Lecturer Dons ‘Iron Man’ Mask And Becomes His Students' Superhero

This university lecturer has got his anxious students’ backs.

To spare them from getting nervous when he was grading their papers, Mohd Nazriq bin Noor Ahmad donned an “Iron Man” mask so they couldn’t see his facial expressions and figure out how they’d done.

One of Ahmad’s “Thinking Skills” students at the International Islamic University Malaysia snapped him wearing the unusual headgear during a recent lecture.

She shared the photograph to Twitter on Monday, and it’s now going viral.

The student, 18-year-old Nur Izyan Farhani Binti Arifin, told HuffPost that she and her classmates were initially “surprised” when Ahmad, 29, placed the mask over his face.

But after he explained why he was doing so, she described him as an “awesome lecturer for considering our feelings” and said she now “looked forward” to attending his seminars.

Ahmad told BuzzFeed News he donned the mask because it was “really easy” for his students to guess how they’d done based on his facial expressions.

But he also revealed another reason for wearing it.

While undergoing treatment for a heart condition in 2014, Ahmad was forced to wear a blue light-emitting heart monitor on his chest.

After his parents bought the self-confessed “Iron Man” superfan the mask to cheer him up (and to accompany the medical device), he decided to use it occasionally in class.

It became the perfect prop to maintain his students’ attention, he added.

“Classes would be boring if it’s just simply about talking and giving marks,” he told BuzzFeed. “It bored me when I was studying, so I saw no reason to be boring when I took up lecturing.”

Dozens of Twitter users appeared to agree with his reasoning: