I thought my classroom needed some sprucing, but I’ve never had much of an eye for decoration. So I did the only logical thing and bought a betta fish to bring some much needed color to the room. After all, on what planet is a class pet NOT a great idea?
(I’ve just been informed by my publicist that a class pet is not a great idea on the Planet Mercury, where there is little to no water, and fish aren’t able to breathe. Pets that breathe, and thus are alive, are on average considered healthier than those which don’t breathe, and thus are dead.)
But since if you’re reading this blog you live on Planet Earth, let us proceed.
Step One: Name the Fish
I knew that banding together to choose an appropriate name for the fish would promote camaraderie among my students. Each student got to choose a name, and I would draw a random name from the pile, thus promoting equal opportunity.
Here’s a typical dialogue:
Me: What should we name the fish?
Kindergarten Student: Saw.
Me: I didn’t hear you right. I thought you said Saw.
KS: I did.
Me: Do you mean Saw as in the sharp cutting tool used to slice through things, or Saw as in the horror movie where a lot of people are violently murdered? Because you’re too young to have acquired the irregular past tense morpheme for the verb “see”……
Saw is not the only interesting pick. Another kindergarten student chose “Haiti” which is only one consonant away from Hell. There was also Hunka Bunka, Samantha (for a male fish?? Okay it does have the word “man” in it but still), and Tele Tubbie. So my “random drawing” had to be rigged for the sake of salvaging what little respect that poor fish has left.
Step Two: Feed the Fish
It turns out that students will do just about anything to get out of work, even going so far as to jeopardize the fish’s metabolic health by insisting that it looks just famished and really needs to be fed immediately before we start the lesson. When the fish became so overfed that it began sinking to the bottom of the bowl, I knew that something had to be done, and fast. So I established a feeding schedule wherein one group of students per day gets the privilege of feeding the (still nameless) fish. The fish has really perked up now that he is fed one time a day, not eleven. He’s even starting to float again.
Step Three: Clean the Fish Tank
This is by far the least appealing step in the process of raising a classroom fish. And yet, it’s vital to a positive work environment that there not be a fish floating around in a bowl of its own feces. So off I traipsed to the faculty lounge last week to clean the fish bowl. I tell you, it’s not the first time this has happened, and it probably won’t be the last, but that darn fish was so excited to get out of that dirty bowl that he jumped right out before I had the chance to put him in a nearby container. And flopped all across the counter. Every time I got ahold of him, he slipped right back out of my fingers and back onto that coveted kitchen counter. After a lengthy battle, I managed to scoop him up in both hands and dump him into the container. I wasn’t quite sure he’d make it after such an extended period without water, but nameless fish are a persistent bunch and sure enough he was swimming again in no time. (And I was carefully disinfecting the faculty lounge to remove all evidence of the incident.)
And that, loyal blog readers, is how you have a classroom pet. 
–Troi out
