Tongue piercing I worked as a long-term substitute teacher for a local high school and I did love the experience. I spent only six months with my classes back in the 2001- 2002 school year. This was an extremely emotional time for students. Their regular social studies teacher was in the military and he was abruptly sent overseas. The students did miss their teacher, but they welcomed me and I found great pleasure in working with them. One thing I could not fathom was tongue piercing. Many of the girls in this high school actually made a conscious decision to have a piece of metal thrust into their tongues. Of course, a student who is under the age of eighteen could not get a tongue piercing without permission from a parent or guardian. I was amazed at the number of parents who did give permission for their child to have her tongue pierced. I also noticed a lot of girls counting down to their eighteenth birthday as if they were on the starting mark for a race waiting to sprint to the nearest tattoo and piercing establishment. The tongue piercing phenomenon seemed to be more common in girls than in boys. The tongue jewelry was a daily conversation among teenage girls. They shared their styles by sticking out their swollen tongues. And their tongues were swollen. Tongue piercing is quite risky. I know I sound like a grumpy old school teacher, but they are. There are a lot of bacteria in the mouth. One thing that many girls who got their tongues pierced did not consider was that they had to diligently keep their mouths clean. I handed out hall passes at least three times during each class to let a girl rinse her mouth with Listerine. Only the original Listerine can be used to maintain the freshly pierced tongues. The girls carried Listerine in their purses and some passed it back and forth the way we passed notes back and forth when I was in high school. The whole thing seemed like such an odd practice to me, but I did keep my opinion to myself. I figured that I was there to teach the students about social studies, not to tell them that I think that tongue piercing is insane. After all, I didn’t listen to the teacher who said that that second earring in my left ear was out of place. She had no idea why someone would purposely put an odd hole in their earlobe. I guess it’s generally the same thing.