My Room Is Infected by Jesus

What fifty-four tiny Jesuses taught me about classroom culture

So, my room got a case of “the Jesus” this spring.

Let me explain.

As teachers, we talk about classroom culture as though it’s something you design and plan for.

Sometimes it is.

Sometimes, though, culture grows the way stories grow. One joke becomes another joke. A class project becomes a tradition. One plastic Jesus becomes fifty-four plastic Jesuses. An engineering challenge becomes a Ferris wheel attached to a three-foot cross.

You look up one day and realize you’ve built more than a culture. You’ve built a mythology without meaning to.

And before you keep reading, I need to borrow John Mulaney’s disclaimer. For this story to land, we’re going to need everybody to get real cool about a bunch of stuff really quickly. Nothing in here is meant to offend anyone’s beliefs. Or this is gonna offend everyone’s beliefs.

I’m not really sure.

Also, I’m taking a week’s break from the more serious stuff. My birthday is coming up, and my wife and I are getting out of town for a few days, so I just don’t have the bandwidth to pick apart a specific reality of teaching this week.

I mean, I still have those thoughts, but just… this week I want to tell a story. I originally thought it was silly on its face, but there’s more to it than I realized until a couple of weeks after the year ended.

So, if we’re all cool, let me tell you how my room became infected by Jesus.

It Starts With a Snowstorm

This part isn’t entirely Jesus-connected, but it lets you know the ground I was working with here.

In North Carolina, teachers see this, and we say, “Yup - that’s at least four days off.”

My region of North Carolina got snow the last week of January and into the first week of February. I don’t want to hear any of it from the northern states—we cannot handle snow down here. I know. I grew up north of Pittsburgh. I remember buses with chains on their tires and roads covered in freakng cinders for traction. That’s up north. Down here, we’ve got a few snowplows, brine, and a lot of hope.

Due to the snow, school was a no-go.

For two weeks.

We had remote workdays mixed in, so lessons were expected to be online. Asynchronous, so we’d post, and they’d work. Their work was due when we got back to school.

In physics, I was scheduled to begin my unit on two-dimensional motion, projectiles, basically.

There are tons of (boring) simulations online, and, hey, like a jillion other teachers, I could’ve offloaded my thinking and my job to Khan Academy, but… ick.

So I went to my default: storytelling (more on that coming up next week, including my manifesto). I reframed the projectile setups as stunts in an action movie. The director (I was picturing a Michael Bay type) wanted the stunts to look cool. The studio, however, insisted they be physics-accurate.

My students became the studio’s physics consultants. What’s the movie’s name?

Arc and Order.

(It’s a parabola inside joke.)

About the artwork — yes, it’s all AI-generated. Didn't/don’t deny that, and I make no (serious) bones about it to my students or anyone else I talk to about this. The images aren’t the main point of the piece, and while I do plan on addressing my use of AI in the classroom in the coming weeks, let’s not lock in on the idea that AI was used here, cool?

Yes, the first movie they encountered was part IV. The joke was that the studio hadn’t even released part 1 yet, and part IV had critics calling it awesome.

They responded, and responded well. When we got back to school, a couple of students told me they actually liked it.

Yeah— students saying they liked what was, in effect, homework, and thought it was fun.

Hmmm.

So, I Created a Cinematic Universe…

All of our new phenomena were worked into the larger storyline (which did not make any sense, by design). And because every cinematic universe needs marketing, I created movie “posters” for each one. Tuned up the ideas I was looking for (as over-the-top action movie from the ‘80s), and went to town.

Along the way, we started using amusement park rides as examples of Newton’s Second Law. We dissected the forces involved in Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster, Tower of Terror, and eventually Action Park’s infamous loop-the-loop water slide.

Somewhere along the way, I revived an old project from years earlier: Bad Idea Park. The concept was simple: scientifically sound, but objectively a bad idea. The one rule: the ride couldn’t kill anyone. We were building Bad Idea Park, not Murder Park.

Bad Idea Park became the final project: design a ride, explain the physics, sketch it, then build it.

And that’s where the Jesuses entered the story.

Fine. I’ll Buy My Own Jesus.

So as we were talking about rides, I noticed that a student had a small plastic Jesus on his desk. You know what I mean - this type of thing:

I know that covetousness is a sin, but man - I seriously coveted that kid’s Jesus.

That same week in my chemistry classes, a Gummy Bear had just “accidentally” slipped and fallen into a tube of decomposing potassium chlorate (a whole other story), so gummy candy was on my mind. I learned three things: 1) Little Plastic Jesus was plastic, not candy, 2) my student actually had four of them, and 3) he wasn’t giving me one.

When I learned that last one, I said, “Fine. I’m an adult with adult money, and I’ll just order my own.” Okay. Two things I learned here: 1) Amazon sells small plastic Jesuses, but not in small quantities, and 2) fifty small plastic Jesuses are surprisingly affordable.

So I had 50 Jesuses within the week.

If I’m being honest, it’s the smile that just kills me with these guys.

And somewhere along the way, Jesus - small plastic Jesus - became the class mascot.

