Insects and spiders don't freak me out. (They may gross me out, though.) This can be useful in the classroom.
I finally made it back to the continuation high school. It's been a while. This day I was covering an English class. They were supposed to be reading and analyzing a current event article. And some of them were.
The boy hadn't been doing much, but he had finally settled down. Just when I thought all was well, he jumped out of his seat and ran halfway across the room.
"Crickets creep me out."
The rest of the class found this amusing.
"Do you move that fast when the cops show up?"
"If you had stepped on it, it would no longer be an issue."
The boy's response (to the second comment): "I can't kill it. Crickets are lucky." (He didn't respond to the first comment.)
This is the point where I got involved. I did my usual when there are critters in the classroom (or spiders in my shower--so long as I saw it before I turned on the water). I found a clear container (the teacher had a plastic cup with markers and highlighters in it) and put it over the cricket. (It was a big cricket. I'll give the boy that.)
The boy then jumped in. I guess he felt his manhood had been questioned. He started to scoot it out the door. But I called a stop to that as the only reason I had left the cricket under the cup was to go and find a folder to put underneath. Once I had that in hand, I took the whole thing outside, and the cricket was dumped in the bushes a few steps outside the classroom.
The class concurred that crickets were lucky. That one sure was. It lived past its encounter with the scary high school class.
