Cockroach

"老師很怕!"

The boys in the front few rows looked back and forth between me and the floor, trying to figure out whether they should believe what they were saying. Jay's eyes showed bemused uncertainty as they shifted: Was it true? Was Teacher Bekah really afraid?

Yes. Yes, to some extent I was.

Why? Well, because the thing crawling around on the floor was a cockroach. Yes, a cockroach, yet there was no screaming, and little panic, just all the students' eyes in the area glued to the ground; every now and then, I saw one of them pick up a bag or something which had apparently gotten in the way.

To reassure me in my apparent unease, Alison turned to me and said "It's okay, it's not a rat."

Wait, it's a possibility that it could have been a rat? Annnd there go the days when I thought my feet were safe walking around school.

Now, I've largely gotten used to cockroaches here in Taiwan; despite never having seen one outside of a cage before I moved here, I feel like I've adjusted pretty well. After the first few encounters were past, they became a normal, if unnerving, sight. I can now kill and dispose of them as needed, and though they still startle me if, for instance, they appear from nowhere inside the toilet bowl (it's happened), and I can't fathom what Rachel had to go through with finding one in her helmet--after driving to school with it on (yup, also happened), I can usually deal with them OK.

But see, when I say "deal with them," I mean "kill them in the quickest way possible and dispose of the body." Apparently, though, a cockroach in a classroom here is not that big a deal--not even as big of a deal as a bee in a classroom (which I encountered a few months ago but I can't seem to find the post to link it...). The reaction today was, at least initially, "carry on!" After a bit my nervousness and the kids' distraction prompted us to try to kill it, but even then, when it scurried out from under foot, everything went back to normal, and no one seemed to mind--not Alison, not the kids, and not the homeroom teacher, whose desk was right next to the bookcase it had sought for cover. Just me.

So yeah, I was a bit scared. Because, in my book, there's nothing quite so bad as something dirty and shifty that you know is there but that you can't see. Apart from that, my day was great--we had an acting competition involving kids as chickens and robots, and a game with "punishments" like turning in a circle 10 times, patting your head and rubbing your stomach, and--always a crowd favorite--giving someone else a hug.

So it was a great day--except for the part with the cockroach. Yes, Jay, I was a little scared. Do you blame me?