As many of my readers know, I team teach and my
partner and I gender split our two classes. One needs to know there is nothing
like a drama filled class of 40 girls unless it is an extremely stinky class of
34 boys. Oh, boy! Oh, boy! Adolescent boys are stinky.
The worst part about being in a room of stinky boys
is the smell percolates throughout the day like a coffee pot. And the one
person in the room that doesn’t smell gets used to the smell and doesn’t
realize how bad it is until one steps out of the room and comes back. A room
full of adolescent males in the late afternoon after P.E. and lunch recess
punches me in the face like a knockout right hook. Then it permeates into my
nostrils and sets up a campsite where it stays for a long time and eviction is
impossible.
Many of you that have teenage boys or have ever
been a teenage boy know what I mean. Think of the worst teenage boy smell: your
older brother’s room, that your mother refuses to go into and clean, filled with
piles of discarded sweaty sock, pants, and underwear that could probably walk
to laundry room on their own if your mother allowed your brother’s bedroom door
to stay open, your son’s football bag that houses his “lucky” underwear that he
refuses to let you wash it until his first loss or the season’s end, or your
dog after he has played in the irrigation ditch. Put those smells together in a room that was designed to hold 25 students but has been crammed full with
35 to 40 students and you know what I experience daily.
When we switch classes and the girls enter,
inevitably, one of them will say, “Miss Cunningham, it smells funny in here. It
smells like . . . . like . . . “
“Boy?” I reply.
“Yes, boy! Like my brother’s dirty bedroom.”
“Or when my brother forces me to smell his
armpits!”
“Yes, ladies, you’ve got it. This room smells like
. . .like . . . “
“BOY!” they reply in unison.
The other day I had the opportunity to smell
something worse than boy. I had some boys that owed me lunch and recess. They
are expected to go get their lunch and bring it to the classroom on their own.
Three boys hadn’t shown up when I expected them to so I decided I would go and
get them and bring them back to the room and let them have it.
When I left my building to go to the cafeteria it
was sprinkling. When I found the culprits and started to take them to the room
when we opened the door there was a deluge of rain pouring from the heavens. It
wasn’t just raining cats and dogs it was raining elephants and giraffes. I
figured if we stayed in the cafeteria it would stop in a few minutes and we
could get to the classroom with no worries.
Well, twenty minutes later, my teaching partner
showed up drenched because it was time to pick up the students from the
cafeteria. We can’t stay in the cafeteria because others need our seats, so we
lined them up and walked the hundred yards to the classroom. It felt like we walked
a mile. It was raining so hard I had to take my glasses off so I could see, if
I was going to trip over the elephants it was raining. When we made it to the
room my skirt was two feet longer from the weight of the amount of rain it
soaked up. The boys were so wet I had to let them take off their shoes and
socks so that maybe their feet might dry. It was bad!
Let me tell you there is no smell worse than BOY
unless it is WET BOY!
Paco’s Perspective
A smell worse than the smell of a classroom full of
wet boy might be the smell of a cafeteria full of wet kid!
The Flip Side
All I can smell is LIZARD!
