My Teaching Days: The Classroom Pet Distaster

It's been a while...if ever...that I've shared one of my teaching days stories here.

There's a reason for that.

Yes, at one point in my life, many, many years ago, the State of Michigan allowed me to be a classroom teacher in a small parochial school just outside of Detroit.  The ink on my B.S. degree was barely dry, but there I was, put in charge of 18 Kindergarten-3rd graders every day. 

Five days a week, parents dropped their kids off, assuming I was a fully in control, completely on top of it, really well qualified teacher.  Now, granted, I met all of these parents prior to the start of the school year and the vast majority of them...well, let's just say they wouldn't have won any awards for great parenting. And if they had...they wouldn't have gotten their crap together enough to actually collect the award.

Still, there I was, the pretty much lone person in charge of educating these wee ones in the important life skills: Reading, writing, basic math.  

Little did I know, I was also in charge of teaching things like: shoe tying, how to not wet your pants every single school day, and my favorite "this is what a breakfast looks like."  But those are stories for another day.

Today I'm going to tell you the story of our classroom pet. And if you've heard this before, well...oh well.  I'd almost forgotten it, becaus it's been more than 30 years, and honestly, I'm old and my brain is full of movie quotes now. But, thanks to a friend's facebook post about the death of her classroom critter, I was reminded of the late, great Chester.  (Yep, that's his real name.  It's the one name I'm not changing to protect the innocent because Chester doesn't care. Believe me.  That creature didn't care about anything.)

I was a fresh faced 21-year-old, put in charge of my own very classroom. The expectation was that I would teach the kids in my charge the basic building blocks and most vital skills they'd need to make it in this world. No pressure.  (Oh, and when I got the job, my father, also a teacher, said, "K-3?  That's not teaching. That's repeating the same thing 5000 times a day." VERY inspiring!)

I'd inherited from the previous teacher a classroom pet: Chester, and hamster/gerbil/small rodenty thing.  I'd never had a pet growing up. I didn't know much about the care of such a creature.  Of course, I didn't know much about teaching primary school kids who came to school without proper clothes or breakfast or lunch, or without a whole bunch of other stuff parents are supposed to provide...but again, stories for another day.

So I had Chester. Chester didn't do much, I think he was about 100 in hamster years.  Plus, he had these two big growths extending from his rear. Like he had a second butt or something.  They weren't gross, they were furry and blended with the rest of him. It was like he had extra dump in his truck or something.  Didn't seem to bother him. He ate, he pooped, and he slept. All the things you'd expect a geriatric classroom critter to do.

I liked Chester. His sawdust tank lining gave the room a clean-ish smell.  Overpowered the scent of urine, peanut butter, and dirt anyway.  He was quiet.  And, late at night, when I was putting up my 10,000th bulletin board of the month (in my teaching college they were SUPER BIG on doing bulletin boards.  As you all know, I'm terrible at arts and crafts. My boards were...less than inspiring.  But they were colorful and I only get screamed at once by the school administrator for something on them.  Again, a story for another day!) I didn't feel alone in the room because Chester was there.

Then came October. October is a favorite month in the education world for students. It's when the last two school days of the month are OFF for something called "teacher's conference." Honestly, until the actual moment I WAS a teacher, I had no idea what that meant.  But there I was, for the first time in my life, unable to enjoy those two beautiful days because I was now the teacher who had to go to the TEACHER'S CONFERENCE. The conference was held in a city some hours away from my school and I'd be staying in a hotel, as would the other teacher in my school. (Yes, a two room school. Very tiny!)  The other teacher, a third year veteran (Tiny school, young teachers) was eager to see all her pals from other schools in the district.  I wanted a four day nap.

Worse yet, I needed someone to take care of Chester while I was away for the four-day weekend.

Now, I don't know what other teachers do about classroom pets when they're gone. Few of my childhood classrooms had pets and the ones that did belonged to seasoned teachers who didn't feel honor bound to go to conferences.  My dad had a pair of white mice in his classroom one year, but he got them after conference and they died long before the next one!

I asked the parents (the ones that were sober and at least partially attentive to their kids, which was a very short list) who could take Chester for the weekend.  Only one volunteered.  

(Teacher friends, you are going to completely understand this!) I don't want any parents out there to get offended, but it's a common knowledge among teachers, and has been for generations, that there are parents and families that volunteer for stuff all the time and you, as the teacher, really kind of wish they didn't.  You know the family means well, but wowser, they just can't seem to get it right.  Even as a green first year teacher I knew those families existed.  It's just that the families in my classroom were all such a complete crap shoot, that actually getting anyone to volunteer for something was a miracle in an of itself. What's the old saying, "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth?"

