When I was a little girl, and got sick, my mother took off work from her own job to stay home with me and keep me in bed where I belonged, because she recognized that as her own responsibility.
Today’s parents can’t be bothered. Against all medical advice and common sense, parents today send the sick kids to school anyway, to infect everyone else.
School administrators are part of the problem: they encourage students to be in school regardless of circumstances. Now, that makes sense if one is referring to kids who skip school to go hunting, or to go shopping, or to go to some sports event. But while I was teaching, I even heard administrators urging sick kids to “be a man” or some such drivel, with total disregard for the obvious fact that that is how epidemics (which will cause far more absenteeism among a larger number of students) get started.
In previous essays, I have occasionally mentioned being of poor health. The aforementioned dubious practice is how I got that way. Constant exposure to multitudes of germs wearing me down day after day, year after year, resulted in my lungs becoming so weakened that eventually, a virus that would cause a mere head cold in another person, would give me a multi-month full-blown case of chronic asthmatic bronchitis. At first, the illness would sock me in bed for two months. But by the fifth such event, I was out of commission for six months.
And now for the unlovely irony: my then supervisor had the unmitigated gall to telephone me at home in my sickbed to inform me that “the parents were complaining” at my long absence! I am very proud of the fact that I retorted, “Let me guess, these are the same parents who sent their sick kids in to infect everyone in the first place? And now that that foolishness succeeded, and teacher is seriously ill, they have the nerve to complain??! Tell you what, next time, YOU lie in bed on death’s door, not to mention bored to death, for several months, and I’LL take those nervy phone calls, and, unlike you I am sure, I’LL tell those sanctimonious parents what they deserve to hear!”
Following my emergency disability retirement, it took me YEARS to (mostly) get past the bitterness of what thoughtlessness and lack of common sense had done to my career, my health, and my life. Health-wise, I will NEVER get over it. I recently suffered my ninth bout of this illness.
But as far as I can tell, the problem of lopsided priorities in the schools remains. How many more teachers must go through what I went through before parents and school administrators wise up to the obvious?
