Today, while walking back from the park with my class of five and six year old kids, I witnessed one of them take an elbow to the nose hard enough to cause blood to start pouring out of both nostrils at an alarming rate.
Our school is situated in a very sleepy residential neighborhood, with a convenient local park just a couple small blocks away. Every day we can, the two bilingual classes at MSP walk the three or four minutes to play for about half an hour at the park. It’s also a convenient time to teach the kids how to safely cross the road, and we practice at the small intersections along the way.
We have a chant that goes “Look to the right, look to the left, look to the right again. Are there any cars? No there aren’t, put your hand up.” The kids put hands to brow like they’re peering off into the distance, and swivel around to look in the direction they’re mentioning.
Well today, one pair of energetic boys was standing a bit too close to one another, and when it came time to “look to the left,” the left elbow of the boy in front caught the nose of the boy behind him with enough force to make a lovely squishing sound, like someone had just stepped on a wet sponge.
His immediate reaction was remarkable, face contorted like he’d just smelled the awfulest stink he never thought possible, followed immediately by two matching rivulets of blood running down his face, while the rest of the class quickly huddled around him.
To his credit, there were no real waterworks, replaced instead with almost a sense of embarrassment at having everyone looking at him while he bled out. I walked the class the last block back to school while my assistant helped him apply wads of tissue to his face.
That was about 11:30am. As we were getting ready to go home today at 2:30, I checked the tissue plug we’d left in his nostril to staunch the flow that hadn’t stopped before lunch.
You guessed it; still bleeding.
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