If you have a squeamish stomach, or if you find certain topics better left in the dark, you should probably skip this week’s post. I taught first grade. I have a very high tolerance for extreme grossness. I can watch My Feet Are Killing Me while eating dinner and never look away. It is a rare and very un-lucrative talent. I was just telling a friend the other day that my talents are so poorly highlighted by my current job. I really should work for a circus. Anyway, this week I am reminiscing about a few of the stories from my classroom days that are really not very delicate. You have been warned.
The first occurred while I was on inside reccess duty. I could just stop there. Inside recess duty in the first grade hall is scary and gross. But, there was more to it on this particular day. It was winter and we had been inside a lot. To mix it up a little, we had the classrooms set up as different activities. One room had a movie going. One room had board games. One room had arts and crafts. You get the idea. The children could go from room to room and play with friends from different classrooms. The friends in their own classrooms were all on their nerves and there was much bickering. This was an idea to save our sanity. It had been working quite nicely. I was walking down the hallway and everyone seemed pretty content. That is, until I passed by the restrooms. I stopped dead in my tracks as a huge roar of high-pitched screams came from the girls’ bathroom and about ten tiny first graders came running out of the restroom and straight at me. At first, I had no idea what they were saying because they all spoke at once. The only word I was picking up on was blood. This was not good. None of them appeared to be bleeding however. I shushed them as best I could and asked the one who appeared to be the most rational seven year-old to tell me what had happened. With her eyes as big as saucers, she explained that there was a dead mouse in the toilet and it was all bloody. She said you could see it’s tail. At this point, I really wished that I had not been the teacher they had found in the hallway. I don’t like mice and I don’t like blood. But, I had to be the grown-up. Crap. I went to the girls’ bathroom. It was obvious which stall contained the mouse-infested toilet. A large crowd of new observers were now squealing at it’s door. I shooed all of the girls out of the bathroom, assuring them that I would take care of the mouse. Of course, I had no intention of touching a mouse. I was going to put a trash can in front of the door and call the custodian. But I did want to take a peek to make sure that it was a real mouse and not a toy mouse. Being the brave adult that I was, I put my hand over my eyes and peeked in the toilet through my fingers. I did see blood and I did see what looked like a tail. A twisted tail. Like a piece of yarn or rope. I opened my fingers a little more. OMG. It was a tampon! One of the teachers must have flushed a tampon and it didn’t flush all the way. All that you could really see was the string and a little blood at the bottom of the toilet. I wanted to laugh and laugh, but the children would think I was laughing over a poor dead mouse. I calmly flushed the toilet and the tampon mouse went away. I went back out and told the girls that the poor mouse must have fallen in the toilet and bumped his head and drowned. I flushed him down. They were very dramatic about it. Many tears were shed about the poor dear.
My next story also occurred at inside reccess. I am so glad that I no longer have inside reccess duty. It is so traumatizing. This day was close to the beginning of the school year. This was a really long time ago. At that time, we were using Box It, Bag It Math and Math Their Way. Anyone remember those? We had tubs full of colorful dry pasta, old keys, playing cards, bottle caps, counting bears, and assorted other tubs of math manipulatives. The children LOVED the math manipulatives. Some teachers would let their students get the tubs out during inside recess. In one of the classes I was watching during my duty this particular day, the children had out lots of math tubs. One of the tubs was full of toothpicks. The tub was pretty big, and it was filled to the brim with toothpicks. The children used them to build things. There were about four little boys who were surrounded by all of these math tubs. One of the boys decided to get up. He was probably going to get up to pull another math tub off of the shelf. When he decided to get up, he put both of his hands on the ground to push himself up. Only one of his hands did not actually go on the ground because there were too many tubs around him. It went into the toothpick tub. He put all of his body weight onto his hands and pushed himself up. I heard the scream. I ran down to the room and I saw him holding his hand out to the other boys. Their mouths were all opened wide. His hand was impaled by about twenty toothpicks. They were quite deep. The poor boy’s face was very pale. I think mine was probably more pale when I saw his hand though. I can’t remember if I picked him up or if I made him walk with me, but we raced to the nurse’s office. The teachers who saw me in the hallway swear my feet never touched the ground the whole way. I have never moved so fast in my entire life. When the nurse took him from me, I left her office about as fast as I had entered it and just started shaking like a leaf. I was not going to hang around when she pulled those toothpicks out. If it had been up to me, we would have called an AirEvac helicopter and sent the poor boy to the hospital where he could have had general anethesia. I know I needed general anesthesia. I went to my classroom and took my toothpick tub and deposited it into the trashcan. Toothpicks still make me queasy.
My last story might just be my favorite funny story from my teaching career. It is highly inappropriate, but so dang funny. At this time, I was an Instructional Facilitator. I had an office in an elementary building. Tfhis event occurred on an evening when the building I worked in was hosting parent-teacher conferences. Obviously, no parents came to see me, but it was a good time for me to get some office work done. My office was inside the front office of the school. Conferences started at 5:00 PM. We kept the school doors locked until that time because we always had parents who would arrive really early and teachers needed time to eat a quick dinner and maybe even run their own children home after school. When the front doors were opened at 5:00, a flood of families would come through the door and head to the teachers’ rooms. I was in my office working this particular night, when a woman came into the front office at around 5:05 PM. I heard her ask the secretary if the nurse was available. The secretary always tried to be a good screener for all of us, so she asked why the lady needed to see the nurse. Did she have an appointment? No. The lady said she needed a change of clothes. This made me perk my ears up. Why would an adult need a change of clothes in an elementary school? The secretary was very sweet, so she inquired to see if the woman needed a change of clothes for one of her children. No. The woman needed a change of clothes for herself. By this time, the nurse had stepped out of her office. Clearly she was interested in this story, too. When the lady saw the nurse, she just started telling her story. Apparently, she had been horribly constipated for quite a while. She went into detail about the remedies that she had tried at home, to no avail. Then this morning, she had ended up at the emergency room. The doctor there had given her an enema and warned her to go straight home because it would work right away. Because she had experienced no success with her previous treatments, she had little hope for the enema. She was sure she would be able to attend conferences before going home. Well, as she was standing our front waiting for the doors to open, she felt a little movement in her bowels. She knew she needed a bathroom. When the doors opened, she had hoped she would make it down the hall to the restrooms, but that did not happen. She pooped right in the foyer. I had never left my office, but I felt like I might have been on some sort of pranking TV show at this point. This could not be real! But the nurse took her back into her office and tried to find her clothes that would fit. I came out of my office to look at the secretary to see if this was all legit. The look on her face told me it was. But it gets better! About five minutes after the lady went into the nurse’s office to clean up, the principal came into the front office. He did not know about the lady in the nurse’s office. The secretary and I were standing there when he blew into the office and yelled, “Call the custodian. Some kid sh*t right in the foyer! All of the parents are having to step over a pile of sh*it when they come in the building!” The lady was less than 15 feet from him. The secretary and I both tried to shush him and I pulled him out into the pooh-infested foyer to explain the situation to him. We covered the “area” with paper towels and put up cones until the custodian could get there. When the poor lady was cleaned up and safely on her way home, we laughed for so long about that. I can still see the principal storming into the office and asking us to call the custodian. That was an all-time classic.
I hope you made it to the end. If you did, you might have a strong enough stomach to manage first grade lunch duty! Maybe I will tell you about that one day. Do you know all of the different ways a seven year-old can eat a corn dog? It’s not pretty.
