It’s blog time and for the last few days I have been struggling to come up with an idea for a blog topic. Then I went for “caramel roll Thursday” at our local Senior Citizens Building and ‘bingo’ a discussion with a fellow retired teacher triggered memories that are certainly blog worthy.
I started teaching in 1967 when many rules that now exist weren’t even thought of yet. Animals in the classroom comes to mind.
In today’s classrooms living conditions for animals are carefully regulated and controlled. In fact I think many classrooms concerned about the caged animal’s welfare ban them completely.
Not in 1967!
To me the presence of animals and plants in the classroom added to the excitement of learning. So in those early years of my teaching career my philosophy was ‘the more life in the classroom the merrier’!
That philosophy led to some interesting opportunities for learning. Teachable moments pop up at the most unpredictable moments in a classroom teeming with living things.
An example comes to mind immediately. We had a rabbit in an old mink cage that was trained to go to the bathroom in one corner of the cage where an aluminum pie pan captured its feces (using the scientific term).
One morning a seventh grade boy brought his rabbit from home and asked if he could put his bunny in the mink cage for the day. I assured him as long as the two rabbits got along that would be fine.
Well the two rabbits hit it off immediately and it became obvious very early in the day that one rabbit was a male and the other was a female. The cage was rocking back and forth as the worried seventh graders thought the rabbits were fighting.
When the bell rang ending the life science class and the sophomores replaced them their smug smiles indicated they understood there was no fighting taking place! (If you know what I mean.)
One month later I had drawings to determine the lucky seventh graders who would be taking a baby rabbit home to raise as their very own. Of course a permission slip from Mom and Dad had to be produced for the transaction to become complete.
Since gerbils and hamsters were also residents of the biology room there were also drawings to find homes for an occasional litter of gerbils or hamsters.
I will never know how many nasty comments included my name when those cute, fuzzy little balls of fur were delivered home to those drawing winners! 🙁
A three foot garter snake was always a necessity to have in the classroom. Allowing the scaley creature to crawl around my neck in front of the class drew immediate attention amid groans and a few shrieks from the students.
There is no better way to get the attention of all the students than to drop a frog into the snake’s terrarium and watch the snake slowly and methodically swallow its prey!
There was only one animal that I had in the classroom that I would never do again. Ike’s Chicken Shack was a favorite smorgasbord eating place along Lake Traverse. People flocked there on weekends and the food was wonderful.
They also had a few zoo animals in cages on the restaurant grounds. Among them were several monkeys. One fall the owner of Ike’s contacted me and asked me if the biology students would like to care for a monkey over the winter.
Thinking there would be a lot of teachable moments with that opportunity I mistakenly said yes!
The monkey’s name was Ralph.
Whenever I would show a movie Ralph would view the animals in the film and go crazy. Grabbing the bars to his cage he would scream loudly at the animals.
Ralph had dirty habits such as throwing chunks of his feces out onto the classroom floor. Naughty Ralph!
One Sunday morning I received a call from the school’s janitor to inform me that Ralph was loose in my classroom. Somehow the cage door had been wired open and Ralph had been encouraged to escape.
Our family was just leaving for church so I was forced to make a mad dash for the school and to attempt a quick capture of the elusive monkey before church began. Thank goodness for butterfly nets because as Ralph leaped off the top of his cage aiming to land on a lab table I made an amazing midair capture.
As our family filed into church that morning no one had any idea that the father of that family had carried out a heroic capture of a monkey just minutes earlier.
The crime of wiring the monkey’s cage door open has remained unsolved to this day. But somewhere in our community some sixty year old beer drinking buddies are laughing about that evil deed carried out in my biology classroom those many years ago. 🙂
I captured a skink, Minnesota’s only lizard, and placed it in a terrarium with a couple inches of soil. Because skinks are very shy reptiles they spend their days in the wild hidden under vegetation or buried in the dirt so I knew my students probably had never seen one.
They made terrible classroom pets, however as the skink was never visible as it buried itself in the loose dirt.
The skink is famous for loosing its tail when being chased by a predator. I bet if I would have demonstrated that behavior I would have peeked a few students interest! 🙂
We hatched baby chicks for several years. One year I didn’t candle the eggs and of course the unfertilized eggs were rotten and broke as the little chicks began to hatch. I never did that again. The smell was unbearable! 🙁
The trip to the Senior Citizens Building this morning was worth it because of those tasty caramel r0lls but reminiscing about animals in the classroom made it extra special. In fact I might just see if I can locate and old mink cage, find an aluminum pie pan and buy myself a rabbit. I think we could clear out a spot for it in our dining room.
I better clear that with my wife though. 🙂
Until next time.
