Teachers are heroes whether we like to think of them that way or not.

Parents entrust these people every day to take care of their most precious possessions. They act as educators, confidants, disciplinarians and friends to other people’s children nearly 8 hours a day, and that is truly something to admire.

But when a teacher went to school on THIS day, she could have never guessed that she would have to play a VERY different ‘hero’ role than what she is used to.

An eighth-grade math teacher stated she ‘was just doing her job’ when she rescued nearly 40 middle school students from a burning bus.

She recalled the incident, telling reporters that one her way toward school, one kid shouted,

“Ms. Buhrman, there’s smoke coming out of my seat.”

Her hero instincts immediately kicked in, as she evacuated every last student JUST in the nick of time.

“Once I got them off the bus, then I moved them down, and there was a ravine down there or like a drainage ditch, so I had to try to get them into a straight line to get them across the drainage ditch without falling into the drainage ditch,” she said.

The bus burst into flames as the last students were de-boarding bus.

But something unexpected happened shortly after the horrific incident that finally broke the teacher down.

Holding back tears, she told CNN:

“After the bus fire, I had received a call saying that a photographer had taken a picture of the bus and they said when I was ready I could view it. So I opened it up, and there was a picture of a rainbow over the bus; however, it wasn’t raining… I immediately started crying because like I knew that we were being taken care of.”

Buhrman talked about her motivation behind her actions — “We’re put in certain places, and if we’re not helping other people, what are we on earth for?”