Oh that seems like probably the hardest job to have with that particular condition. Imagine having to explain to a new group of 10-year-olds every year why you have a conjoined twin. And I’m sure there are kids who say not nice things about them.
I had a science teacher in 5th grade who pretended to die of mercury poisoning because a kid broke a thermometer, complete with having a substitute coming in the next three days
Imagine being in class trying to sneakily do something to make a friend laugh, and while you're midway through your class clown routine, you start to feel like something is watching you.
You slowly turn around, sweating, heart racing, and lock eyes with the most menacing glare imaginable. Thousands of years of pain and suffering fill your mind as you watch the head slowly begin to lift off the shoulder. Through the silence, you hear the AC unit humming in the ceiling. Then, the automated shades click on, and the blackout fabric slowly begins their descent down the window. Taking away not only the sunlight but any remaining sense of hope as well.
She then effortlessly rises from her chair without breaking her unwavering focus solely on you. You witness a second of her legs and arms beginning to twist and twitch as she leaps up over her desk. Before she can land, the lights in the room shut off, leaving only the faint red glow on the emergency exit sign. The temperature begins to drop rapidly, and you frantically reach out into the dark void, looking for a classmate to save you.
Teacher here. I joke about having invisible eyes all around my head, but having a literal extra person to keep an eye on things would be real cool. Literal superpower with teaching kids haha.
My six year olds think I have eyes n the back of my head. I tell them they'll get them when they have babies but if they try to find them n My hair they'll never be able to have them.
They're astonished at how I know what happened when I'm not around or how I give them advice and when they don't listen things happen like I tell them. They even wonder how I know who's talking 🤣
HAHAHA my twins are the same :') they think they are so quietly whispering and not making noise. But they talk louder than my deaf grandma and bags of snacks make noise.
I would imagine it might be hard to use her two limbs with her eyes closed though? They both have one leg and one arm.
Honestly one of the degrees should have been counted as audits rather than having to pay double tuition. I mean, Im sure they both decided it's better to both have degrees. But fuck the school for not making a special circumstance out of it.
But does the one not getting paid work? Or does she instigate the kids and sabotage her sister? Imagine what it’s like when they get in a fight…like I wonder who’s got more control of the legs…
I believe from what they've said, having been that way all their life and having quite a bit of practice how to handle being two people sharing a body, the uninvolved party can just sort of... Ignore it? Disassociate
I don't believe anything is happening non consensually. They are pretty much by definition the two closest human beings on the planet and they have spent their entire life navigating their situation. I can't imagine anyone is doing anything without the consent of all parties involved
How they specifically deal with that is nobody's business but theirs, unless they decide they want to talk about it
Questionable, but not a problem in this case. While only one of them is married, that's purely on paper and they're in a poly relationship involving them and the one guy, just only one of them can be officially married to him since they're legally two separate people and you cant be married to multiple people.
Interesting how only one is married and in love. I mean they’re two different minds but sharing a body and being in the same place and same conversations and same experiences with the husband, but only one is in love and married?
Never mind one writing on the board, the other watching the little rascals.
Literal eyes in the back of their heads.
The college is pretty ruthless. As an employee they are not doing the work of two people, even if they have a greater capacity to keep an eye on the class.
The possibilities are endless.Brittany: "Abby will be absent today so its just me teaching" Abby wears sunglasses and doesn't say a word the entire day.
To their slight benefit, I doubt it’s a shock to any of the kids or parents when they show up at the start of the year. I bet they’re a well known pair in their school system and community.
Doesn’t make comments and jokes easier though, but hopefully they can turn their experience into good lessons
If I recall their situation correctly, the even more fucked up part is that she would be carrying around her slowly necrotic twin until she herself died.
I believe each twin controls their own half of the body, and they have a couple organs that are duplicated, but I don’t recall which ones. If they share a heart, and other vital organs her dead sister would just be there, and continue to be dead without actually decomposing.
If they don’t share vital organs, then she would slowly become necrotic until they both died, and the living twin would feel an immense strain on her own organs.
I've never met them but they're a couple years older than me and from broadly the same area. I know people who went to college with them. They're definitely a known entity
Even when I was growing up, talking shit about them got you pushback. And we were noxious little shits back then compared to today. It was partially cause it's disrespectful but also because Minnesotans fucking love any claim to relevancy we can get and they're celebrities. Did you get interviewed by Oprah? Yeah I don't think so buddy.
Yeah, you nailed the MN mindset. I've seen them out and about a few times. I feel terrible when I saw them once and kind of jumped. It was my first day on a job so I was pretty nervous and I turned around they were right next to me. My brain took a second to process what I was seeing and I was amped up because of my first day. They did not seem pleased.
I met them when they went to bethel university. they're instantly recognizable but it is a little weird how they keep ending up in the news lol out here they're just normal people but it feels like the rest of the country sees them as a freak show or something.
On the other hand it gives them the opportunity to expose kids growing up to differently abled people and helps to guide them on understanding that and having important questions answered in their formative years.
