Things You Don’t Think You’re Going to Find on the Floor of Your Fifth Grade Classroom

by gillis

I thought it was an ice pack, the kids are always leaving lukewarm icepacks around the classroom after the drama of an inury has lost its novelty. These white icepacks appear randomly, sometimes in clusters, after a warm, busy recess. They are left behind, forgotten by the injured, or more commonly, those feigning injury. The walking wounded are often too lazy to return them to the nurse’s office because the pain, or the thrill of the attention of the injured, is gone and they are on to the next adventure.

Drawing closer, I saw that, no, it was not an ice pack, but what it was I could not yet say. It was white, but it did not bear the familiar blue and red writing of the ice pack. Nor did it have that rectangular, uniquely distinctive lumpiness about it that is the telltale shape of the unfrozen icepack left to fend for itself on the floor. No, this was a pure white object, and it looked smooth from about 15 feet away.

Still unsure of what I was seeing, I bent down towards it. Assuming the worst, that it was some sort of handkerchief filled with mucus or other bodily-fluid, I bravely sliced down toward it with my pencil and lifted it up on the tip with one hand, while flipping my reading glasses down with the other hand. I still could not make sense of what I was now holding at the end of my pencil at the end of my outstretched arm. I had established its whiteness and its smoothness. It was quite light and shaped like a large leaf which quivered and danced at the end of the pencil as I took another nanosecond to examine it before recognition finally set in. Someone had lost the foam insert to their padded bra. Here in my classroom. During first ELA class this morning.