OK, I phrased that title dramatically, but today I experienced a less intense version of every teacher's nightmare - a health emergency during class.
I've been teaching at the USC International Academy for five weeks now, and it's been going pretty well. I'm teaching the master's prep program, which is pretty intense (the students are all conditionally admitted to master's programs at USC, they just need to get their English skills up to snuff by taking this one semester of classes and passing it with a B average), but the students are so motivated and generally so easy to work with, it makes the job pretty enjoyable.
Today, we had a grammar quiz at the beginning of class, and one of the women (girls, really - I'd guess she's in her early 20s) didn't look so good. She took the quiz really fast and then asked if she could go to the restroom. When she came back about 5 minutes later, she literally walked in the door to the classroom and then fainted onto the floor. It was very dramatic! All the students gasped and I immediately ran outside the room to tell someone at the front desk, who then called the campus equivalent of 911. I wouldn't have been that stressed, to be honest, because it didn't seem that serious overall, except that she was pretty unresponsive to anyone talking to her while she lay on the floor. She was breathing, but not communicating at all.
So a tense 5 - 10 minutes passed (I think? It felt like forever.) while we waited on the paramedics to come. They finally arrived and asked everyone to leave the classroom so she could have some privacy, so we all walked awkwardly into an empty classroom, where I wondered if I should try to have the students do work while we waited. I ended up giving them a handout on APA citations to read and work on if they wanted to. Most of them opted to stare into space or go on their phones.
The girl seemed to be OK after a few minutes with the medics - they were able to get her to sit up and respond to questions, and I honestly suspect she just hadn't eaten in a while. So we all filed back into the room (after she had been wheeled out in a wheelchair) and I tried to continue the lesson as usual. It's such a difficult balance, trying to show concern for the student who just left in a wheelchair, and check that everyone else in the class isn't freaking out, AND try to make sure that we don't "waste" class time!
In the end, I think the whole process went OK. We did manage to continue the lesson, and I got a text from the girl's friend later in the day saying that she was doing well. Phew. Thinking it would probably be a good idea to take a CPR class though, just in case.
2 comments:
Eek! That's so stressful. My worst nightmare is that happening in a room full of kids, haha. During the birth class we took when I was pregnant with Rhoda one of the dads couldn't handle one of the videos and he passed out but it manifested itself as a sort of seizure and it was so frightening. Our teacher said it was the first time it had happened in her 10 years of teaching so I guess that's good?
Wow! That experience with the future dad must have been even more stressful for the other students (and especially the teacher) than my experience was!
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