The Bee Eater: Do Act to Get Attention

Michelle Rhee ate a bee. In front of her students. On purpose.

She was a young Teach For America corps member in a Baltimore classroom, struggling to get the attention of kids who had zero interest in learning. Nothing worked. Not the lesson plans. Not the raised voice. Not the discipline. So one day, when a bee flew into the classroom and the kids went wild, Rhee grabbed it and ate it. The room went silent. Every single student stared at her. And from that moment, she had their attention.

That story, told in The Bee Eater: Michelle Rhee Takes on the Nation's Worst School District by Richard Whitmire (published by Jossey-Bass/Wiley in 2011), is what hooked me into reading the entire book. Not because I planned to eat insects. But because it captured something I had been struggling with as a lecturer: how do you break through the wall of indifference?

The Book

The Bee Eater follows Michelle Rhee's journey from the daughter of Korean immigrants to the chancellor of Washington D.C. public schools, one of the worst-performing school districts in America. When she arrived, the district had been broken for so long that everyone had given up. Graduation rates were abysmal. Test scores were among the lowest in the nation. The bureaucracy was bloated. The teachers' unions were powerful and resistant to change.

Rhee did not care about being liked. She closed underperforming schools. She fired ineffective teachers (including principals). She fought the unions head-on. She was hailed by Oprah as a "warrior woman for our times" and reviled by teachers' unions as the enemy. The book provides an inside view of the union battles, school closings, and contentious community politics, along with a rare look at Rhee's upbringing and what shaped her relentless approach.

You do not have to agree with everything Rhee did. Her methods were controversial, and the book does not shy away from the criticism. But the underlying principle is undeniable: if the system is broken and nobody is willing to act, someone has to be the one who moves first. Even if it means eating the bee.

Do Act

I am not as mad as Rhee. I did not eat a bee. But the book gave me the idea that sometimes you need to do something unexpected to break the pattern. Students zone out when lectures are predictable. They wake up when you do something they did not see coming.

So I started doing my own version of "eating the bee." Not literally. But through provocative questions that force students to stop scrolling their phones and actually think.

One question I throw at my students early in the semester:

"Is it the same level: a graduate who gets a job, and a graduate who creates a job?"

The room always splits. Some say yes (both are contributing to the economy). Some say no (creating a job is harder, riskier, more valuable). Some have never thought about it. That is the point. The question is not about the answer. It is about the disruption. It forces them to question the default assumption that education equals employment. It opens the door to a bigger conversation: what if the goal of your degree is not to get hired, but to hire others?

That single question has started more meaningful classroom discussions than any PowerPoint slide I have ever made.

The Lesson for Lecturers

Rhee's story taught me that authority in the classroom is not given by your title. It is earned by your willingness to act. Students respect lecturers who do things, not lecturers who just talk about things. If you want their attention, you have to earn it every single session. Not with gimmicks, but with genuine acts that show you care enough to be uncomfortable.

The bee was not the point. The willingness to eat it was.

Read this book if you are a teacher, a lecturer, or anyone who has ever stood in front of a room full of people who would rather be somewhere else. It will not give you a step-by-step guide. But it will give you the courage to do something different. And sometimes, that is all it takes.