A fifth-grade science lesson saved the life of one elementary school student in Florida.
The Tampa Bay Times reports 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.
In October, Tashawn's fifth-grade teacher at Pinellas Park Elementary told her students to feel for their pulse, first in their wrist and then in the hollow of their necks.
Tashawn pressed two fingers to his neck, where the blood branching through his body bumped against bone, and felt for the thump, thump, thump.
Tashawn couldn't find it. "Miss Digman," he said, "I found a lump."
The boy was rushed into surgery for a golf-ball sized aneurysm in his neck that, had it gone undetected, could have ruptured and caused brain damage or ended Tashawn's life.
The boy and his teacher were both new to Pinellas Park Elementary, and the circulatory system isn't usually taught until much later in the school year, when it could have been too late.
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What brought them all together, somehow, started with failure.
In early summer, the school learned it would be named an F school. About 57 percent of students had failed the state's reading test, and 69 percent had failed the one for math.
Teacher Michelle Digman was one of the new teachers hired for the fall. It was also Tashawn's first year at Pinellas Park.
Digman told Tashawn's mother about his progress in class, something his mother liked. And when her son came home talking about the lump he found in science class, she took him to the emergency room.
The surgery took two hours as doctors replaced the vein in Tashawn's neck with one from his leg.
