After 26 years of teaching I’ve been introduced to a new word this year – bathrooming.  Until now, I thought teachers just took kids to the bathroom, but no, they are BATHROOMING the kids.  How do I know this?  Because this year I am bathrooming kids before they go to lunch. So, you might be asking, how does one bathroom an elementary student?  Well, let me tell you.

My first attempt at bathrooming was a disaster.  I just assumed, like adults at a football game during halftime, that children would know to watch and wait for their turn to go.  Au contraire mes amis!  There was loud, mass chaos as kids crowded into the bathroom, looking under stalls to see if they could go in. There was a party in the hallway.  To properly bathroom a classroom of kids, one must first divide the group by gender, have them sit against the walls in those gender specific groups and then send kids in when someone leaves the bathroom.  It’s a little like the guy who yells at paratroopers on a plane; “go, go, go!” One at a time.  Because you see, there is a time element here because they must get to lunch.  And of course, there is the monitoring of hand washing.  From those who would try to just run their hands under the water and run to those who just want to see how much lather they can create, to those who just stand there and let the water run over their hands while they play in the sink.  All the while saying, go, go, go! to the next kid in line.  And for those kids who have finished, there is a third line where they wait so we can all march to lunch at the same time.

The bathroom seemed to be the theme of the day today.  It started right as the bell rang and I thought I would take the opportunity to use the restroom myself before class started.  I would use the restroom right across the hall from my room, but obviously that would make too much sense.  There was a group of kids who dashed in at the last minute so I thought I would walk to the office to use the “grown-up” bathrooms.  However, as I walked around the corner, I saw a dad trying to convince his Kindergartner daughter to go down the hall to class.  When she saw me, she grinned and yelled “Mrs. Bush!”  Dad mouthed “thank you” and I took her hand to go down the hall.  The bathroom would have to wait.  Again.

People joke about teachers having to wait all day to use the bathroom and there have actually been articles written about how unhealthy this is.  But I’m here to tell you, there is no time and in my case, there is almost always a class using the closest restrooms between classes, so I either wait or dash at the last minute as I hear my next class coming down the hall.

Another new experience today.  It’s not like I’ve never had a kid have an accident in my room, but it’s been a few years.  I usually catch them when I see them dancing and send them across the hall.  Today however, I had a child who started crying who said she missed her mom.  This happens once in a while, so I had her stay by me and tried to distract her with a game we were playing.  But somehow she seemed to cry even harder.  At one point, I almost did the mom thing and plop her on my lap because I was trying to teach AND comfort her at the same time, but in hindsight, I’m really glad I didn’t. Because right after that, she got this horrified look on her face and I realized she had waited too long.  I tried to get her to run with me towards the bathroom, but she completely froze and as we all watched, there it went.  She was finally willing to go if a friend went with her and when she came back, I sent her to get some dry clothes.  Hopefully it will be a few more years before that happens again.  Maybe I’ll be retired by then….

Then after school, I saw a group of the custodians talking in the hall, so I thought this would be a good time to ask one of them to go over my carpet in my room from the earlier accident.  Their focus however, seemed to be a problem with someone or a group of someones who have decided it’s a game to see if they can get all of the soap out of the dispenser and get it all over the floor.  At $12 a pop, refills in the dispensers can get really expensive really quickly.  Welcome to creativity from kids with no idea of how their actions affect others.  They’ll always find a way to make a game out of something.  Especially when you’ve given them specific rules – one squirt of soap and two paper towels.  After all, what’s a few more squirts and a a few more paper towels, which of course you have to shoot into the trash can like a basketball?

I know it sounds like my day is obsessed with the bathroom, but truth is, it plays a big role in my day.  Good bathrooming by a teacher at a good time helps keep kids from leaving my class and missing content during that 50 minutes.  And when you only see students every 3, 4 or for some of my kids, every 5 days, every minute counts.  And of course, if one has to go, they all have to go.  It’s Murphy’s Law.  So here’s to perfecting the art of good bathrooming and may the accidents be infrequent.