Brats working the system- feigning illness to go home and play.

Remember! Raising these little shit is TMIJITW. And we were kids too, once: lying selfish little assholes.

Teacher diagnoses pupils’ excuses
By Debbie Patrick
When I was teaching fifth grade, I had a boy in my class named Chad. He was a very athletic kid who loved any game that involved running all out.

It was early September and the kids had organized a game of kickball. The next thing I knew, Chad was running toward me with a look of shock on his face, screaming my name. As he got closer I looked at his leg and could see a deep gash on his shin. (When he slid into third base the base flipped and the nail holding it down ripped his leg wide open.)

I immediately tried to hold his leg together as we ran into our classroom. Still holding his leg, I sat him down and called down to the nurse from the classroom phone.

“This is Mrs. Patrick, Chad cut his leg open and I think we need to call 911. No, we can’t come down the hall, please come up.” Then, after my first ride in an ambulance, I decided there was one job that I could never, never do. Yeah, you guessed it — the school nurse.

A couple of months ago while doing a readaloud in the classroom, Rachel stood up and came up to the rocking chair.

“Mrs. Patrick, can I go to the nurse?

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“Rachel, I am in the middle of a story right now. Can it wait?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Do you feel like you are going to throw up?”

“No. But I’m sick.”

“Do you have a fever?”

“What’s that?” “Let me feel

your head. Nope. No fever. Does your throat hurt?”

“Will the nurse send me home for that?”

“Rachel, are you really sick?” “Well, not really. I would just rather be home playing right now.”

Every year, I am always amazed at how brilliant kindergarten children are. It doesn’t take them long to figure out their ticket home. After the first child of the year goes to the nurse and gets sent home, it’s like a duck to water. The other day was no exception. Bruce wanted to go to the nurse, and when I told him that he really didn’t look sick, he was adamant. So, against my better judgment, I took him.

Nurse: “So Bruce, what hurts?” “Every time I blow my nose my ear hurts.”

“Well, how long has this been going on?” the nurse asked.

“Um, let’s see, about 52 weeks. Since 2007 at least.”

And with that, I gently took his hand, smiled at the nurse and marched him back to class.

I laughed so hard that I decided this column had to be dedicated to the school nurse. So, without further ado and with a shout-out to those incredible nurses in the trenches, here are their tales ... and some of the complaints they’ve heard from their little patients: “My ear hurts when I burp.” “My lips are tired.” “I’m leaking plasma.” “I have a hernia in my knee.”

“I think my sister has the weasels.”

“My right eye is blinking.” “Somebody fwode up and it made me sick.”

“I had a crustacean on my eye.” “I had to see the eye optimist.” “My sister has mice in her hair.” John had gone to the nurse complaining of being “gassy.”

The nurse asked him when his last bowel movement was. He said “Umm, when I was about 3.”

Sure, there are many important things kids learn in kindergarten — letters, letter sounds, how to be a good friend, how to write words and how to read. However, there are other lessons that are learned quite by accident, and how to get the “go home for free” card is one of them.

Now if you’ll all excuse me, I’m gonna take a trip to the nurse. I feel like I have to fwoe up.

Used to see this all the time when I taught--we called it "Testitis" when certain kids would, without fail, be absent on the day of an exam.

shaved candle wax the bees kind, not the petroleum kind, gives you the runs for a couple of hourse. then you are better. if you time it right (takes about 30 mins to work,) you go school, eat wax, be ill, go home all day too late to go back to school..

we really made ourselves ill at our school

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I just post the stories, for interest.. for everyone

Lord, what fools these mortals be!
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act III, Scene ii

Voltaire said: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

H.L.Mencken wrote:"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. Albert Einstein

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mercurior
shaved candle wax the bees kind, not the petroleum kind, gives you the runs for a couple of hourse. then you are better. if you time it right (takes about 30 mins to work,) you go school, eat wax, be ill, go home all day too late to go back to school..

we really made ourselves ill at our school

Sounds like beeswax would make a good laxative too.

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"I have learned that pleasing everyone is impossible, but pissing everyone off is easy and fun as hell"

:eatu

And to think the kids at our school would overdose on oxycontin when they wanted to go to the nurse.

it is, you have to shave it very fine, it works best shaved, (i could say something LOL but i wont).

it was an all boys school . what can i say.. we worked around problems, like faking illnesses LOL

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I just post the stories, for interest.. for everyone

Lord, what fools these mortals be!
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act III, Scene ii

Voltaire said: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

H.L.Mencken wrote:"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. Albert Einstein

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mercurior
it is, you have to shave it very fine, it works best shaved,

Like most things do.

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"I have learned that pleasing everyone is impossible, but pissing everyone off is easy and fun as hell"

:eatu

Man, I was the antithesis of these little bastards when I was in school. I hated falling behind in class and I chose to go to school when I was sick. I still do this. I think in my entire academic career, from kindergarten to now (3rd year of college), I have only ever faked being sick once. I was a senior in high school and I woke up with a tiny headache. I decided that since I had not stayed home sick since the third grade, I was going to take a day off. I called my mom at work and told her I wasn't going to school and then I called the office at school and told them I'd be absent. It felt nice to play hooky...I just hung out at home with the cats.

