Flight of the Cockroach

I would like to begin with a warning: never google-image "cockroaches". It's a terrible idea.

So, it's after lunch. My kids are in their seats dutifully copying math notes off the board. We're studying area of polygons and today's lesson was on triangles, parallelograms, and complex figures. Needless to say, all of them were filled to the brim with excitement (yeah right). I begin the lesson as usual, reviewing what we did yesterday and beginning to discuss today's objective, but no one's looking at me. They're all looking at the wall above me.

I follow their eyes just in time to see a humongous cockroach crawl along the wall above my chalkboard. Just as I look, it decides to fly.

Yup. Fly.

Needless to say, the room quickly descended into contained chaos with screams and kids jumping out their seats, and, after it flew for the second time, I told my kids to line up in the hall so I could kill it. I hoped they'd exit orderly, but they're kids, and they're from the hood, so it was every man for himself.

One of my students however, decided to take matters into his own hands, literally. While everyone was clawing their way out the room as quickly as possible, this particular student smacked the roach while it was in mid-flight and knocked it to the ground. Then, with me and most the class watching, this student proceeded to stomp the shit (sorry no other word gets the point across) out of the thing till we were all sure it was dead. He then, very matter-of-factly, asked for the broom.

Now, does it matter that this student of mine is actually too old to be in 6th grade or that he sometimes misspells his own name? Something tells me yes. But I guess his talents lie elsewhere...