The Grossest Day of my Career

Not having been in the workforce for very long, I can make outlandish claims like "Longest day of my career" or "Best day of my career" and such. Today I can safely say that I had the Grossest Day Ever. If you are a frequent visitor to this site, you may remember a story about a little boy who found caterpillar eggs on the playground about a month ago and brought them to live in our classroom. Well, the eggs have hatched and the critters have grown. They were living in a transparent, triangular container. We kept adding leaves and the caterpillars would chew holes through them. Recently I'd noticed that a lot of the leaves were decomposing and creating mold (which, as everyone knows, is bad for caterpillars!). I told the critters' proud "owner" that we needed to transfer the caterpillars to a bigger container and wash the old one out. We set out to complete this task during our 20 minute recess. Reaching in and moving those slimy caterpillars one by one, removing the layers of rotting leaves, and then finding a thick layer of caterpillar poop was by far the YUCKIEST thing I have had to do on the job. Not only that, but I was under the impression that there were only eight or nine caterpillars in the container. As it turns out, there are forty-two!! And they were slimy!! And I had to touch them!! According to Max, there are far grosser jobs to do on a farm, but in my defense, I did not realize that teaching had any gross parts (unless you're teaching preschool and wiping snotty noses...).
In any case, the whole job took about one hour and twenty minutes. Not a lot of academics this morning...

The worst part may have been the sinking realization that these caterpillars look nothing like our other caterpillars (butterflies now, by the way!) and may in fact, be disgusting moths.