Same Mistakes

"Teacher, SPIDER!"

That is not an uncommon thing said during class, while pointing to the wall behind me. The spider in question is never bigger than your average house spider (is that a thing? I'm sure you all know what type of spider I'm talking about).

"Oh, a spider?" I said, as I turned around to check the wall. I couldn't even see a spider, that's how small it probably was. "I can't see it," I said. But that's when it happened. It crawled out from behind the poster hanging on the wall. It was huge. Probably the size of most of the kid's hands. In my unexpected shock I screamed and jumped backwards a few feet.

This made half of the class scream with me, and half of them laugh at me. I could not let this thing roam freely in the classroom. It needed to be killed. By this time it had continued up the wall behind another hanging piece of butcher paper. I ran and grabbed the broom, hoping that it would be strong enough to kill that creature when whacked with it.

It took a few times of almost lifting the paper up high enough for all of us (me and 18 six-year-olds) to be brave enough to see it again. When we finally lifted it up, that thing ran straight down the wall, to the exact spot where I usually stand when teaching the music lesson on Mondays. Oh it was so gross. It could crawl right from the wall to the table, then onto the bottom part of the white board where you put the markers like it was its job. Didn't even have to make stretch. We were all screaming again as we watched this new development. And during the chaos we lost the exact location of it, but we knew the general area.

Once it was found again, I tried my hardest to kill it from an awkward angle, with all those 18 kids standing in the most inconvenient spots around me and the spider. And I was scared to death. Usually I am alright with killing the bugs. Ashley and I made a deal. She cooks and cleans, and I kill the bugs (we both think we got the better end) but spiders of that size are definitely a different story. I was shaking in my bare feet. But alas, I was not able to get it. It ran away. So maybe we will meet again. Hopefully not.

To [possibly] be continued...