I would imagine it's easier to not be judgmental about different people if you're exposed to them early on and have that curiosity explored in a healthy way.
This is real. If I’m a 5th grader and one of my teachers is two people, just about any other kind of human condition would become less polarizing/abnormal to me. “Why’s ____ weird? One of my teachers literally had two heads.”
Yup. Good neighbor friend was deaf, another one had half an arm due to a car crash, another (while this isn't a disability) had a big, textured portwine birthmark over most of her face. Everybody's normal after the first time--and it sticks with you that those things and plenty of other things are normal and fine.
I've seen a few interviews and the one sister in particular (can't remember which is which, sorry) seems to be quite sassy. They've probably heard it all before and by this point, nothing a kid says will effect them long term. They've made it this far already.
Having been a teacher, you'd be surprised. Kids are shockingly accepting and honest little beings. Their honesty is refreshing. I've got Parkinson's these days so I only substitute teach now. Kids are dramatically less awkward than adults when you tell them. They'll just straight ask why my hands shake. And then you tell them and instead of being weird about it they'll say "Damn, that sucks" with perfectly sincere empathy and then ask how you text on your phone.
And they're going to say mean shit to anyone and everyone. Don't think you're safe because you look normal. They'll find your weakness and blurt it out.
As someone who has lived with a fairly mild physical disability since birth, it is 100% the adults who have always had an issue with my disability more than the kids(even when I was a child). Kids will stare, sometimes mimic(toddlers), and ask but will still mostly treat me like they do everyone else(for better or worse). Adults will add the shaming aspect and act like I shouldn’t be interacted with “because it’s rude” or they don’t want to hurt me/my feelings(when really it’s more about them not wanting to feel uncomfortable). The fake act of caring while being actively shunned through dismissive pity is so “othering” and 100% worse(stigmatizing really).
It’s also interesting to note that no kid has ever come up to me to tell me that my disability inspired them or if they can pray for me because I’m especially cared about by god…Yikes! I sometimes really appreciate the authenticity kids tend to display.
It’s all fun until you call the rude lady in church a dick nose. I have been told I was honest in that assessment, but it was not the place for it. Kids 🤷
I subbed for a few years. I never really got any of the behavior issues people talked about. I think part of it is just that people are expecting kids to be adults and tend to attribute to malice what is often just poor impulse control and a developing brain.
%100 true. I'm missing a finger and when adults learn about it they flinch and some even have a look of horror on their face. Kids; super chill about it and get up close to look at it. Kind of refreshing.
You know that trick where you disconnect your index finger? I do that trick but sneeze in the middle of it and "lose" my finger. Kids are so sweet they crawl around to help me look for it.
My English teacher's hands shook when I was little and an older boy said it was because she was shooting drugs into her butt behind the school at lunch.
So I never thought to ask because it had already been answered. It had been answered terribly but it was an answer.
Hey that said, one of them can explain the lesson while the other one stares intensely making sure no one is slacking or snickering behind the teacher's back.
Also cheating on their exams would be twice as hard with 2 inspectors.
Now I'm imagining them filling the white board up from either side until they meet in the middle in half the time it would take a single person to fill it up.
Theyre probably use to it, and use their ability to deflect those awful things and instead teach acceptance. I think it would be incredibly hard, but theyve been conjoined for 30 somethings years? Thats hard in itself. Think its beautiful they chose to become teachers.
When I was in the 4th grade I had a teacher who had a birth defect that left her with “T-Rex” arms (her description). On the first day of school she took a little bit of time, maybe 15-20 minutes, where she addressed it. I remember she told us the medical name (can’t remember what it was), talked about challenges she had growing up and how she adapted her life to be able to do anything we could do. She had prosthetics she could wear but they were uncomfortable so she avoided using them. But she did put them on to show us, the only time I ever saw her using them. She addressed our questions and we moved on. Not a single kid teased her, made fun of her, or exhibited any signs of being a bully. If anything, she probably made us all a bit more empathetic that day.
from their documentary show the school was actually a smidge concerned about how the kids would react and had the gals come in and do a Q&A session and then had them leave and asked the kids if they had any more questions with them gone and the kids were pretty much fine. if they were teaching seventh grade maybe it would have been a different story, but that age seemed to be ok with them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M36jxR_6lIE
on the contrary, i think kids would be the best demographic to work with. bigotries are taught, not innate, and kids have a far more adaptable sense of normality than adults.
Pretty sure they've been dealing with people saying not nice things their entire lives. It sounds like a good opportunity to teach kids that there are all kinds of people in the world. I'd bet money that they are a lot of their students favorite teachers because I would imagine they have tremendous empathy and really love their job.
Honestly, because of them, they could change some kids lives in a good way. Spending 8 months or whatever with them as a teacher and learning they are no different aside from a wildly rare birth condition, could teach some kids empathy who didn't otherwise learn it at home.
Oh man when I was in 5th/6th grade I was such a shithead. My friends and I would tear substitute teachers apart saying the meanest things we could think of.
So I live in roughly the same area as them. It absolutely threw me off guard the first time but luckily I didn't feel like too much of an ass since they didn't seem to notice me.
