The might of teachers is found in their immune...
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Dec 05, 2012  |  Vote 0    0

The might of teachers is found in their immune systems

Oshawa This Week

Nobody tells you that when you start living with a teacher things change.

For starters your immune system will need a complete overhaul. If you are dating a teacher you should immediately begin to eat oranges by the bag-load, put yourself on a green tea intravenous drip and get a flu shot every couple of days. If you intend to kiss your teacher partner, I suggest an oral dam or perhaps a gas mask. Real intimacy will require a HazMat suit. Even that may not help you.

Teachers work in what is essentially a two-storey, sealed, brick-and-glass petri dish. Into this environment swim, daily, hundreds of sneezing, coughing, gooey-nosed, phlegm-ejecting, two-legged snot factories.

Inexplicably, the windows at most primary educational institutions cannot be opened more than a couple of inches. This is ostensibly for the safety of the children, but I suspect it has more to do with preventing raving, bacteria-covered teachers from throwing themselves out of them. This lack of fresh air, however, creates an atmosphere more conducive to developing spores than young minds.

Teaching, at the primary level, is a very personal experience. Unlike the secondary and post-secondary years, where instructors stand in relative safety at the front of the class or lecture hall, education in the early grades is something that much more resembles hand-to-hand combat than the Socratic handing down of wisdom.

Study any primary classroom for any length of time and what will you see? Teachers bending down close to their charges, guiding chubby little hands, speaking slowly and emphatically and bringing their own faces sometimes within inches of their students. The board offices refer to this as 'hands-on' learning. The children know it as one-on-one time. Teachers call it 'The Kill Zone'.

In the world of classroom germ warfare, this is effectively ground zero. How many teachers have leaned in close to praise, correct or instruct a youngster only to have the little cherub sneeze and/or cough directly into their open mouths at point blank range? And each one of those crusty-nosed darlings has two hands. That's 10 fingers. Ten little digits eagerly spreading their viral payload to everything they touch. There are doorknobs in public schools that could take down an Ebola monkey.

Remarkably, teachers, especially those with years in the system, have developed incredibly robust immune systems. It's statistically miraculous how few of them get really sick in view of what they have sprayed on them on a daily basis. They are scientific and medical anomalies. I've always felt that in the event of a nuclear or chemical attack, only cockroaches and primary school teachers will survive to repopulate the earth.

Living with one, however, provides you with no such immunity. Quite the contrary. Sharing a bed with one is tantamount to lying down beside a smallpox blanket. But nobody, as I say, tells you this. And by the time you find out, it's too late. You're already in the ICU with her sitting at your bedside, holding your hand and complaining about the new curriculum guidelines.

Much has been made about the number of sick days afforded teachers. What I personally find incredulous is not the number of sick days they are given, but how few they actually end up using. Teachers are a very resilient lot. Not so, however, their feeble, germ-riddled, unsuspecting partners.

To that end, may I put forth the idea that teachers be able to keep all of their allotted sick days ... as long as they are transferable to the poor bastards they live with.

-- Neil Crone, actor, comic, writer, saves some of his best lines for this column

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