I smell a rat!

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I smell a rat!
By cc

Reading these responses I could not help but want to tell you what happened to me this year..my second year of teaching. My students were telling me they were smelling something then I began to smell something..like a dead
rat, I thought. So, I call for a request for maintenance to come, which I was told it better be a good reason for a request, and had to clear my class out of the room while maintenance lifted every ceiling tile looking for the dead rat. NoRat! Oh, boy was my name mud! Well, I sprayed alot and burned candles. The smell went away...for weeks. Then it happened again and I went on a discreet

sniffing mission. I could not find where that smell was coming from. Nor could my students. I began though to figure it out it had to be a student. To try to make this a short story, it was a student who had an accident, now it had been several times, and when I asked him about it he denied it. Lesson 1 - when you know don't ask...the evidence is there. We conferenced with his mother and she was frustrated too about what to do. His doctor said there was no physical problem. I tried for the rest of the year to help remind him to go and it worked pretty well. But I guess he just didn't want this teacher to forget him because on the last day of school he did it again and this time as soon as I got a whiff, our eyes met, and I told him to go to the office, he probably needed to go home early. Lesson 2 I will let the office take care of this. Dont' get me wrong, I really cared for this precious student but the "dead rat" had to go! Oh, the life of a teacher!