The student who just TOOK the spider out of class

You never know fearless until you teach a roomful of teenagers.

Sure, the teachers are okay and a bit sadistic, but if anyone remembers high school, every teen braving the world of going to class is truly brave.

I’m basing these beliefs on my own teenage experiences. Maybe there are 13-year-olds who think they are the shit and have confidence. If so, let me know what that’s like.

This incident that left me speechless happened in summer school — the worst of the worst of high school. These kids weren’t there as punishment (officially) but did a course for preparation for high school. Poor kids.

Anyway, it was a normal classroom of 16-year-olds. They actually took class seriously, which was a miracle because not only did class start at 8:30 AM, but also the A/C was broken. Middle Eastern summers are brutal.

So as I was in the middle of a random Grammar lesson (I love grammar! The teens didn’t) a girl screamed her head off because there was just a spider hanging from a single thread of web right above her.

Luckily I do not have arachnophobia, but neither did I have any spider-catching skills. They don’t teach you that in teacher school. (Although if there were a class about how to deal with distractions in a classroom, I don’t even know how it would help because kids are just inventive and there is no way to predict what could happen in any classroom. Once I was trying to make my 5th grade students aware of their broken classroom door, and before I could say “Don’t close the door because it will get stuck,” one student immediately slammed the door and we were unable to leave the classroom for the entirety of class. We got the janitor involved and instead of teaching, I was trying to keep the students calm while the sounds of sawing off part of a door frequently interrupted me. So, no matter what, distractions abound.)

Anyway, luckily, on that dismally hot day of summer school, we had a hero. There was a student who stood up, marched toward the screaming girl, and just — picked up the spider by its web and headed out of class with the spider dangling on the end.

Truly an unforgettable hero.

I’m sure wherever he is now, he is doing it successfully and efficiently.