Sadly, the few times I've been ill at school, it looked very much like I was trying to fake it. For example, I had a horrific sinus infection as a senior. And I didn't know it was a sinus problem because all I had was a headache and nothing else. No runny or stuffed nose or anything. I was in the nurse's office multiple times a day asking for aspirin - she thought I was trying to overdose . No I wasn't...it's just aspirin did jack shit for my pain and I figured if I took 4 aspirin rather than 2 (I was told this was okay), it might work. Three months later, I did get that damn infection cured.

Another fun time it was midterms and I was in history class. It was also the first day of my period and, right on schedule, my cramps and cold sweating and nausea kicked in about halfway through the exam. My face was paste white and I was trying hard to not pass out. I got up in the middle of the exam and asked to go to the bathroom. This teacher knew I was not one to cheat or not study, so he let me go. I still felt awful, so when I got back, I rushed through the last part of my exam, was the first one to turn it in and told my teacher I was going to be ill and had to leave. I managed to just get into the nurse's office bathroom when I threw up. I was totally fine the next day. And I got a 91 on the exam

If those kids want to get out of class by faking sickness, they're gonna have to try harder. I'm still waiting for the day when parents coach their kids on how to be sick so they can go home and play with Mommy. Hell, some woman coached her kids on how to act like retards to get government money, so I wouldn't doubt someone trying to teach their kids how to act ill in order to go home.

But if anyone ever needs a good excuse to get out of anything, go here. Lots of good ones. larious
http://www.bored.com/excuselist/

i was a swot, i was frequently weeks ahead of everyone else in class, frequently i was so bored i would help the less able to do work, just so we could move on to good stuff

*********************************************************************************************************************************
I just post the stories, for interest.. for everyone

Lord, what fools these mortals be!
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act III, Scene ii

Voltaire said: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

H.L.Mencken wrote:"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. Albert Einstein

I actually did the exact opposite of this when I was in high school.

When I was in 10th grade, I had a chemistry teacher who despised giving make-up tests and always made them tougher than the regularly scheduled ones. One day, I was sick on a test day but did not want to miss the test. My mom called the school that morning as she was supposed to do, to tell them I would be absent. However, and with my mom's blessing, I actually went to school that day but only for the chemistry class and the test. Then I returned home. What would have happened had the teacher realized I was illegally present in school that day I do not know. [Methinks she would have been flattered and had done nothing.]

A few months later, I tried to do this again for another class. It was just before finals and we had an essay to write for English class's final. I was about to go in but had a bad case of the runs just before I was going to leave for school so I had to ditch the plan and forgo 20 points on the final exam or write an extra essay during the final. I ended up forgoing the 20 points due to lack of time but still passed the final, barely.

I used to play sick occasionally, my body naturally ran hot so I always seemed to be running a mild fever. Made it easy to fool the nurse.

My mom, on the other hand, knew better and wouldn't use that as a guideline. Then again she'd usually let me stay home "fake sick" and call me in sick a few times a year simply because she figured out that if I felt I could do that she didn't tend to get calls from the nurse saying I was sick and needed to be picked up from school early.

The key thing here is that I was a straight-A student so when I skipped school my education didn't suffer.

i think I missed 5 days due to illness my entire 12 years of pre-college.

I was one of those horrible annoying little bastards that would come to class the day of a test not realizing it was a test day, not having studied, and get everything correct along with the extra credit for a 108% total or something like that.

I actually would intentionally not do homework just to see how far down I could go and still pull out the "A" at the end. I once turned a mid-term "D" into a 90.2% "A".

Teachers hated me.

Other kids hated me.

My schoolmates would occasionally ask me to help them with their studying and I just couldn't offer assistance. I didn't have to try to get an A so I didn't know how to help anyone else do it.



And for the record I'm not holding this up as some kind of "gee aren't I just super-smart" kind of thing. School wasn't challenging enough for me and that actually caused problems later on when I undertook goals that were challenging. The school system had ultimately failed me because I wasn't prepared for that.

I don't fault the school system for this either because not everything is someone else's fault. Some things just are what they are. I overcame the problems because I chose not to waste time assigning blame. If you're way ahead or way behind the curve you can't expect the system to be properly geared to your speed. It's not anyone's fault, that's just the way things are. (Actually, this is where parents are supposed to pick up the slack. Mine did.)

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married with rabbits

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Rose Red
i think I missed 5 days due to illness my entire 12 years of pre-college.

Go you. I was out for 3 weeks in the 8th grade due to an unexplained illness. I was so miserable and they never quite figured out what was wrong.

Well, my mom was crazy too and no one had problems as bad as hers so it wasn't an option.....

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Konkurrent
I was one of those horrible annoying little bastards that would come to class the day of a test not realizing it was a test day, not having studied, and get everything correct along with the extra credit for a 108% total or something like that.

