With 43 students gone this past Monday and 47 students gone on Tuesday, Tremont is definitely seeing the effects of this year’s flu season. The overall enrollment of the school is only 356 students and secretary Susan Wheeler claims that those are the highest number of students absent in one day for the three and a half years she’s worked at THS.

     Whether these students are suffering from the Swine Flu depends on if they were properly tested, but there is one thing that we all know: we don’t want what everyone else has.

     This past week I was sitting in my classroom as a group of my sophomore students presented a project when my classroom door swung open. To my shock (and initial horror), a student from another one of my classes shuffled in wearing a surgical mask. The classroom suddenly became so quiet that an ant’s footsteps would have sounded like Godzilla’s. He walked up to me, slipped me a piece of paper, and walked out of the room without saying a single word. I paused for a second as I glanced down at this inevitably germ-infested sheet of paper and then listened as the rest of the students bust out into an uncontrollable fit of laughter.

     My cooperating teacher urged me to throw the sheet of paper away because we were not sure how sick this student was. We later found out that he was actually running a 103-degree temperature and had insisted that he come bring me his part of his group’s presentation. Although I am impressed that he was dedicated enough to bring me his homework, I still would have rather he spared the germs and stayed away.

     As soon as the student was out of the room and my class had settled down from their laughing spell, a red-headed girl on the far left of the room raised her hand frantically and yelled, "Miss Pistole, can we get a Germ-X break?" After a little more laughter and agreement from her other classmates, I passed the bottle of Germ-X around the classroom.

     Up until that moment, I had never believed that I would actually come into contact with this scary flu. I had been naively ignoring all possibilities of myself getting sick and simply dismissed the idea that a school was one of the perfect places for the flu to break loose in.

     Tremont is far from being the only school that has been recently infested and overtaken by the flu and I’m sure this is only the beginning signs of what is going to be one sick winter.

     We are going to have to take all the right precautions by washing our hands frequently, coughing into our elbows, and simply taking care of ourselves. With the close proximities of schools, the flu is almost unavoidable, but being responsible is not. If we can all be accountable for our own health, we will be heading in the right direction towards dodging this sickness.