When I'm not frantically running off copies (this is what you actually call it when using a Duplo, as opposed to a photocopy, machine) for the activity I have just improvised, or scarfing down a Pop-Tart hoping a student won't see me and ask me for half, I am having a leisurely lunch of microwaved chimichangas in the teacher's lounge, listening to other poor teachers make frantic copies a few feet away. In the toner-induced haze, I find myself in some strange conversations, like today's about the dental habits of the Marshall Islanders.
Our ESL teacher and a German long-term sub started talking about the behavior problems posed by the recent (past 10 years is recent here) influx of Marshallese, in our oh-so-tolerant rainbow society that is hardly influenced by the 19th century plantation dynamic. We did use their islands as practice bombing targets, so we can't, and don't, complain about the fallout when their natives come here to live; if you lived in one of the highest person-per-square-foot-densities in the world, you would, too. What we do do (ha! I said doo-doo!) is provide sad commentary, whilst shaking our heads.
The German lady has strong feelings about the Singaporean approach to discipline, but that's for another time.
The ESL teacher says that her biggest problem by far is that her kids miss tons of school due to toothaches, making it impossible to establish continuity, which is a necessity that kind of leads to....literacy. Yes, toothaches. I picture bald cartoon stick figures with big white cotton bandages wrapped around their heads. Or mouths, I guess. The uncomfortable silliness of this image helps me deal with the fact that in this day and age, thousands of years after the toothbrush was invented (trust me, I wrote an article for an in-flight magazine on this very subject once, and did exhaustive research), a child could miss school for multiple days due to a toothache. Which will probably turn into an abscess.
Honestly.
At first, I just took this into my bosom of "Things That Make Me Feel Better About My Own Classes." I chase boys old enough to sire children around the room to stop pencil fights, it's true, but at least I don't have to drive a girl home as she writhes in pain because her parents don't know this state offers nearly universal health care for children, and could stop her toothache with one free visit.
But then I kinda felt bad. Even worse when I told my mother, and she recounted how one of hercounterpart students (likely these kids' cousins) developed boils that became a systematic infection, and the school nurse couldn't communicate to the parents that he needed to go to a doctor.
Sorry for all the italics. But they seem necessary, to convey the...I don't know, "what the heck should I do"-ness of.......stuff.
If only The Bureacracy didn't keep us from solving the problem with its red tape. (Irony intended, reinforced, and shoveled on just there.)
Oh, so my funny point was: The German, eating her muesli mixed with water (I am not kidding), was lamenting the backwardness of the Marshallese, how they snack on candy and sodas all day, and that wouldn't be so bad if they knew to brush their teeth right afterwards.
"Eet is not so bad zat zey eat sveets! But zey do not brash zeir teece aftervwards, and zat eez ven your teece are under attack!"
It was at precisely that moment that I was opening up my Gladware full of Oreos. To be fair, they were Newman-Os, which are wheat-free cookies made of barley and oat flour, and probably organic sprouted sea kelp juice instead of sugar. But I felt that to point this out would only draw attention to my vice, which I could not keep from eating. Four of them.
Whatever, at least no kids have poisoned my coffee with Wite-Out, which is more than I can say for an infamous ex-teacher I know.