School wasn't challenging enough for me...

Hear hear!!! I'm sick of this notion that school was soooo haaaaard. It wasn't. Some of us here liked it, some did not, some loved to bunk off, some did not. Some did better than others. But was it hard? No. Hard comes later.

On the rare days I was ever home sick from primary school, I was at the microscope half the day, the piano the other half. My brain needed serious daily feeding. Many people will have everyone believe that enjoying learning is wierd. Getting the right answers is sad. Developing skills is dumb. Well those people end up breeding because they haven't bothered to wire up their brains or equip themselves to progress and improve themselves in life. By about age 25 they can't think of anything else to do with the decades they've got left sitting around watching Wheel of Fortune and so they turn the channel to Blues Clues and get busy makin more stupids like themselves.

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"The death of creativity is a pram in the hallway"
- Cyril Connolly

Any adult that complains about the academic challenges of Public School can immediately be determined to have quit at or before the 12th grade.

One year of college is all it takes to become painfully aware of how dumbed-down our modern school system is. I had more than a half a semester of college credit before I ever set foot on campus (thanks to lots of AP classes) and I was still very rudely awakened by the transition. It wasn't the greatest academic challenge of my life, but it still made everything up to that point look like summer camp.

When I was in the 6th grade we had a rash of fake illnesses to go home early. In the middle of all that I had a bike accident on the way to school and broke my arm. Some friends helped me into the school nurse so I could contact my dad to take me to the doctor. There I was holding my arm, in terrible pain, and crying my eyes out and the nurse tried to send me on to class saying I was faking an injury to go home early.

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Konkurrent
Any adult that complains about the academic challenges of Public School can immediately be determined to have quit at or before the 12th grade.

One year of college is all it takes to become painfully aware of how dumbed-down our modern school system is. I had more than a half a semester of college credit before I ever set foot on campus (thanks to lots of AP classes) and I was still very rudely awakened by the transition. It wasn't the greatest academic challenge of my life, but it still made everything up to that point look like summer camp.

Your story here and in other posts on this thread sound a lot like mine. I had a rude awakening when I started college and it took me a year until I got my act together and did as well in college as I did in high school (I was an "A" student, too.). I won't be as quick to blame my HS education as you were, however. The math AP Calculus courses I took spared me from really baaaaad college professors who taught the same material. I knew this because I tutored several freshmen in Calculus. That same Calculus came in handy when I took (and passed easily) the first actuarial exam a few years later.

And........after my rash of minor sicknesses in 10th grade, I missed only one day each in 11th grade and 12th grade. Close, but no cigar!

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deegee
I won't be as quick to blame my HS education as you were, however.

I did very specifically say I did not blame the quality of my HS education. You're free to be exactly as quick to blame that as I was, but since I didn't do it it's hard to say whether you're faster or slower than me.

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deegee
The math AP Calculus courses I took spared me from really baaaaad college professors who taught the same material.

Did you take additional higher maths? Calc 2, 3, etc?

I took the AP Calculus (BC course) which placed me out of Calc I and Calc II. I took Calc III and Linear Algebra in my freshman year. All 4 courses included material covered in the first actuarial exam (at the time; the test makers have changed the material).

In my experience many people who take AP Calc in highschool, test out of some of it in college, and then go straight to the next course in the list tend to find the advanced pacing of college courses something they can't shift gears into that quickly.

If anything I'd recommend most people that test out of Calc 1 go ahead and retake it in college (or just audit it) to make the transition easier.

The problem I had with Calc III was that the professor did not speak coherent english. He was some old Chinese guy with a very heavy accent and it was fruitless to ask any questions, as I learned quickly, because you got the same jibberish in response as you got when he was first explaining the concept. When I took Linear Algebra next, I had a professor who spoke normal english and got an "A" in the course after being able to understand what the heck he was saying LOL!

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deegee
The problem I had with Calc III was that the professor did not speak coherent english. He was some old Chinese guy with a very heavy accent and it was fruitless to ask any questions, as I learned quickly, because you got the same jibberish in response as you got when he was first explaining the concept. When I took Linear Algebra next, I had a professor who spoke normal english and got an "A" in the course after being able to understand what the heck he was saying LOL!

Precisely why I crashed and burned in Trig. Iranian.

Our high school did not offer any AP courses when I went through, so I did all of my Calc courses in college. I was lucky enough to have professors who wanted to teach, rather than focus on their own research, and all were understandable.

When I taught AP Calc AB, some of my students (the 4s and 5s, anyway) went straight on to Calc II and did fine. Since the AB course went a bit farther than a traditional college Calc I course, there was enough of an overlap so the kids had time to adjust to the professor, and found it comforting that the course for them started with review.

I'm enjoying college more than I did HS.

Back when I was in first grade, I was commming down sick with strep. The nurse and teacher both thought I was faking it ( I wasn't). I came home that day with fever, aches and pains. I was pissed. It sucks that breeder byproducts have to ruin it for everyone.

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lab mom