No squirrels, and certainly no frogs

No Jakob, we cannot have a squirrel. I love ya kiddo, but no way. Try to coax me with their cute and cuddly features and ability to entertain all you want. It’s not going to happen sweetie, it just isn’t.

My students are writing persuasive essays on topics of their choosing this month. Their little heads are busting with the righteousness of their causes and I am finding their powers of persuasion both hilarious and endearing. I mean, come on, who doesn’t love a good lobby for shorter school days or an impassioned plea for a Royal Fork buffet line in the cafeteria? Alexandra would like less homework, Alia wants others to embrace her passion for chickens, Jakob wants us to get a squirrel as a class pet. His impish little face and sometimes naughty, knowing smile endear him to me, and so I feel the need to explain to him why his much-desired squirrel just isn’t possible.

I have a history with classroom pets. After teaching for 11 years, it’s inevitable that I would have had at least a few critters live in my classroom. There have been gift pets and choice pets, bad mistake pets and sweet pets, pets that refused to die and pets that showed up without an invitation. They’ve ridden home in my car with me, sloshing around in their tanks, or curling up into tiny balls as we bumped over dirt roads to our summer break destination. It’s not that I dislike classroom pets exactly, it’s just that I know the scenario all too well.

Take the hedgehog, for example. Brillo was her name. She found her way to my classroom via a family who was moving. I enthusiastically accepted her into my then third-grade classroom. I was sure she would be a great classroom pet; hours of fun, exotic and interesting. But I’d never actually smelled a hedgehog. I mean, not in action. Cute and silly as she was curled up in a little ball, she was no picnic to clean every week, and being as she was potentially quite hazardous in her normal little prickly state, the job of cleaning her fell to me. My students had to wear gloves to hold her, and her weekly workouts in the exercise ball, rolling around at staff meetings — well, those didn’t go over so well.

The albino African claw-toed frog was an adventure. As I recall, it was a gift. Somehow it came the same year as another gifted item, a 2.5-foot-tall Crayola crayon-shaped fish tank complete with a bright red crayon cone top. I don’t think I even named the frog. That’s how much it repulsed me at first sight. The thing just didn’t give me a warm fuzzy feeling at all.

It floated. That’s it. Near the top of the tank it hovered in the water, rarely moving. I would come over and gently tap the side of the tank from time to time just to make sure it was still alive, and it would jet to the bottom, splashing water and bumping into the sides of the tank. The thing just gave me the heebie jeebies. One day, as my third-grade students were lining up, someone tripped on the cord of the Crayola tank, sending the pale, wet creature shuttling across the classroom in a column of water, much like those containers in the bank drive through. It seemed to happen in slow motion, and when that frog hit the floor, time stood still for a moment while I registered the soggy smack of amphibian during an out-of-tank experience. That frog left my classroom about a week later, re-gifted to someone likely much more compassionate for frogs than I’d ever dreamt of being.

So Jakob, now you know some of my experiences with classroom pets. You should also know that the chances of us getting a squirrel in our classroom are quite small. But I applaud your efforts, my optimistic little friend. Let’s stick to pet rocks or some nice, quiet plants. Nothing that creeps or rolls into a ball, please. Nothing that hovers or flies unexpectedly across the room (which I’m pretty sure a squirrel would love to do). Let’s try to keep the teacher sane, shall we? You’re just not persuasive enough for a squirrel. Sorry buddy.

Vanessa Powell is a National Board Certified fifth-grade teacher at Snowshoe Elementary in Wasilla. Her Chalk Talk column appears every four weeks.