During my time teaching small kids (ages 5-10) in Taiwan, I was continuously searching for ways to entertain them — silly games, jokes, physical comedy routines incorporating juggling, etc. After a month or two, I hit upon a brainstorm: I needed a classroom mascot.
In the teacher’s room one day during a break, I came across the perfect candidate in the recesses of an old bookcase: a plastic spider left over from the previous year’s Halloween celebrations. I scooped him up and, when class resumed, introduced him to my students.
Miles the spider was born. (I named him after one of my best friends from college, Miles B., who in fact doesn’t resemble a small arachnid at all, for he is 6’6″ tall weighs about 280 pounds.)
The kids took to him slowly; they thought I was certifiable when I insisted, time and again, that in fact Miles was not an inanimate toy, but instead a 29-year-old lifetime pet (I said my parents gave him to me as an infant, and that he’d made the journey with me to East Asia). Once my ever-serious students finally warmed up to Miles, I incorporated him into various classroom activities — for example, I’d have my more advanced classes write 10 sentences about Miles using adjectives (Peggy, one of my more stubborn pupils, would invariably submit sentences like “Miles is Teacher Newley ugly stupid toy spider.”)
In one of my older classes, a feisty girl named Chia-ling constantly insisted that I was nuts; she insisted Miles was not a real spider. One afternoon, we were talking about our weekends; the students asked me what Miles did last weekend. I said he’d told me that he’d managed to open the classroom’s sliding glass door, venture out onto the balcony, and stare at the beautiful stars one night.
“Teacher, you a liar!” Chia-ling said. “You cannot see the stars at night in Kaohsiung! Miles is not a real spider — he is a toy!” (Indeed, Chia-ling was right: the city’s air pollution made the
prospect of star-gazing ludicrous.)
Toward the end of the year, the students really became enamored of Miles; I let him take our daily “oral tests” (I’d hold a book up over my face and repeat vocabulary words in a squeaky voice, and the students would always scurry out from behind their desks and attempt to catch me out in my ventriloquism). I’d even write Miles’s name up on the board, along with all the other students’, and assign him an oral test grade. The more studious children would always listen intently and rat out Miles’s pronunciation gaffes in an attempt to lower his grade sufficiently so he’d have to stay after class for “extra practice.”
Miles, in time, became perhaps the best-loved class mascot in the history of Taiwanese private English language education. One day, a quiet girl name Annie even brought in one of her Barbies from home and proclaimed the doll to be Miles’s girlfriend. (I did not draw attention to the sexual perversion of such an intra-species romance.)
Here, alas, is a photo of one of my classes in front of my whiteboard. Miles is visible in the upper left-hand corner (though I’m afraid he’s a bit blurry):
