Over my, probably far too many, years in teaching, I have amassed a never-ending cycle of fairly wholesome anecdotes about my classes, and today, I would like to share one that has particularly stuck with me.
I once taught an upper-school student who was terrified of spiders. Their fear of spiders reverted them back to being childlike. Of course, in class, I did my best to accommodate this, and when showing a spider or spider-adjacent image, I would warn them. The students had been given textbooks to use for study. I am not really a textbook user in class, but the students liked to use them for exam prep.
One day, the student came to me, visibly distressed that he couldn’t study for his exam. He was so distressed that he couldn’t even explain his ideas adequately. Eventually, we got to the crux of the issue: The book had a picture of a spider in it, and he was too scared to open it in case he saw it. I suggested other study methods, but he was adamant that the book was how he learned, and I could tell that only solving the book problem would calm him down, so I got to work. I armed myself with Post-it notes and tape, taping the little square notes over every spider picture we could find. The solution worked for him, at least at that point. We still had to address what would happen if there was a spider in his exam.