smothered

Sometimes unwanted attention makes me feel this way:

give me some rubber gloves, lysol, and a pair of tongs, please

Five students were out sick on Monday. Two out of five returned on Tuesday sporting day-old coughs and chafed noses. One student needed to make up a quiz.

I put this student in the corner of the room where she could concentrate. When I checked back on her, she was making good progress, but there were three big drops of nasal drip on her paper. Splatters really. She was also quietly hacking up a lung into her sleeve, which was pulled up all the way to her palms. I later observed that her sleeves too were wet from drippage. I offered her a cough drop, some tissues, and a trip to the nurse's office to be sent home. She declined all three and completed the quiz in her contaminative state.

Since drastic times call for drastic measures, I had to take the completed quiz by the corner (trying to make the least amount of paper-human contact as possible and trying not to look grossed out) and quarantined it onto the top of my printer where it could dry. I would have preferred to quarantine it to the trash can, but that probably would have caused some emotional damage for the student. I then busted out the sanitizing wipes and aggressively wiped down her desk and squirted antibacterial hand sanitizer onto her hands, my hands, and on anything near me with five fingers.

I'm not looking forward to facing this monster anytime soon:

papercut pain

transition into adulthood

rice infestation

my big toe is a monster