Dealing With Urban Legends

By John Anderson

I was lecturing my 10th-grade biology class one fine day about arachnids. Now one hallmark of being a good teacher is the ability to make the subject matter relevant to the kids. So I’m telling the kids how spiders rarely bite and how there’s only two species of poisonous spiders in Wisconsin and how spiders trap other pesky insects and all kinds of other good stuff.

Then Rachel raises her hand and proceeds to tell me how her mom got bit by a spider and the bite formed a welt. This welt festered for several days and eventually it erupted releasing a slew of baby spiders.

Now anyone who has mindlessly surfed the Internet for a few hours has eventually run into wild stories such as these. You may have read the dire warning to keep cats away from newborns, as they will suck the breath right out of them as they sleep. Or maybe you’ve chuckled over the story of the pot smoker who accidentally dialed 911 in a pizza delivery call and ended up in jail.

These are called “urban legends.” It’s my personal opinion that they figure more into the world of teaching now than at any time in the past. Years ago, if someone experienced an uncanny series of events that made for a great story, they were limited in the speed and variety of ways they could share it with others. You could tell your spouse or your uncle, or maybe even write up a manuscript and send it to a publisher and hope for a book deal.

But nowadays, all one has to do is post his or her experiences on the Internet, and millions of people may read about it. Countless Web sites, forums, chat rooms, and e-mails have hugely entertaining stories, some complete with doctored photos. Yet now we have a generation of young people in our classrooms who have so much information coming at them from so many different directions that it’s difficult to substantiate the truth to any of it.

After Rachel told us about the spider bite, chaos erupted. Voices were yelling and screaming . . . all inside my head. One voice was saying, “Let it go! You don’t want to debate a student about her mother’s integrity! Besides, there’s more lecture material to cover!”

Another voice insisted, “You always have this (admittedly distorted) mental picture of yourself as a beacon of truth and a model of scientific thought. So address this situation, if you have any self-respect. Come on, show some courage!“

I listened to the second voice. I said that this sounded like a common urban legend. I explained that the laying of eggs into living hosts is a well-known behavior exhibited by animals such as parasitic wasps but it is not common in spiders. The lawyer in me finished off the subject by saying that the event may well have occurred, and that there were all sorts of exceptions in the world of biology, but it sure resembled a common urban legend.

A few mornings later, my comfortable pre-school routine was shaken as I looked down the hall to see Rachel’s mother standing outside my door.

I had met her a few weeks before at parent-teacher conferences and she impressed me as a real down-to-earth individual who was nice and easy to talk to. Yet I knew she didn’t come to school that day for niceties. She was pretty upset, telling me that Rachel came home the other day embarrassed because I had called her a liar in front of the whole class!

I remember thinking that if I had gone to work in a typical corporate office, I would be drinking coffee right now and not dealing with any of this at 7:30 in the morning. But I tried to appear as professional as possible and assured her I had not called her daughter a liar. We then talked about urban legends and I mentioned the “spider bite erupting arm cyst story” was a common one. Another story was similar but involved scorpions and a nose. She said she would look those stories up but angrily told me her bite was real. That the doctor she had gone to had said he had never seen such a bite in this country before. She even showed me the scar. I apologized for questioning her integrity and felt terrible for the rest of the morning.

All three parties involved were hurt by the incident. Rachel was embarrassed because I shot her story down in front of class. Her mother was upset at the implication she was telling lies and, for all I know, may well have run across such a spider. I was placed in a very uncomfortable position of questioning the validity of a story, which sounded an awful lot like typical Internet bunk.

Did anyone gain from the incident? Hopefully the students listening to the whole conversation learned that new information should be questioned, especially in this new Information Age. That’s about all I can hope for.

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Posted September 16, 2005