For many teachers, the hardest part about their job is instructing the dozens of half-asleep, half-distracted teens they see daily. But for some, like AP Chemistry teacher Janny Cahatol, another aspect comes dangerously close: ”I’ll always see them right before lunch or right after lunch, and there’s even a fly right above your head right now!” she said as she spoke to a Falcon reporter.
Between managing multiple lab stations, lecturing and helping her students prepare for the AP exam in May, Cahatol consistently finds time to battle a fierce population of flies that invade her classroom nearly every day. Especially in hot weather, flies seem to overwhelm every classroom on campus, causing untold numbers of annoyances.
“[The fly population] is always too high,” Cahatol said. “Always, even if there are no flies in the room — it’s too high.”
Although she agrees the problem is most present in warmer months, she’s noticed a different trend recently — that her room always fills up with the pests during 4th and 6th period, after students eat their snacks or lunches. Administrators have also warned that food is a primary reason for the fly invasions as well as the ants that regularly invade classrooms.
Cahatol advises others, both in the classroom and at home, to always keep their doors closed and to install screen protectors so that flies can’t get through open windows. Unfortunately, in order to cool her room down, she finds that she often is forced to keep its doors open, which inevitably lets the annoying pests in.
Once the flies are inside, getting rid of them becomes a difficult challenge. In her 13 years of teaching, Cahatol has only witnessed a student catch a fly with their hand once, and shooing them away has constantly proven unsuccessful.
So, after years of failing to handle the problem with just her bare hands, Cahatol decided to extend her reach by buying a Mosiller Bug Zapper. Electric fly swatters take advantage of a voltage booster to send up to thousands of volts of electricity through an unlucky fly’s body, killing and even sometimes incinerating them.
“The satisfaction of hearing the flies frying lowers my angst against them, you know?” Cahatol admitted.
On the other hand, Algebra 2 and Precalculus Honors teacher PJ Yim has seen worse in his life when it comes to insects.
Growing up in Boston, Yim describes how the area’s mosquito population makes California’s insect population look tame; he attributes this difference to some efforts to tackle the issue by local officials.
For example, Santa Clara County has a Vector Control District dedicated to reducing the mosquito population through various means, most directly by treating mosquito breeding locations with pesticides.
In his classroom, Yim has experienced minimal issues dealing with flies, lowering the temperature indoors to reduce the insects’ activity. Still, when they become a distraction for his students, he is often forced to take action.
As a Buddhist, Yim tries his best to stray away from killing the flies — killing any being has a negative karmic effect — instead, he tries to catch them and toss them out alive. He often instructs his students to quietly point to any fly that lands near them, allowing him to sneak up and trap them with his hands.
Yim recalls when he was a younger man, this tactic earned him a catch rate of 80-95%, but with age, a lack of practice and slower reflexes, his success rate has been reduced to only around 25%.
Although he recognizes his occasional successes, he finds he still isn’t as good as Mr. Miyagi from the film “Karate Kid,” who could famously catch a fly with a pair of chopsticks (Yim has so far been unsuccessful with this method).
In fact, Yim recalls his older sister’s stories of his father accomplishing this “Mr. Miyagi” task. Yim doubts the truthfulness of those claims but admits that his father was fairly athletic, even in his later years.
If a fly becomes too much of a nuisance, however, Yim will temporarily put aside his Buddhist values to put the insect out of its misery.
“If you don’t bother me, I won’t bother you,” Yim said to all flies in the area. “If you bother me enough, I am willing to subtract some of the good karma I’ve amassed from teaching to deal with you. Don’t mess with my class.”
