My first day of student teaching, my mentor teacher handed me some gloves, a Qtip, and a sewing needle. She informed me I would be pollinating flowers.
Why the needle? I asked hesitantly.
To keep the dead bees from flopping around while I swabbed them with a Qtip and then transfered the pollen to a flower.
Gross gross gross. I almost abandoned my teaching career at that exact moment. Good thing I kept going, because two weeks ago, I had the privilege of working once again with my least favorite thing in the whole entire world: bugs.
I
escaped took a break from my little darling (you remember, she peed on me) for a week and subbed in a 2nd-grade classroom. The teacher's sister had hip replacement surgery, so I was called in to take over for five days. As the teacher caught me up on what I'd be teaching while she was gone, she innocently slipped in this little gem: "By the way, the caterpillars arrive on Wednesday, so you'll need to transfer them from their carrying case to their individual containers." She failed to mention the GIANT BALL OF FOOD/POOP the caterpillars would be smushed into when they arrived. More on that later.
Side note: when I was younger, the neighborhood girls and I spent hours outside capturing bugs, putting them in jars, and creating bug worlds. I was hardly squeamish about picking up worms and caterpillars, but that was when I was young and naive. Fast forward to last week.
The caterpillars arrived in a box, with the following instructions: REMOVE CATERPILLARS FROM BOX IMMEDIATELY. I wanted to eat lunch, but I pictured thirty caterpillars crawling around inside their container, desperate for food and their newfound friendships with twenty-four excited eight-year-olds. I sliced open the box.
It's hard to tell, but there is a large brown mass in the middle of this container. The mass is a mixture of caterpillar food and caterpillar poop, all rolled into one gigantic ball, covered with caterpillars. There are also some dead caterpillars smashed inside this food/poop ball. My job was to remove all the live caterpillars from the food/poop ball and transfer them to their individual containers.
But first, I needed to fill the mini-containers with caterpillar food. Which smelled like vomit. Vomit and rotten food. Vomit, rotten food, and poopy diaper. Worst smell ever ever ever. I used a spoon to smush some vomit-food into each caterpillar container. I gagged every. single. time.
I did not eat lunch. I had to breathe through my nose. I had to leave the room periodically to get fresh air.
Twenty minutes later, I had filled thirty caterpillar cups with the vomit-food. My next task was to transfer one caterpillar into each container. With a thin paintbrush. The poor caterpillars did not want to leave their food/poop ball and I swear their tiny caterpillar hands were clinging on for dear life. It only took me another TWENTY MINUTES to transfer all the caterpillars.
Ta da!! Forty minutes of my life...gone.
As of two days ago, most of the caterpillars (that didn't die) were cozied up in their chrysalises, waiting to become beautiful butterflies, which we aren't allowed to release into the wild, so the kids get to watch them shrivel up and die right before their very eyes. The circle of life.
