Anonymous Rex’s Weblog

So today I was told that our school is infested with lice and that I had to go through all my students’ hair looking for parasites. I was sort of wondering what all the scratching was during math class: apparently they weren’t thinking really hard—they were scratching at parasites.

So my principal comes in and asks, “Do you know how to do a lice check?” Well I don’t have any kids, and this is NOT in my job descriptions. So the principal nabs some unsuspecting student and drags her into my office. For some reason I thought searching for lice entailed a flashlight and maybe rubber-gloves or something. But this was basically the classic-nature-documentary pick through another chimp’s fur approach.

I’m really not afraid of parasites, but this is a rather degrading process for my students. The fact that some of them don’t see it as degrading is irrelevant. So I had to go through all of my kids’ hair searching for evidence of lice––which I’ve never seen, so I wouldn’t know it if it bit me in the ass-–no wait, that’s crabs.

Now my students are almost all black and some of them are under the impression that black people cannot get lice. I guess it makes sense that lice would have a more difficult time nesting in thicker hair–but I don’t think they’re that picky.

Then there are the braids. I can’t do the chimp search when my students all have hair that’s done up in tight little cornrows and braids. And I don’t want to undo the braids because then I’ll lose an hour of class time while they find someone to do their hair.

In the end though, my kids knew if they had lice or not. (They’re getting their freaking driver’s licenses.) The students who had been scratching all day where the ones who refused to be searched—go figure.

I plan to use this on Monday when I start going over their biology quizzes. Apparently a lot of them don’t know the difference between pesticides and parasites anyway. Gotta love the multi-discipline curriculum.