Damn you, Roald Dahl.

I'm going to tell you a story about something that happened at school the other day, but first I have to tell you this:

I have a phobia of stinging insects.

I'm pretty sure it's a real phobia. I have several pieces of evidence, which I will now publish here because I don't think I'm currently doing enough to contribute to my generation's reputation for over-sharing on the internet.

• I think about bees all the time. Any time I walk outside, I am thinking about bees. In any area that I walk around often, I can tell you all the places where bees are prone to be. Whenever possible I walk in the street instead of on the sidewalk because there are fewer bushes and flowers, and therefore fewer bees.
• I cannot look at pictures of bees or wasps.
• When I go to a beach or a lake or a pool, I take towels that are muted colors because bees like brights colors.
• Once there was a bee in my house and I left my house and refused to come back until my roommates promised they had physically seen it fly out the window, though I still suspect they were lying.
• I once refused to go on a date to a botanical garden.
• Once in college I was conducting interviews for new members of a program that I was in charge of, and the only space we had available was at these picnic tables outside, and I kept having to get up to run away in the middle of conducting interviews because there were bees. We still had a remarkably successful recruiting season.
• I have had more than three dreams where I am being forced to eat a bee. Stinging insects are probably my third most nightmared-about topic, the first obviously being my classroom. (The second is that I'm in the musical Rent and don't know any of the lyrics.)
• Typing this much about bees and wasps is making me antsy.

Legitimate phobia. Case rested. Whenever I am with some people and a bee or wasp is nearby and I become unable to behave like a normal human, people inevitably give me a judgmental glare, or, on a good day, a pitying glare, and remind me that "it's more afraid of you than you are of it." Nope. Definitely not. It is an insect with a stinger on its butt and a brain too primitive to process the emotion of fear. I am a human with a phobia.

I share this with you so you can understand the significance of the events that occurred in my classroom on the afternoon of Thursday, September 19, 2013.

My sixth graders and I were reading a passage from James and the Giant Peach and discussing the elements that make it fantastical. We were in the section where James first finds his way into the Peach and meets all the gigantic anthropomorphic insects. So there we are, discussing the fantastical nature of over-sized insects that behave like people, when who should join our reading lesson but a WASP THE SIZE OF MY HEAD. Roughly. And not just that, but this was not your typical hang-out-by-the-window-and-look-for-a-way-out wasp. This wasp had some sort of agenda. Like, to get really close to my students' faces while they are trying to read, and move in a rapid and unpredictable way, and be really scary.

Guys, it was all my nightmares at once! (Except Rent, thank god.) It was literally my nightmares. But guys, I was so good. The wasp was trying to assume control of my classroom; what the wasp didn't know is that you cannot manage a classroom through fear tactics. The wasp hadn't read Teach Like a Champion. I maintained my authority and most of my composure. The kids lined up in a calm fashion to continue our reading in the cafeteria. I assured them that as long as they didn't flip out, the wasp would not sting them. I told them it was more afraid of them than they were of it.

While we were in the cafeteria, one of my amazing colleagues trapped the wasp and sent it out the window, which is actually for the best because dead wasps can release a chemical that tell other wasps to come defend it's legacy by launching a coordinated attack, which is either a fact that people who have a phobia of stinging insects would know, or a myth that people who have a phobia of stinging insects would believe.

It turns out we had a wasps' nest in the heating unit outside our window. It's times like these that I am so so thankful that we have an amazing responsive building manager who gets wasps' nests destroyed as soon as they are discovered. Don't tell the kids, though. Now when they leave trash on the floor after snack, I tell them, "This is why we have wasps."