When I first started working in education, I was a substitute teacher. I worked in several districts and in a variety of classroom settings.
Although I have loads of stories, perhaps the two that get told the most are of when I got a concussion. Yep, and not only once – but twice. That’s right, on two separate occasions in two separate schools I got a concussion.
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The first happened in a Special Needs classroom that I was very familiar with. At Las Lomas Elementary, there was a teacher who was new and in trainings a lot, so I became her regular substitute teacher. There were three very well-trained aides with me too, they made each day flow seamlessly.
On one particular day, one of the aides – Sally – told me to be aware of D and his new behavior. D is an autistic boy, who was seven at the time; he didn’t have a strong verbal vocabulary, but was very aware of his surroundings. Sally was telling me how D had this new angry maniacal laugh, and right when he stops laughing he goes into a fit.
“Well, what does the laugh sound like? So I know to watch out for it. “
“I’ll let you know it when he does it.”
On cue Daniel starts to laugh his new scary demonic laugh.
Sally says, “That’s it.”
I turn around just as Daniel picks up a wood black and throws it at my face.
Now this little boy may be autistic, but he needs to grow up to be an MLB pitcher. With the most amazing accuracy he picked up and threw this wood block so absolutely perfect at me that it hit the bridge of my nose. Of course my eyes began to water; and luckily since there were three other adults in the room I went to the nurse’s office. There I got an ice pack and some aspirin. I re-entered the room with a big ice pack planted on the middle of my face, and all of the kids began holding their faces like I was. I knew that I wasn’t going t o be able to hold this ice pack to my face all day. So unfortunately that knock from the block ended up swelling so badly that it resulted in me receiving an actual concussion. Luckily the swelling did go down and I was fine. Until the next time.
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Some time after the block throwing incident, I was called in to work as a substitute at GGUSD. I had never worked at this particular district before, but I wanted to. I was a larger district and close to my home. Obviously I was glad to get a call from them. However, I am sad to report that it was the last call I received from them as well.
On the day in question, I arrived to a very busy room – full of students, adult volunteers (who also needed direction) and lots of notes. This particular day the class was to do centers. One of the centers included listening to an audio cassette, the cassette player was underneath where the television was hanging. The TV that was perfectly set up at eye level…the TV that I ran smack into….
As the class was settling in, I was trying to multi-task, obviously unsuccessfully. An adult volunteer came into the classroom, just as I was putting the tape into the tape player, and BANG! I hit the TV with such force that my vision became blurry, my nose starting running, and I began to cry from the force of the smack.
Since I was apparently becoming an expert on concussions, I immediately put the volunteers in charge and stumbled my way back to the main office and into the nurse’s office. The nurse became very panicked, she had never seen a teacher who got a concussion. To make it even more entertaining she informed me that I hit the TV so hard that I had the letters from it imprinted on my forehead! It goes without saying that everyone had to come and look at the ‘RCA’ on this new girl’s face.
I did end up having to leave school and have my then boyfriend take me to the E.R. But it’s fine, I just will never be able to play football professionally. Oh, and that school district? Managed to lose my phone number because they never called me again. I can’t imagine why.
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