Starting the week on Valentine's Day should have made for a nice, fun week, right? Especially knowing that I didn't have to cook dinner on Monday night. And so many people came to school that day dressed in pink, my happy color!
But things started to look a little fishy on Tuesday morning. It was pajama day, but despite wearing my pajamas, the atmosphere didn't seem very calm and relaxed. I had a previous student from about ten years ago observing me via Zoom while I tried to keep my class of antsy 7 year olds in their routine despite all wearing pajamas instead of their normal standard uniform. (When you teach at a school with uniforms, any kind of free dress day makes the kids act like it's Halloween, and any teacher can tell you how difficult teaching on Halloween can be.) Anyway, we reviewed our vocabulary, read our story, asked questions and made life applications, then a small group went out with another teacher, I called a single student to work with me at my table, and the rest of the kids went back to work on a computer program at their seats, knowing restroom time would come in about 20 minutes.
But then the drama began.
A student had complained of a stomach ache (as second graders do often), and I sent him to the restroom. But then he returned to my table to tell me he felt like he was going to throw up. Why I didn't send him back to the restroom or tell him to keep the trashcan near, I don't know. Probably because the focus has been on COVID for so long that I forgot there are other ailments that kids get. So I told him to wait a second while I wrote him a pass for the nurse. But in the five seconds it took me to grab the pass to write his name, he started to vomit all over the floor in front of the doorway. And I'll just be honest with you, it always takes me a few seconds to process and respond to pretty much anything. By the time I grabbed a trashcan and gave it to him, telling him to walk with the trash can all the way to the nurses office, my entire doorway was a big pool of vomit. And as the door closed behind him, we were trapped inside with that pukey sight and smell until clean up arrived.
Except that the nurse called for someone to bring the kids' backpack so he could go home, meaning I had to send a student to bravely jump across the vomit pool to take the backpack to the office. Oh, and my small group that worked with the other teacher came back and knocked on the door, meaning I had to find another brave soul to try to open the door for them, and then those three students freaked out and didn't want to come back in the room.
And don't forget, I had a college student sitting there observing me on the other side of the screen.
What a mess.
Clean up finally arrived, and we finally got to leave the room for our normal restroom break. Needless to say, not much focus or learning happened during the last half of that Reading time. Took us quite a while to settle back down.
Later that day, another teacher saw me in the hallway and warned me that a stomach bug was going around and was very contagious. I had parent conferences scheduled all week, and I had just confirmed an appointment for Thursday. When she said that, the thought crossed my mind, "I hope I don't have to cancel that Thursday appointment because I'm sick."
Well, thankfully, Wednesday went much smoother. It was cowboy day, so I enjoyed wearing my boots that David got me and the black cowboy hat that David had gotten Mike for Christmas. I got a lot of complements on it all day long. My conferences all went smoothly, even the one I had to do by phone for the kid who had gone home sick the day before. His mom said he threw up all day, ran a fever that night, but that he was much better the second day and would return to school on Thursday.
I got home, ate a quick dinner of leftovers, and went to ReEngage. I was home and in bed by nine, only to be awakened two hours later with an uneasy stomach. Ugh. Within an hour, I was puking my guts out--all night long.
So much for parent conferences the rest of the week, because I missed both Thursday and Friday trying to recover.
Here's to hoping for a better week this week, still filled with college student observations, more parent conferences, and lots of required testing. Never a dull moment, for sure.
So far it's starting off well, with a morning coffee date with David before he went back to school today (he came home to switch out trucks and finish a project with his dad on his own truck).
