‘This Is What Schools Should Be Teaching Kids’: Teacher Goes Viral For Showing Her Class How To Correctly Wipe Their Butts

There are some topics that are very important, but most of us are too embarrassed to discuss. Even if our health and happiness depend on it.

Do you know what’s important and stays with you from your early childhood to the end of your days? Knowing how to wipe your butt after going for a Number 2. But before you go running off to some other article that’s not talking about DooDoo and CaCa, hear us out: a teacher went viral on the internet after using balloons to teach her preschool students how to wipe their behinds.

The video where a teacher uses balloons to show kids how to wipe went viral

Image credits: gnuman1979

The creative and innovative unnamed teacher showed kids how to wipe front-to-back (and not back-to-front), fold the paper, and wipe again. The balloons were a perfect way to illustrate how to do this in practical terms.

When the video was posted online, it went off the rails: when one person shared it on Twitter, the clip got over 165,000 likes and was retweeted 48,300 times. Plenty of American Twitter users exclaimed that lessons like this would be invaluable in US schools. However, there were plenty of offended people as well — they thought that lessons such as wiping one’s buttocks were best left for parents to teach at home.

You can watch the full clip here

We don’t teach essential skills in American schools. pic.twitter.com/OnKwolhKVY

— jamie (@gnuman1979) October 10, 2019

Wiping your behind with toilet paper is far from the healthiest or cleanest thing you can do, according to scientists and BBC Future. In the West, the fact that we overwhelmingly use toilet paper instead of water to clean ourselves is an indication of the influence the United Kingdom and the United States have, rather than ‘proof’ that it’s more hygienic than the available alternatives.

According to BBC Future, the vast majority of the world uses water to clean themselves after [ahem] evacuating their bowels. Or, in the words of Egyptian comedian Bassem Youssef during a recent performance in the UK, “I don’t get it: you guys are one of the most advanced countries in the world. But when it comes to the behind, you’re behind.”

“The penchant in many Western countries for wiping after using the toilet – rather than rinsing off – is a source of puzzlement around the world, writes Christine Ro on BBC Future. “Water cleans more neatly than paper: at the risk of inspiring an “ew!”, imagine trying to remove chocolate pudding from your skin with tissue alone. Plus, while toilet tissue may not be as harsh as pieces of ceramic (used by ancient Greeks) or corn cobs (used by colonial Americans), we can all agree that water is less abrasive than even the softest five-ply.”

So, dear Pandas, what do you think of teachers showing their students proper bathroom etiquette? Do you think that water is better than paper? What other thoughts do you have on this topic? Share your ideas in the comments.