Has this ever happened to you: you’re sitting in class, you adjust your seat, and you feel gum stuck to the bottom of your chair. Or maybe you’ve found gum under a desk or table. Stuff like that has happened to me too many times to count, and if you’re a student at CHS, you’d likely share my sentiment. 62% of CHS students in a survey reported having accidentally touched gum in school. If that percentage were to apply to the whole student body, that could mean over 300 Cashmere students have at some point accidentally touched gum in class.
It’s not just gum stuck to tables or desks that’s a problem; gum on the ground is a big issue too. According to that same CHS gum survey, 57% of responders reported having stepped on gum before, and 29% of responders reported doing so at school or at a school event. Everyone knows how annoying removing gum from shoes can be. For example, before a CHS track race I was running, I accidentally stepped on gum, and after I finished the run, I found a big glob of gum and track tar on one of my expensive Nike spikes. It took me over half an hour to remove it, and even then, I couldn’t get it all. Keep in mind, this all happened because some idiot left their gum on the ground.
According to the National Library of Medicine, a single piece of gum can have over one hundred thousand bacteria on its surface, which can also remain for several days after being stuck. Despite that, there are still people, even in CHS, who put gum on things others may end up touching. Why is this? The most common theory involves the belief that your body can’t digest gum well, a widespread myth. Yes, the human body can absolutely digest gum, and it digests it at the same rate as anything else. However, not many people know this, and refuse to swallow their gum. And this is where the theory goes: a person doesn’t want to swallow their gum, they can’t access a trash can where they are, and they are too impatient to throw it away when the opportunity comes. As a result, they put their gum on whatever they may find, whether that be under a table or on the ground. Considering how prevalent gum under desks is at CHS, these people likely exist here and are running rampant in the halls of our school.
So with all that said, what should we do? Well, I don’t think a gum ban is necessary, as there are likely only a few perpetrators. In the CHS gum survey, only one out of the over 90 respondents said they didn’t make sure to throw out or swallow their gum when finished. If this applies to the whole school, and only a few people here stick gum on things, then it makes no sense to use their actions to restrict gum rights for the entire student body. Instead, I believe we should reach out to the uninformed and tell them why they’re wrong. To tell them why they should throw away or swallow their gum. We should educate students, perhaps in class or in advisory, on why swallowing gum isn’t very unhealthy, and also on how truly unhealthy gum stuck to things is. Only then, by effectively getting to the source, can we start to see progress.
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