This wasn’t proselytizing. My room also contains Ganesh, Buddha, assorted superheroes, and a Cthulhu Chia Pet, which is considerably more disturbing than you’re imagining once it starts growing “hair.”

I couldn’t keep my 50 small Jesuses on the table; otherwise, they’d start to walk away, so I found a safe place — the top of my whiteboard. Occasionally, I would loan one or two out to students. Apparently, our Pre-Calc teacher gives very hard tests, and these kids felt they needed all the help they could get.

My collection that was to grow. And yes, that’s a wrestling figure of The Rock on the right, holding Jesus up. Over time, this became a Jesus lending library. Need a Jesus, take one.

Then something weird happened. I don’t know how, when, or why, but I now have 54 tiny Jesuses on top of my whiteboard. Look, I’m a science teacher; I’ve had more than a couple of proselytizing books published by various church organizations mysteriously show up on my desk after class over the years. There are no end of students who’ve told me that I need Jesus in my life, but add-on Jesuses? That’s new.

Their placement in the room matters — now, I can objectively tell my classes that Jesus is watching them while they’re taking a test or a quiz, or gesture toward the whiteboard and ask, “Is that what Jesus would want you to be doing right now?”

Overall, it was a silly thing, and I thought I still had control of my physics class. I was about to learn otherwise.

The Infection Spreads

Physics classes occasionally do an egg drop lab. It fits in the standards nicely - build a vehicle for an egg such that the egg (or egg-stronaut in our case) would survive the fall from 15 feet, which is as high as we can safely go on the band’s practice riser.

My groups built their vehicles, mostly drawing from the same family of ideas I’d seen for years. And then I checked in with the group with the student who had the tiny Jesuses that started all of this. This is what things looked like prior to final checks.

Right. It’s called the God Bless, and there are our Jesuses — one with arms outstretched (jealous), blessing it before launch.

I need to introduce another element in all of this — a student in that group. Let’s call him Tyler. Tyler’s terrific in class — high 90s all the way, but I have to say, I’m not sure if he spent the whole year doing a bit or if who he is is just who he is.

On the getting-to-know-you sheet on day one, under “what would you like me to know about you?” Tyler wrote: 1) I love God, and 2) I love my country. I know what you’re thinking. No, he’s not that guy. Tyler’s a tall kid, belted shorts and tucked-in polo every day, kind of nerdy, a little socially awkward, and draws a small American flag beside his name on everything.

He believes that there are two musicians worth listening to: Frank Sinatra and Katy Perry. No, the rest of the class and I couldn’t make that work in our heads either.

During two weeks of AP testing (no announcements), Tyler started leading the Pledge for our class. By the end, three-quarters of the class was standing with him. He’d finish with “God Bless.” Someone else added “play ball.”

So, that became a thing.

There were days when I thought this kid was Andy Kaufman-ing all of us, this whole thing was performance comedy, and all of us were his straights. There was always just something in the corner of his eye, and I swear it felt like he was checking to see if we were in on the joke and having fun along with him.

Back to the egg drop, I shut down the idea of Jesus riding along with the egg (I told the group it might provide a non-physics level of protection), and they reluctantly agreed.

Of course, their egg was fine after the drop. After two drops. After four drops.

We stopped after that because they couldn’t be late for second period.

In retrospect, that was my first clue that the infection had spread.

The Jesuses Escape Containment

The semester was winding down, so we moved back into the world of Bad Idea Park. Students pitched three rides, explained the physics, then developed the strongest idea into a rider narrative describing what guests would experience.

I informed them that the movie studio behind the “Arc and Order” cinematic universe was kicking in to produce ride posters for the park.

I got some terrific ride ideas, and I generated ride posters in the same style. Some examples:

Apogee — a drop ride where riders stand and their feet are strapped in.

Extreme Centrifuge — as advertised.

Sonic Slam — truly unsafe bumper cars.

Pretty Pirate Party — either this student missed the assignment or understood it better than the rest of us.

Tunnel of Nothing — yes, I checked on this student. No, they did not need to see their counselor.

And those are just a few.

Earlier in the semester, I’d gone to Disneyland and become mildly obsessed with the Pixar Pal-a-Round on Pixar Pier. Some cars stay fixed. Others slide. It’s exactly the kind of twist on a familiar ride that I wanted my students to think about.

Watch what the cars do in the video…

When I showed the class a video of it, Tyler’s eyes lit up.

So yeah - Tyler’s ride narrative:

“Show the children what to paint…” is a reference to my claim that I painted all of these pictures, but the class was convinced they were AI. I told them I didn’t believe in AI, and they then went with the idea that data centers are filled with small children on keyboards and easels, akin to a million monkeys on a million typewriters. Oh, and you saw the flag up there, right?

And the poster:

The ride was an extreme Ferris wheel attached to a giant cross. The wheel spun fast enough to launch riders into the air. During their flight, they’d pass through pearly gates and land safely in cloud-shaped padding.

Naturally, it was called Jesus Take the Wheel.

I gave everyone printed copies of their posters. They passed them around, showed them off, and laughed.

It was a good day.

Unfortunately, the project wasn’t over. They still had to build scale models.

