Like… a tenth of my second grade class had Confirmed Pox. I was far from the only person with chicken pox, as it so happened. I was an angry little gremlin the whole time, because I wanted to go to the school library and read books about the human skull, but my mother said, “no, you cannot leave this house, and do not scratch the bumps please.” So I sat at home and tried not to scratch the bumps, like a good little gremlin.Ī few days into my Chicken Pox Related House Arrest, we got a letter from the school. So I had to stay home from school until I got clearance from my doctor to go back. The doctor said “yup, you’ve got those pox, it may seem mild but please for the love of god DO NOT take her to school, she is very contagious even though she may FEEL okay.” So, in elementary school, I started having chicken pox symptoms, right? They were mild because I was vaccinated (yay!) but my mom recognized them quickly and took me to the doctor, because my mom is a reasonable human being with standards. They asked me why I didn’t just “postpone” a surgery at one point- when I was fifteen- to give you an idea of how monumentally obtuse these people were. Many schools are like this, but looking back, my town’s was borderline fucking dystopian. The school system I grew up in put an absolutely ungodly amount of pressure on kids to Show Up Every Day No Matter What. I’ve seen people show up to class with the stomach flu, pneumonia, respiratory infections and all sorts of other contagious ailments. On my campus there tends to be a problem where even I you have the doctors note professors will still take points off of your final grade regardless of how sick you are.
I wonder if it has something to do with the whole “you need a doctor’s note to excuse your absence of even one day” combined with the average price of going to a doctor, the lack of education on things like “you’re still contagious even after the fever goes away”, and the overwhelming message of “if you don’t struggle through it, you’re a failure!”
It’s interesting how diseases rip through schools at incredible speeds despite being in an arguably modern, clean(ish) environment.
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