It was winter… a few years ago.
Winter as an elementary teacher means lots of runny, snotty noses followed by coughs and sneezes. When you teach the little ones, daily life at school becomes a lot of …”Teacher! I love you!!”...”I’m sick!”…cough, sneeze, wipe nose with hand, smear snot on arms, run to teacher to show your undying affection.
In order to combat the germs, we, as a class, did lots of hand washing and desk wiping… and for added fun, and cleanliness, I’d have the kids wipe down their chairs and pencils too. For awhile I even had the students bend down to sneeze on their shoes. It was far better than having them sneeze on their hands and arms and they thought it was a fun game. I actually had the least amount of sick students that year.
But one memory returns to me time and time again and always gives me such a laugh.
The class was busy working on their math assignment for the day. I was rotating around the room assisting students that needed help. My assistants were also roaming around the classroom helping other students that called for aid.
One of my more interesting students, who was always well spoken, clearly had a cold affecting him this day. One of my assistants was counseling this child on cleanliness and the art of using a tissue when one has a runny nose.
“You need to go wash your hands. If you have a runny nose, you need to use a tissue! Don’t sit at your desk and dig and dig and dig…it’s not clean!”
“But I had stuff in my nose that I needed to get out!”
“Well, you have to use a tissue!”
I chuckled to myself as I listened to this conversation in the distance.
So math class continued and a few moments later, I looked over to check on the student with the nose issues. Ever so carefully, he was doing just as he was told: using a tissue to address his runny nose.
He was holding up the tissue as a curtain with one hand, while digging in his nose with the other!
I had to laugh.
Apparently blowing his nose with the tissue just wasn’t going to work, but he wanted to make sure he was doing what he was told and used the tissue.
Kids are so funny.
1 comment:
Kids and snot go hand-in-hand. Never in my life did I think I would ever have to go to Costco to buy tissue paper, but that's what I had to do thanks to my daughter, who has had a drippy nose for what seems like the whole school year thus far, which then gets passed onto my son and then onto my husband. I got the cooties once and hopefully I have an immunity to it now. But oh well, thank goodness Costco carries that big huge thing of tissue paper. We're good to go, for a week anyway.
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