Story #27: Lice

Not long ago I was walking down the hallway at school with student I'm tutoring. He just arrived from Russia and is a complete newcomer, logistically speaking, so we are doing things like practicing number words by playing Bingo and sorting the foods in the kitchen pantry to learn the names of fruits and vegetables. This particular morning we were walking around the school introducing ourselves to people so we can practice greetings and conversation starters like "Good morning!" and "How are you?"

We had just finished up our lesson for the day, a game where we practiced color words and spatial orientation vocabulary by jumping in and out of a rainbow's worth of hula hoops, and were walking back to class when the assistant principal came racing by us down the hall. Her long blonde curls were pinned up haphazardly on her head and her hands, rubber-gloved, were held aloft. "LICE!" was her stage-whispered response to the quizzical look I gave her.

After dropping my student back off in class I returned to the office to find a full-scale infestation in effect. Kindergarteners were piled up everywhere waiting for someone to flip through their hair with the long thin wooden sticks that look eerily like the stirrers from Starbucks. In all I think we sent something like 18 kids home. Gaah.

Getting lice is every teacher's nightmare. As soon as the last student got picked up and sent home with the trilingual information packet about how to do their family's laundry (less pertinent for families who live in transitional housing and don't have ready access to a washer and dryer, but still) I sat myself down in a chair in the principal's office and made the student advisor check MY hair. Her verdict? "Mmm..." she said, rubber gloves rustling as she used the stick to section my hair and scratch at my scalp. "Very smooth, what conditioner do you use?" she wanted to know. All I wanted to know was whether or not I had lice. In fourteen years as a teacher I have had many cases of pinkeye but never this. Fortunately with a snap of the gloves coming off the student advisor pronounced me lice-free this time too. Sigh. All in a day's work.