Comment of the Quarantine!

Yesterday, I lamented the fact that some of us are not cut out for all this extreme hygiene during the quarantine. Masks, gloves, hand-washing, no face-touching, six-foot distancing. It's an OCD ballet, and I can't find the rhythm.

It's because I've become inured to people and germs. I teach in an enormous, crowded high school.

Kids come to school sick, they cough, they drool, they fall asleep with their snot-covered faces plastered to the desks, they blow their nose while you're giving directions, and they occasionally leave menstrual blood on chairs (seriously, this has happened more than once . . . you call the janitor instead of doing the clean-up yourself).

I eat in a tiny office shared by twenty other teachers. There's always random food on the table, often long past the expiration date. I bring a cooler because I'm scared of what's inside the refrigerator.

Thousands of people are touching the doorknobs, staircase railings, and bathroom surfaces each and every day. If you need to get from A Hall to F Hall during the five-minute passing time, you inevitably get stuck near the library in a mass of bodies that resembles an Anthrax mosh pit. It's no place for claustrophobes, germaphobes, or tiny sophomores.

Ironically, this year our school decided to crack down on two things. Teacher absences (especially sick days on Mondays and Fridays) and bathroom passes. Obviously, the teacher-absence thing went out the window when the pandemic started. Teachers were encouraged to stay home if they were sick-- which is how it should be. We get our sick days for a reason, so as not to spread virulence in a building with 3000 closely-packed inhabitants.

The bathroom passes are another issue. Students are required to take a laminated pass if they leave to go to the bathroom. These passes obviously harbor bacteria, fecal matter, and worse. They are disgusting. But star commenter Zman offered an elegant solution:


You should keep the bathroom passes in a glass cylinder of Barbicide like the combs at the barbershop.


While I'm sure when we finally go back to school, we will abolish shared, laminated passes for some other more hygienic system, I am definitely going to take my old passes and put them in a glass cylinder of Barbicide on my desk.

I can never pass up some good prop comedy.

Thanks Zman!