Sigh, it happened again. Pretty much the exact same way.

November (when I am writing this) is something of our dead season. The student numbers get down to a trickle, as everyone would rather stay warm at home then come to class.  I wasn’t too shocked to see that my last class of the night (8;40-9;30) only had one student booked. This is something fatal to see at the beginning of the day, because it charges you with the hope that this student will either cancel or not turn up. Alas, 8;30 rolls around, and the student is there in the classroom waiting for me.

I know this student, and she exemplifies the worst of human vapidity. The conversations I have been obliged to have with her have demonstrated that she has nothing to say. Unfortunately, when she has nothing to say she ends up giving me a big, toothy grin. This is what I was mentally ready for; silence, and an idiot grinning.

What I wasn’t ready for is the red that ran down her incisor. But this is a different horror movie scenario, as this person hasn’t done anything interesting to gain this discoloration, rather she forgot to do something. Repeatedly.  Namely, brush her fucking teeth. At first it is just a tiny rivulet of blood coming down from between her teeth. But as she opens and closes her mouth to speak, it starts to stain the whole area.For fifty minutes I go over the lesson where she barely talks and every time she is too stupid to answer a question, she gives me a bloody smile. Fifteen minutes in I am thinking to myself PLEASE STOP GRINNING and desperately looking for sometime to stare at in the room. It eventually stopped, but the image is pretty much set in my mind.