Our Crosses to Bear

I had a mountain of cardboard, five hot glue guns, all kinds of tape, and enough pairs of scissors to make my room dangerous. They had three days and a weekend.

You want to see a slightly cynical teen turn into a kid again: tell them to build something they designed and give them zero guidance, other than that the scale cannot exceed 1 centimeter = 1 meter. At that scale, as I told them, they could afford to go big if needed.

Tyler needed to.

Jesus Take the Wheel was 100 meters tall.

Tyler got to cutting.

The following came later and is my side of the conversation:

“What’s up, Tyler?

“Sure, as long as it’s not bigger than 1 centimeter to a meter.

“Okay - well, I guess it’s going to be big.

…

“Yeah, I was worried about it standing up if it’s just a single piece of cardboard.

…

“Yes, you can make it three-dimensional.”

When I said that last part, I saw the reality: I was going to have a 39-inch cross in my room.

With a Ferris wheel attached to it.

Other rides were coming along great — even the tough roller coaster builds and Pretty Pirate Party. I should add that one of the tiny Jesuses (not one of mine) ended up riding Medieval Mayhem. I did not discover this until the model was complete.

The weekend hit, and Tyler asked if he could take his home to finish it. I said sure.

Monday came, and Tyler was busy working on his Ferris wheel in class. I asked him where his cross was, since I had expected to see if all was finished that day. Tyler said it was, but he just didn’t feel like carrying it.

It was the end of the year, and my judgment was probably off, so I went for it:

“Tyler, you know who else didn’t want to carry a cross, but had to anyway?”

Tyler knew exactly where that was going.

He looks at me, sighs, and says, “Jesus.”

“Yes, Jesus, Tyler. He’s watching you now, and he’s so, so disappointed.”

Tyler laughed, and the room laughed.

The next day, the cross came in, the wheel was finished, and Jesus Take the Wheel was assembled, along with the pearly gates and the cotton-ball model of the safety pad—the clouds. The class had a chance to set up and talk about all of their rides, but Tyler’s got the most laughs and attention.

So that’s how my room ended the year, with 54 Jesuses in the front and a three-foot-high cross (with a Ferris wheel attached) in the back. Jesus all around.

Apologies for the image - I wasn’t thinking enough to take pictures of all the models at the end of the year. But, hey, it’s there.

It was Never About the Jesuses.

The title of this piece is “My Room Is Infected by Jesus.”

Yeah, that wasn’t the real “infection.”

In my teaching memories, this class will be legendary. Yes, there was Tyler, but he wasn’t alone, nor the dominant voice in the class.

There were my two Hispanic students who tried to teach me Spanish, but gave up when I argued with them about adding gender to nouns. I rejected the idea that a table would be a feminine noun, so we came up with the muy macho “El Meso.”

It’s non-alcoholic beer, of course.

There was my near-silent table of really smart girls - the Brain Trust - whom I’d check with if “the boys” were swearing a wrong answer was right. The young male ego dies a little when a girl just looks at their work, shakes their head, and says, “No.”

No, the infection wasn’t about “bringing religion back to public schools” or any such nonsense like that.

This class was infected by authenticity, creativity, trust, inside jokes, and shared stories.

My room was filled with students feeling safe enough to be themselves. The Jesuses were just the symptom.

I spent far too long trying to be the unflappable teacher — always right, always on point, always “in charge.” Fifty-four Jesuses later, I have again been reminded that I was not entirely in charge. This was all about what happens when people stop worrying about looking cool, myself included.

It’s about what happens when a teacher is both self-confident and comfortable enough to be a little ridiculous, and students realize they can be themselves too. And no — none of this can be taught.

For those who’ve been reading for a while, yes, this is connected to It Takes Ten Years to Grow a Teacher and Why Schools Keep Learning the Same Lessons. Teachers need time to learn who they are and to learn that vulnerability is a feature, not a bug. They need the room (and grace) to screw up, a mentor to tell them, “Sure, go for it,” when they come up with a crazy-sounding idea, and help to kick the tires.

This class’ culture was hard-won. It’s taken me years, but now I have more hits than misses. I can create a room where…

Tyler could be Tyler.

The kid with the original Jesus could be the kid with the original Jesus.

Someone could say, “play ball” after the Pledge.

Someone could design a ride called Pretty Pirate Party.

The Brain Trust could be the Brain Trust.

Nobody was trying to win a popularity contest. Nobody was trying to be somebody else. And they all became friends.

Oh, and the rides aren’t done yet. Every fall, our school - a magnet school - hosts recruitment nights, and I’ve told the class I’m keeping the rides so they can polish them up and show them off.

I have no idea if Jesus Take the Wheel will bring students in or drive students away, but it’s a chance I’m willing to take.

We talk about classroom culture as something we build, but looking back, I think it’s something we permit. We create enough trust, enough safety, and enough room for people to show up as themselves.

After that, culture grows on its own.

The classroom is where I do the work.

The Science Of is where I chase the questions.

If you’d like more stories about science, dinosaurs, asteroids, history, space, comics, and the strange connections hiding between them, come join me over there.