It's fucking amazing how full grown adults will talk when they're out of earshot of them. I knew they were in a target before I saw them just from hearing people gossip out loud about them after seeing them. Adults can be just as bad they're just a bit better at hiding it.
I imagine the parents of the students get a letter explaining their child’s teacher for the year will have two heads or something like that. Idk I can’t imagine it going well without warning or a heads up.
I mean to be fair, 5th grade to me felt like the last time my classmates acted politely towards one another, maybe before the hormones started kicking in. It was 6th grade and onwards where the problems started. Just a personal experience I know.
At the same time it's a wonderful thing to teach kids about different being ok and kids meeting different kinds of people makes them more open to others.
they probably tell the kids ahead of time…and they are all at the same school so they probably see them and get used to it by the time they are actually in their class
The elementary school I went to had a 4th grade teacher with dwarfism.
He was one of the most popular teachers in our school.
I think for the 4th graders having an adult at your eye level is different experience than a most teachers that are taller and naturally are looking down at you when they’re talking to you as a kid.
I don’t recall any student ever making a negative remark about him.
Kid brains are wired to learn new things and become familiar with things they didn't know existed. They're probably very accepting . . . right after they say the most out of pocket shit even a bigoted adult would blush at
Idk. Every primary school teacher I had joked they had eyes in the back of their head to stop you messing about when they wrote on the board. This definitely one ups that.
Kids tend to adjust to unexpected things surprisingly well. It’s probably a conversation teachers of younger kiddos have as they see them around school. Then by the time the kids end up in the class they are fairly familiar with their condition. There might be a few questions here and there, but kids tend to accept things at face value.
If I was in 5th grade and my teachers where conjoined twins I would find it the coolest shit ever and pay lots of attention even of they where talking about the most boring lesson ever
Honestly, being an upper elementary teacher (5th being my favorite age group) working in some really rough schools, I don't think this would be an issue for them. Kids are surprisingly accepting and accommodating, even the ones who tend to be little jerks will not be that way towards a teacher who has any sort of disability, in fact they'll straight up defend and advocate for their teacher if let's say a new kid comes in and might not react well to the surprise of their condition. The other kids will be quick to correct them and let them know that won't fly and how great of a teacher they both are. The things kids tend to be mean about with each other and teachers is if a teacher isn't being fair or consistent, or if a kid is just being annoying. Most of the bullying situations I've had to deal with was because a kid was not taking no as an answer when they wanted to hang out with a group that didn't want to hang out with them.
Now, middle school, I can't imagine the kids being rude to their face, but I can see them talking behind their back a lot, maybe coming up with rumors or saying inappropriate things because unfortunately that's how that age group is. I think they're well fit for elementary, it's a lot easier to build relationships with kiddos that age.
I have kids currently in school. My son told me one of the girls in his class made the teacher cry yesterday. Nothing happened to the student.
I asked what he did. He said “What could I do? I already get bullied enough.” and my heart broke.
School is hard, but the kids suck, the teachers are getting worse (my oldest has a teacher being forced to retire for touching the girls, my son has one being forced to retire for putting hands on students in anger, yeah) and I can’t come up with a solution that doesn’t end in beating people up.
but i’m sure the kids end up being better people :)
like they’re exposed to someone, regularly, who has a physical abnormality. they have to listen to the two women and respect them. surely that’ll make the children more kind and open-minded
iunno, kids are good at following the culture. if the other adults around act like it's no big deal, then it's probably no big deal. i would imagine/hope that any school community that would hire them, would also swiftly deal with any unwelcome behavior towards them. kids are always going to be curious and say things without thinking, but i bet they have super thick skin and do a treat job handling those innocent moments of awkwardness.
and i think this would only be a big deal to new students. it's fifth grade, most of these kids have probably seen them in the halls and on the playground since they were much younger. i would hope for most of them, it's just business as usual.
There are adults who say ‘not nice’ things either. I used to live in the same town as Abby and Brittany and I saw them around a few times. There were a lot more adults pointing, staring, and giggling then I would’ve expected.
not necessarily. when i was in high school there was a sub we’d get sometimes who had some sort of condition… i forget what it was exactly but he had small arms and was in a wheelchair. everyone loved him and he would pop wheelies on his chair. granted, this was high school and not middle school but kids can be as accepting as they can be cruel
Nah, they’d eventually become well-known and by 5th grade, most students would already be aware and wouldn’t need any explaining.
My mom’s not a conjoined twin, but she is missing an arm. She used to work at my school, and the first few weeks there were a lot of questions, but eventually it just became the normal thing. People who are around anyone who’s differently-bodied already kinda know this, you just sort of forget about it after a while. People always forget my mom’s only got one hand, makes for some funny situations when they ask her to hold something for them or similar.
In the long run, I think it might be good for the kids to get exposure to this. It’s not a common condition, I know. But it will help them learn to respect people with physical conditions, disabilities, etc.
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u/viggicat531 1d ago
I sure hope they are not working for that same college....