For me second grade was a pretty traumatic year. Nothing particularly bad happened to me, but we had some accidents in my class that were kind of scarring. So let me tell you about perhaps the most traumatizing thing I have ever witnessed.
It happened when we were split into small groups to read from these booklets. I don’t remember whatsoever what the reading was about probably something dumb since it was second grade and second graders are kind of dumb, but I very distinctly remember that they were these little blue books that were super low quality and probably home made by the teacher.
So we split up to read and the teacher wasn’t really paying attention to us, and this one kid (we’ll call him Jimbo) leans back in his chair while we’re reading. Now if the teacher had noticed she probably would have freaked out! Adults always warning about the horror stories of tiping back in your chair and basically saying, “You could die if you tip back in your chair!” Now maybe they didn’t really tell us we’d die, but the hype around the dangers of chair tipping was very extreme, but I don’t think most of us really believed the danger was real, but also you know maybe you’d die we didn’t really know. It could go either way.
So this Jimbo kid’s just leaned back totally not worried about his eminent death when he of course fell and cracked his head on the corner of a table.
We were all horrified by this and worried that the warnings of chair tipping were true, but Jimbo just got up like, “Ow that kinda hurt” and he went off to the bathroom (that we had in our classroom since second graders can’t be trusted to leave the room to pee.) I think Jimbo went to check the damage or something.
Well a little bit of time passed and we were all like, “Oh I guess Jimbo’s ok” “Yeah, he didn’t die” and we went back to reading but then suddenly Jimbo just started screaming his head off. He came out of the bathroom like the victim of a murder scene.
While in the bathroom he had touched the back of his head, which of course was spewing like a faucet, because that’s how head injuries work and so he got blood all over his hands and then seeing all that blood like a psycho he put his hands on his face and so there was blood all over his face and he came out of the bathroom like that and proceeded to run around the classroom screaming. It was terrifying.
He just ran around screaming and bleeding all over the place. He even got blood on this one girl’s blue book. And she was all like, “Eww my book” while this kid was seemingly dying.
The teacher was just like, “Oh crap” and called an ambulance for Jimbo. I don’t remember how she got him to stop running around and screaming but somehow it ended and we were all in extreme shock that having been just about the scariest thing we’d ever seen, and I think it still is one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen.
After the chaos died down the teacher tried explaining to us what happened. I remember thinking based on her explanation that Jimbo……………was kind of dumb.
How she explained it was that after Jimbo hit his head from tipping in his chair he went into the bathroom felt the gash in the back off his head and saw the blood and panicked that there was a big hole in the back of his head. And the way she described it I always thought, that Jimbo thought there was just a giant black hole/abyss thing in the back of his head. Which was pretty much where I as a little judgmental, second grader decided this was a sign that my classmate was probably stupid.
The teacher also tried to help make Jimbo seem “cooler” by explaining that after thinking he had a black hole in his head and rampaged around, without any help he calmly walked to the ambulance “all by himself.” Which who freaking cared if he walked to the ambulance!? I can walk to my bus but that doesn’t make me special, and yeah he just cracked his head open, but I was utterly not impressed, plus he literally just traumatized everyone and she pretty much told us he was stupid. I didn’t care that much anymore since I knew he was okay. Yes, I was a very judgmental and not very sympathetic second grader.
Thankfully Jimbo didn’t die or anything, he just had to get staples in his head, which back then I didn’t know there were medical staples and just thought they put normal staples in his head which seemed pretty dumb to me, especially when I knew kids who’d stapled their fingers.
Well the moral of the story is don’t tip back in your chair because you could die, or at the very least traumatize your entire class. Also if you do get a gash in the back of your head I promise it’s not a black hole and if you think it is don’t share that information or second graders will think you’re dumb.