers.

That's a good thing you did Steelhead!!!! Hopefully they will make you their mentor......

I have the Pre-K kids sit in the first row, but do try to bring up the 'bad' kids. Truth is, there ain't a bad kid in the group. They are all kids being kids and it's hard to blame them for that.

It is an interesting dynamic having kids from 4 to 17 on one bus.

If you ever hear someone say that all their problems are behind them you can assume they are a school bus driver...

Ain't no different than a Chicago school bus...... Except in Chicago they're all in the first grade.......

Strong Work!

You need a tape of Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Dueling Banjo's!