Just Another Day In Elementary School

Something weird happened during 1st grade music today: a student got a piece of plastic stuck between his teeth.

Instead of placing his coat on the back of his chair, one of my students evidently decided to put part of his coat in his mouth.

Maybe he had a little piece of food lingering from lunch. Maybe that little piece of food was bothering him so much that he needed to remove it. And maybe the little piece of plastic on his coat seemed like the perfect thing to remove that little piece of food.

I don’t know.

For some reason, my student decided to stick a piece of plastic between his teeth. And it got stuck. It got really stuck.

When I first noticed that something was wrong, I thought that the kid was trying to pull out a tooth and that he had pulled a string from his coat to help him do this. Thinking this a bit odd, I started some dance music for the rest of the class and walked back to check on the tooth removal operation.

I quickly noticed, though, that he wasn’t trying to remove a tooth and that the thing dangling from his mouth wasn’t a thin string but a somewhat thick piece of plastic. Thankfully, when I looked at what was going on, I didn’t see blood gushing from his gums. I also didn’t see any reason that that little piece of plastic should be so wedged in his mouth.

Then it hit me: My 1st grader had the remainder of a price tag stuck in his mouth. Having put the “T” behind his teeth, close to the roof of his mouth, he had gotten it so tightly wedged that he couldn’t get it out. When he pulled the plastic forward and down, the “T” simply hit his teeth. The harder he pulled, the more futile his attempt to dislodge it. Unless, of course, he had been trying to pull out a few teeth!

As the class began to fall apart from a minute of unsupervised dancing, I began to feel a bit panicked. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with a 1st grader with a coat hanging from his mouth! I knew the weight of the coat was not good for his teeth but I also knew that I couldn’t get the plastic dislodged without gloving up and doing a lot of work that I wasn’t capable of doing in the middle of a falling-apart class.

Then it hit me: Cut the plastic! The tag might still be lodged in my student’s mouth but at least the coat wouldn’t be hanging from it as well. So I cut the plastic.

Then I remembered: Thursday is nurse day at my school!

A little while after sending my 1st grader to the nurse, the nurse called to see if his class was still with me. They were leaving. My student was leaving, too. The class was going back into the building. My student was going home. With a piece of plastic hanging from his mouth, stuck between his teeth. The nurse couldn’t dislodge it either.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said.
“Me either,” I responded.
Then we both laughed in disbelief,
I silently wished some dentist luck,
And I taught two more plastic-free classes.
Thankfully :-).