"Are You Scared, Sir?"

In juvenile hall, the students love to scare, to intimidate the new teacher, and they definitely love to play with the sub.

My first day at Central Juvenile Hall, near Downtown Los Angeles, one of the students shouted at me:

"Are you scared, sir?"

Of course I was, but you never let a student in on that, especially criminals on trial trying to fight their fitness hearing.

I got good at snapping back at them

"No," I shouted back, "But you should be." As if, I was a slight figure then, and I am not an imposing figure, although they did take me seriously.

Fear is a powerful motivator in juvenile hall. In the faculty lounge, one of the teachers, a former police officer, was dishing on his first day in the classroom.

"I pushed on kid to the wall and told him: 'If you mess with, I will beat the crap out of you. I'll kill you if I have to.'" I know that I was pretty shook up after what he told me; whether that line worked on hardened gang bangers or not is another story.

In one class, the students came in like a bunch of wildebeest. The teacher next door walked in traumatized, his hands gripping his head in shock. "Those kids drove me crazy," he forced out in his Nigerian accent.

Within five seconds, I was trembling, I even told the teacher I was working with that I was scared -- one of the students heard me! Nothing happened, though. After about ten minutes, I started talking with one of the older students. He was caught up in an attempted murder case in North Torrance. Of course, he didn't do it. Still, I kept my cool as best as I could for the rest of the period. But boy was I scared!

My first day at Los Padrinos, I dealt with a real loudmouth. He was loud, brash, up in people's faces, and he felt justified lecturing to the rest of us not to show any fear.

"Don't let them see you scared," he would tell everybody as the students were lining up for class. He was a really arrogant, too, something like the former cop at Central; but this guy wore a suit, dressed to impress.

I did the same thing, when I wanted to hide how insecure I was. I guess that pretty much explain him, too, especially when he yelled at me after I asked him for something. Like a lot of insecure people, he got angry when other people did not hear him clearly the first time. He gave me a set of papers, he mumbled something, I repeated to clarify, and then he snapped back, "That's what I said!"

My French teacher in high school did the same thing, always having to prove that she was in charge, not liking it one bit if she had to repeat herself, masking a lot of insecurity.

Just like any other school, teachers in the juvenile courts get easily shaken, too.