My classroom is a petri dish and other truths about the teaching profession

My classroom is a petri dish.  

That’s how one friend describes her workplace. She’s not a science teacher. She’s not making anything up either.  In winter, when the weather outside plunges into single digits,  her classroom stays a humid eighty or so. The rest of the school year? Count on nineties at least. Come May, June, September, October, we’re talking close to or exceeding one hundred. We’re talking sauna. We’re talking petri dish.

My friend works with classes of twenty to thirty kids in a windowless cube on the top floor of an inner city school that was built back when the surrounding neighborhood was mostly farmland, back when the current boxy vinyl-sided tenement houses were stately one-families, their elegant facades swathed in patterned shingles, ornate dentils, flowery spindle work.

Other than the fan my friend bought for herself, there’s no source of air movement in that room, except for that provided by human breath. Six hundred coughing, sneezing, laughing, talking Sponge-Bob bedecked organisms incubate with her every week, little tornadoes twisting and churning the wet, rank air. It’s a miracle she’s not dead.  I mean that.

Kids come to school in all kinds of health. There are minor colds, but there is serious stuff too: lymphoma, heart disease, brain tumors, asthma, deadly allergies. Another friend, retired now, a teacher of fourth, fifth, and sixth graders,  contracted tuberculosis several years back, likely from a student who’d recently emigrated from a poor country on a distant continent. The student had no inoculation or school records showing he had tuberculosis or was a carrier of the disease, because before he came to the United States he’d never seen a doctor and had never attended school. We get lots of students like that, students with spotty or nonexistent records.

We get lots of students born here who come to school ill too. Sometimes they need to come to school because the parents have to work and have nowhere else to send them. Sometimes the kids choose to come to school sick because they'd rather be with their friends than be at home. Sometimes, they get sick after they've gotten to school. I always have at least one sick kiddo in my class. The norm is usually two or three. It’s just the way it is.

Germs spread easily in a school. One kid gets sick, we all get sick. Teachers develop little survival tricks to avoid being out sick all the time. For example, you learn pretty quickly to refrain from using any student writing implements. The wet of one chewed up pencil is all it takes. You learn to push doors open with your shoulder, rather than with your palm. You learn to never ever ever touch the stairway banisters.

Still germs spread. It’s one of the hazards of working with little humans who are still learning hygiene basics, like coughing into their elbows rather than in your face, like blowing their runny noses into tissues instead of wiping them on their hands or on your arm, like washing their hands after using the bathrooms, or sticking their fingers in their mouths and up their noses.  Kids can be gross.  

Working conditions can be pretty gross too. In my building, for example, we were recently told to not open our windows ourselves, but to get the custodian instead.  The windows are maybe eight feet high and several feet wide. Most windows in most classrooms open, but some in some classrooms are stuck shut. In one old classroom of mine, only one window opened, which was not very pleasant at all in warm weather, and downright dangerous in winter. Because my classroom had such minimal ventilation, I worked in a germ farm. We got air, but not much. Still,  I had it better than my friend in the windowless box.

This year we’ve been told to get help opening our windows because the windows have gone wonky. They’re only twenty years old, thirty years younger than the windows in my house and eighty years younger than the ones in the house I grew up in.  Yet these relative youngsters are getting dangerous.

Two years ago without any warning, one window, open at the time, fell off its tracking and smashed right onto the floor of a classroom. Luckily no students or teachers were injured. Staff was assured that the windows would soon be replaced. We still wait. This year, within the first few weeks of school, a window shattered while a teacher was pushing it open. Luckily, she didn’t need stitches though it took awhile to pick the tiny shards of glass out of her bloody palm. We’ve since been told that windows should be fixed or replaced this summer. I’m guessing the custodians will spend most of the May and June school days opening and shutting windows.

  

Though we’re not supposed to open our windows, I opened one the other day because the air in my room was killing me. See, a nasty smell has been wafting through our hallway since early December, supposedly a result of the old roof leaking onto whatever the attic right above our rooms contains – old insulation, books, furniture, dead bodies, who knows. We've complained about it -- teachers, parents, students, and were told it was being investigated.

Up until the other day, the smell was more of a stupid inconvenience to me than anything else. Up until the other day, I'd come to school healthy. Monday I went to work feeling at about eighty percent, which is not unusual for any teacher at any school anywhere. Not unusual for most of us worker bees, I'm guessing.

I walked onto my hall and was dying within just a few seconds of breathing in that fetid familiar rankness. My throat was on fire, my lungs had gone cottony. I threw open a window in my class but I'm pretty sure that whatever was swimming through that air had already nestled into my lungs. I worked a full day, but I'm out sick the rest of this week.  Doctor’s orders. I told the doctor about the bad air. Turns out, bad air can wreak havoc on lungs already fighting off a virus. Doc says to stay home until I'm healthy. If I go back to school too early, I'll likely get sick again.

So I'm home until Monday. Hopefully, my lungs will be well enough by then to fight off not only the usual dust, dirt, and kid germs, but any moldy smells as well.  

Meanwhile, I rest, read, blow my nose, cough. I think of my friend in her petri dish room, and the students and teachers with asthma and worse. I wonder about sick buildings and MCAS scores. I drink my antioxidant tea and take my meds. I wonder if my sub has opened the windows in my classroom. I wonder if any of the kids are out sick. I think of fresh air and fairness. I think of basic rights and wonder where mine have gone.