Toeing The Line

Are you ever afraid somebody will find your blog by Googling specific keywords? I know this might come as a shock to you, what with my blog popping up for people searching for Apollo 18 spoiler alert, skank reptile photo, gooey duck, and sandra bullock butt. But I don't feel like taking chances. I don't live life on the edge. So I will attempt to tell my tale without using certain terms. Please bear with me.

Each workday is a series of points on a learning curve. I try to instill in my students the difference between being a student, and being a teacher. As in, some rights are inherent to teachers, but not students. Such as being the leader of the classroom. The one who establishes the rules. It's not a free-for-all, with equal rights enjoyed by all.

With a few minutes left in class, I mentioned some current events that I'd read about or seen on the news. Such as Venus and Jupiter being so close in the evening sky. The upcoming anniversary of the submersion of a giant ocean liner. They shared a few stories. And I mentioned one I read that morning concerning a young lass who was in litigation with a medical facility in a southern state that juts out into the ocean, over a heartbreaking health care faux pas. It seems that a female professional in that facility, in attempting to sever some intravenous tubing in an infant, inadvertently severed instead the smallest digit of said infant's wee mitt.

And if that wasn't bad enough, just last week I saw on the news a story of another unfortunate cherub who had his smallest digit gnawed off by a newly-weaned canine as his maternal unit snoozed on the divan right next to him. And when a friend woke her and informed her that her son had red cells, plasma, and platelets all over him, the maternal unit swore that the bambino had never uttered a sound. And furthermore, when she could not find the digit, she dialed emergency services.

Both were horrendous stories. And I raised the question as to how these folks in charge could not KNOW THAT SOMETHING WAS TERRIBLY AMISS. Seriously. Wouldn't a normal person catch on, and put a stop to the horror before it reached fruition?

The class agreed. But one objected to the news items. She demanded that I cease such storytelling, because she could not stand to hear about the separation of minute digits from their rightful owners. I suggested she not listen. After all, Mrs. Hillbilly Mom's voice is routinely tuned out by countless adolescents on a daily basis. Still, she objected. In fact, she rushed my control center with the threat of removing her footgear and placing her tootsies upon me, as I have previously voiced my aversion to human paws.

Can you see how wrong this tactic is? She, however, could not. First of all, I pointed out that she did not have to listen or join in the conversation. Because she did not want to hear about it did not give her the right to make physical contact with Mrs. Hillbilly Mom. After all, while I did not speak this concept out loud, it's not like I approached her and rubbed severed infant digits on her person. And besides, the removal of footgear of the sort previously called th0ngs was not actually making much of a statement, since the exposure would do little to change the view of one's gal-hooves.

For her unreasonableness, a few members of the class moderately mocked her manufactured angst. To the point that one sort-of threatened to find out her locker number and place in it...okay, so she saw the futility of promising to place a severed infant digit there, because, contrary to recent reports, they are quite hard to come by. So we all, complainer included, had a chuckle at the idle threat.

Seriously. Some people live to complain. Did I not sit idly by and listen to her story of hoarding holiday sweets in footgear designed for tramping in frozen precipitation, consuming several tidbits nightly, only to discover several weeks later, upon dumping the contents onto the floor, a deceased rodent? Yet I did not complain. I'm an equal-opportunity nausea-inducer.

But I'm the captain of my educational vessel.