Classroom Science Exercise Turns Out to Be Salutary for Young Boy

A fifth grade class about the human body turned out to be salutary for a young boy’s life. The Tampa Bay Times reported that 10-year-old Tashawn Roberts was checking the pulse in his neck during a lesson on the circulatory system when he found a lump.

Back in October, Tashawn’s fifth-grade teacher at Pinellas Park Elementary told her young students to feel for their pulse, first in their wrist and then in the hollow of their necks.

“Tashawn comes up and says, ‘Ms. Digman. I can’t find my pulse,’ and I said, ‘Oh, lets see if I can help you find it,’” Michelle Digman, a Florida teacher at Pinellas Park Elementary School, said. “And he goes well, ‘I feel something else.’” Ms. Digman felt the lump, too, so she instructed the boy to tell his parents about it when he got home. That night, they took Tashawn to the hospital, where doctors discovered a golf-sized aneurysm on the verge of rupturing.

The surgery took two hours as doctors replaced the vein in Tashawn’s neck with one from his leg. “I ate a lot of ice cream,” the boy recalled. “The other plus side, I got to play all kinds of video games,” the young boy said regarding his stay in the hospital.

On Thursday, the student’s mom thanked the 5th grade science teacher by giving her a big hug. “Had it not been for her teaching them, God knows what would have happened, ” the boy’s mother said.

However things should have been a lot different. In early summer, the school learned it would be named an F school as roughly 57% of students had failed the state’s reading test, and 69 % had failed the one for math. Teacher Michelle Digman was one of the new teachers hired beginning with this fall. In the meantime it was also Tashawn’s first year at Pinellas Park.

Ms. Digman told Tashawn’s mother about his progress in class, something his mother liked and therefore gained her confidence and respect. That’s why when her son came home talking about the lump he found in science class, she took him to the emergency room as soon as possible.

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Anne-Marie Jackson

Anna grew up on a steady diet of 20th century literature, science-fiction movies and Viking lore. Unsurprisingly she turned into a technology geek with an inclination for history & fantasy.