spider semester

When I was entering junior high school, my district had begun a huge push for hands-on alternative ways of learning, attempting to move away from stuffy textbooks towards something more in the sphere of edutainment or, at very least, deeply demonstrative.

This took the form of activities such as a Wax Museum (I wrote about that here) and the infamous Holocaust Roleplay Day (I can’t help but hope I never write about that one). It also popped up in our science classes, though, with exercises and projects taking the place of homework questions and essays. One year, something downright eerie happened, though.

A new teacher came to our school. Nobody knew her, and she was to teach science to the seventh graders. She seemed nice and normal enough, but then… the spiders appeared.

Spider posters. Spider ornaments. Spider jokes.

It was clear that Miss Jesse liked spiders a lot. And, she wanted to pass that joy on to us, her students. After a few weeks of the basics, suddenly most of our work was spider-themed. There wouldn’t be any real spiders in the classroom ever, she assured us, but we’d be studying them constantly. We received a notice explaining that Miss Jesse planned to teach us everything required for the state exam in her own unique way - with a spider focus.

The scientific method would be demonstrated with spiders, as would other important concepts. The entire class would revolve around our eight-legged friends. The point, she said, wasn’t to teach us about spiders, but to teach us important scientific concepts via spider facts and features. We’d thus learn a lot about all kinds of zoological concepts, not (only) spiders, and be well-prepared for that state exam.

If this plan sounds piecemeal and flawed to you, well, you’re not alone, and quite right in your concerns.

I don’t remember much of Miss Jesse’s spider curriculum aside from the final project, which was a massive production. We all, each and every one of us, had to make a model of a spider - a specific type of spider (our choice) and it had to be as accurate as possible. The requirements quickly became byzantine. Miss Jesse even encouraged us to make it “life size,” ie, small as possible, and as detailed as possible. Paired with this, we were to each submit a paper detailing our specific spider species.

My mom had already made quite the name for herself with various annoying advocacy campaigns within the school district. She thought that such a complicated (and potentially expensive) project was an unfair assignment, considering students wouldn’t all have the same resources or even the dexterity to create these spiders. She pointed out how asinine it was to judge the student’s model based on how closely it resembled the real spider, rather than how much knowledge the student demonstrated. She asked what the point of the models was to begin with.

Other parents, naturally, joined her complaints, often much louder. While I could afford this spider project, plenty of kids couldn’t, or didn’t have parents as involved as mine. The complaints (mostly) went unanswered, though the principal became somewhat aware. Meanwhile, we as middle schoolers succumbed to the spider mania. Rubber spiders manifested under our dinner plates, and Spiderman was suddenly quite a popular superhero compared to the rest. For most of us, this was heavily tinged with our burgeoning sense of irony.

The joy of thirteen-year-olds discovering satire for the first time! As someone on the utter fringes of our seventh grade society, I grew tired of fake spiders after a while. Miss Jesse seemed to assume we were genuinely this enthusiastic about her lessons, and didn’t grasp the meta-post-ironic nature of our spider fascination. I don’t blame her, though. This was years before the internet became ubiquitous, after all, so she’d probably not had a lot of practice recognizing that kind of humor.

Meanwhile, I chose an obscure, large (of course) and fairly simple-looking spider for my project, and collected materials for it. I can’t remember the name of the spider, sadly, nor anything particularly interesting about it. Perhaps there wasn’t anything interesting about it - my memory may be hazy for that reason alone. I wrote a short paper to accompany my spider model, but waited until the day before it was due to even start on the model itself.

This created an unfortunate (but rather classic, don’t you think?) situation where I was up at almost midnight gluing legs onto a styrofoam ball and mixing craft paint. My mom was not pleased. I managed to turn in an acceptable spider model and a spiffy paper describing it, though. Many other kids did, as well, and Miss Jesse invited the principal to come and look at the models along with some other teachers. She framed this as a good thing, but it became clear that the principal himself was not fond of this.

Miss Jesse did not return for the next school year. Following that, we saw her name appear on real estate billboards throughout town - she was now selling houses, having given up teaching. Kids, of course, called the number on the billboards and sang the Spiderman theme song. I can’t guess what happened to her ultimately, but I like to think she found happiness.