Flunking the Sniff Test

I proctor a sniff test that is more like a pop quiz in that it is unannounced.

Failing it will get you a call home to mom or dad but will not affect your grade.

The test is done one on one with a teacher but is not oral. And I dare not give it to girls. It just wouldn’t look right.

Dayshawn (pseudonym) took it last week and failed miserably.

In walking across my classroom, I was stopped in my tracks. The problem was coming from Dayshawn’s direction, so I discreetly asked him out of my classroom. There were students in the hallway, so I summoned Dayshawn to the unoccupied room next to mine. I leaned over close to his armpit and sniffed. He smelled awful.

It was 8:45 in the morning.

He said it was his dad’s cologne. Only it was not cologne.

It was body odor.

I sent him downstairs to a colleague’s room. She keeps deodorant wipes for this very reason. When Dayshawn returned, thankfully, the smell had not.

Welcome to the life of the middle school teacher. Hormones generally start kicking in around 6th, 7th and 8th grades, which are the grades I teach. When we teachers get our students from gym or recess, we brace for the worst because we know what’s coming — a conglomeration of odors that’ll knock your socks off.

It’s a combination of limburger cheese, chitlins, sour socks and, as my deodorant wipes colleague likes to say, old hoagie sandwiches.

Sometimes, these kids come to school smelling like that (or weed). And running around during gym or recess only exacerbates things. Once that class leaves the room, I must fumigate with the Lysol sprays we’re all given by our administration at the beginning of the year.

Once the classroom is sprayed down, the next class enters. One of the students inevitably announces, “It stank in here.” And she’s right, as old hoagies and Lysol generally don’t mix.

I taught two years apiece in poor countries, Madagascar and the Philippines. In Madagascar, I taught in a village called Maevatanana, where we usually didn’t have running water. But the kids didn’t smell, not consistently.

They somehow managed to keep themselves clean, probably the same way I did: On the rare occasions that the well at the school produced water, we would line up — sometimes at 2 in the morning — and fetch, taking the water in buckets back to our dwelling and pouring it in an enormous plastic drum. You go back and forth from the well to your home enough times and you’ll have water to last you … one week.

If there was one thing Filipinos in the Philippines take very seriously, it is cleanliness — their bodies, homes and classrooms. We may be a developing country, they seemed to be, but you will not accuse us of being dirty.

The issue of student body odor is not uniquely an American problem, but of all the places I’ve taught around the globe, it’s the worst here.

And why is that? Where does the fault lie? My mother puts it squarely on the parents. As a teenager, I was a bagger at Jewel Food Store, and we were required to wear an apron, a white dress shirt, black slacks and dress shoes. My mother took great pride in how white my shirt collars were; she would wash them after only one wearing, spraying them down with Shout before cleaning.

“You can tell a lot about a mother by how clean her child’s collar is,” is one of my mom’s favorite axioms.

One day, my mother had to pick up my last check from the grocery store as I was off to college. The manager, a woman named Alma Lewis, applauded my mother for her son’s consistently white collars. My mother wears the compliment like a badge of honor even now.

She says however a child is perceived is a direct reflection of his/her parents. This isn’t always true, for I’ve taught plenty of smart kids with stupid parents and vice versa. But I get her point. Whenever I encounter a smelly kid, or one whose clothes are dirty, my first thought is, “Why would a parent let her/his child out of the house smelling or looking like that?”

A teacher must be careful in addressing the problem. Want to know how I once made a kid cry in the South Bronx? He was a seventh grader, and he wore a heavy winter coat every day in class. Never took it off, even during the summer. One day, for whatever reason, I had enough and told the kid he was going to have to take his coat off. He wouldn’t budge. So, I told him again. Still, no movement. I said if he didn’t take it off, I’d send him to the principal’s office.

Reluctantly, and now with tears in his eyes, he slowly started taking off the coat. It was at that moment, you could start to smell the stench.

What was I doing? I quickly told him he could keep his coat on. I hope that the other kids never realized why.

Whose fault was it that this kid came to school in this condition? In parents’ defense, many of them work odd hours and are not home to see their child off to school. And a lot of times, these are single-parent homes. And almost as often, there’s more than one child in the house, and the oldest have to make sure their siblings get up, eat and get to school safely.

That’s a lot for an 11 year old to handle. In the schools where I’ve worked, you see it all the time.

We routinely have kids miss school because they have to stay home and watch their baby sibling. So, you’re just happy they can make it to school in any type of condition possible.

And sometimes those conditions are the worst.

Fortunately, we have washers and dryers where I’ve worked, in the South Bronx and Chicago. Often kids come in way before school starts to wash and dry their clothes, with the administration’s blessing.

Sometimes teachers go above and beyond. I once had a fellow teacher who went to a student’s home, gathered her clothes, took them back to her place and washed and dried them herself, free of charge. I’ll let that teacher tell the story:

“Really I did it because I heard other students and staff mention this body odor, which I had never really experienced. I walked by a couple of times and it hit me. So, I had a transparent and honest conversation with her and just let her know I hadn’t noticed it before but I had heard about it. And I told her, ‘I don’t want people talking about you.’

“To be quite honest, she was well aware. She asked, ‘What was the stench like? Was it, like, a musty kind of thing or whatever?’ And she mentioned, considering the space that she lives in, she leaves all her clothes in, like, a big garbage bag. And since the bag is always closed, that kind of contributed to it. And combine that with the smell of the space she lives in …

“That girl had so much going on, so many things. She’s tough. And that was the last thing on her mind.”

So, a teacher saved the day.

Again.

You’ve got to give it up to us educators. We juggle. At school, we play the role of educator, parent, counselor, motivator, disciplinarian, good cop, bad cop. Now you can add another title.

Cleanliness Keeper.