Oh The Joys of Teaching

I have a student in my class that is.....well....different. I guess she has some mental disabilities that cause her to not understand social things, or something like that. Anyways, she doesn't know how to act appropriately sometimes when it comes to the social scene.

So there I was, teaching my first period of math. I was standing at the back of the room by my overhead projector and I was having the class look at the numbers on the board to see if they could see a pattern of what was happening (we were learning about tables and expressions). Everyone's eyes were up front looking at the board, when all of a sudden, this girl starts to walk, hunched, across the room. You see, my desk is on the opposite side of the room where she sits. And everyday, she has to blow her nose about 3 or 4 times. I have no idea why - she's not sick. But she just blows her nose a lot! Well, she had used up all my tissues that were close to her desk, so inevitably she has to walk across the room to my desk to use those tissues.

I'm looking around at the students making sure they are all on task looking at what is going on with the numbers on the board, when she starts to walk hunched over, across the room with her hand under her nose about 3 inches. She's not covering her nose, just has it held underneath. When I look up I see her slightly bent over and walking, I notice that she has a huge, long booger hanging out of her nose. Because she is walking across the front of the room at that very minute, every student gets to participate in the wonderful scene as well. Luckily, most of them know she is different and don't say anything. One student makes a muffled laughing grunt and I shush him really quick and shake my head at him. Other students have this disgusted look on their faces, but don't say anything.

She continues to blow her nose, in the front of the class, and all I can do is feel sorry for her. So I continue talking and move on. Luckily no one said anything, or made a scene, but come on - does she really think that's ok?

Anyways, I laughed real hard about it later and thought I would share the joys of teaching sixth graders.