Vomit and Ghosts in the Classroom

I've been teaching a lot lately, and the classes I teach are long - either 5 hours or 6.5 hours.  Day classes start at 8:00 and tend to end at 1:00.  Night classes run from 5:30 - 10:30.  A few weeks ago I was teaching a night class and my students had taken their finals and went home early.  The other classes had finals as well, so the building was quiet as I set up my classes online for the following term.  I started to hear someone wretching.  I could tell it was a male.

My classroom was a good amount of space down from the men's bathroom, so it seemed weird the sound would travel so far.  It went on and on.  After a while, I started getting concerned that the guy was very seriously ill and in trouble.  So I walked around the building trying to find him.  The two classrooms set behind mine were empty.  Beside my class was a hallway and then faculty offices, which were empty.  The classroom next to mine was a nursing lab, but as I walked by I could see there were just two students in there with an instructor, and it appeared they were studying vitals. 

I finally walked down to the library, and explained the situation to the night librarian.  I asked if he would mind going into the men's bathroom to make sure the person was okay and didn't need help.  When the librarian walked past my classroom, he, too, could hear the violent vomiting.  But when he went into the bathroom, it was empty.

We walked up and down the halls, searching for the source of the dreadful sound.  I certainly didn't feel like eating any dinner that night, after hearing twenty minutes of heaving.  Eventually the librarian and I roped another instructor into searching for the ill person.  Now there were three of us.  And she finally located the source.

Remember that nursing class right next to mine?  The one that seemed to be studying vitals?  It turns out they had a vomit app on an ipad and had spent the past thirty minutes playing with the app.  I guess if you're a nursing student, vomit apps just never lose their fun!

When I told my boys about how the nurses got me good, they thought this was just hilarious.  I'm pretty sure they wish they had a vomit app.  Yuck.

One more story from the classroom - I do teach some basic level statistics in my Introduction to Psychology class.  I saw this little math joke around Halloween, so as I was teaching what a normal distribution looks like, I drew it on the board.  All my students were drawing right along with me.  Then I drew the paranormal distribution, and they drew that too.  It took them a minute before they realized that was a joke, but when they did, they were all amused.

Here's hoping that all of you are finding much amusement in life lately.  Have a great week!