The one and only parent that volunteered to take Chester was, let's call her Nancy, the mother of, let's call them Timmy and Sally.  Now, on the front of it, Nancy seemed to have it all together. They were a traditional family unit, which made them the unicorns of my class.  Nancy was a stay at home mom who was very involved in her kids and she was my biggest fan.  (No idea why.)

But that's kind of where the greatness stopped.  Nancy sent her kids in impossibly dressy clothes.  Every. Single. Day.  Sally was in some frothy little frock complete with velvet Mary Janes and tights.  Always, always white tights.  Those tights would be in shreds by noon.  But at least Sally, who was in kindergarten, was the tidier of the two children. While the tights never made it to the end of the day, she generally managed to keep her dresses intact and she never ate anything that wasn't human food.

And then there was Timmy.

Timmy, I'm sure, is somewhere in a very big room, either at NASA or GM (or he's working for the Chinese, who even knows?) creating something brilliant.  He might even have found the cure for some horrible disease that's killing children and he has six Nobel prizes and maybe he was even voted People Magazine's "sexiest scientist" (Nah, that always goes to Bill Nye, right?) at some point.  Timmy probably even invented the Internet.  

But, back when I was a teacher, some 30 years ago, Timmy was a pencil losing, crayon eating, paste painting, book chewing first grader who came in dressed like a college professor with tenure and left school looking like he'd escaped Jurassic Park.

I knew Timmy was highly intelligent. I also knew that if I let him keep his full pack of crayons and pencils in his desk, he'd be begging me for something to write with by 9:00. I kept his pencil box on my desk. Every morning I'd give him one pencil and one crayon. And I kid you not, within half an hour, he'd lost the pencil and eaten the crayon.  He always had a ring of waxy color around his mouth and his desk was ALWAYS covered in dry paste or glue.  How that happened, I have no idea.  Again, that was never in his desk.  

But the kid was smart. Like beyond super smart. He could out read anyone and he verbalized thoughts that were astounding, not just for a first grader, for someone getting out of high school.

Still, the kid could not keep a crayon out of his mouth. And he could not get through the day without multiple holes in his clothes.

But, since this was the only family that volunteered to take Chester for the weekend, they got him. Wednesday afternoon, Nancy picked up Chester at the end of the school day.  She got his food and his bedding and a sort of travel pen, because the glass aquarium was too heavy.

And thusly, I went to my first teacher's conference. And then, because that was kind of dull, I skipped out early on Friday, and went to see Boyfriend, (the guy you now know as Hubby) who was sitting through his own first Teacher's Conference, but in Wisconsin.

I returned to school Monday morning, tired, but cheerful. I greeted each student as they came in.  It was almost 8:30, and no sign of Nancy or the kids. I thought that was a little odd, but hey, maybe they got the flu or something.  I wouldn't have to clean paste off the floor for once.  SCORE!

And then...

Sally, much like a town crier of old, scampered into the classroom and shouted, "CHESTER DIED BECAUSE TIMMY KILLED HIM!"

Friends, there is NOTHING in teacher school that prepared me for this moment.

Sally was bouncing around the room, shouting, "Timmy killed Chester!" while Nancy walked in, all Chester's crap in one hand, and dragging Timmy in with the other.

Nancy marched her son up to my desk and said, "Now you tell Teacher what happened."

That boy could not have looked sadder.  There he was, all clean, and cute, and not smelling like dirt or paste or crayons. His sweater vest and dress pants didn't have any holes in them.  And he raises his giant, Disney sized, brown eyes up to me and says, "Mishush Schultsh.  Um.  Chester escaped from his cage so I had to chase him but then I tripped..."

Oh Lord.   

I looked at Nancy who was nodding.  "That's right. He was chasing Chester and he tripped and fell on him.  Crushed him."

"But I didn't mean to!" Timmy's big old eyes welled up.

All this to the back drop of Timmy's sister chanting, "TIMMY KILLED CHESTER!"

So, what's a girl to do?  what did I do?

Honestly, I don't remember. I'm sure I mumbled something like, "Well, it's okay. Chester was old.   he probably liked playing with you."  I'd like to think I did.

Somehow I got Nancy out of the room, and I got Sally to SHUT UP.  And weirdly, once he'd confessed, Timmy seemed pretty chill about the whole thing.  He sat down, put a blue crayon in his mouth and started his day like always.  

I'm sure I had a talk about Chester's death as a general way of calming everyone down.  And no, I didn't dispel anyone's hope that Chester was in Heaven.  These were kids who barely had the essentials of life. I wasn't going to add more despair to them.  Since we didn't have the body, we couldn't bury him, so we said a prayer that Jesus was having fun playing with Chester.

But to this day, I'll never, ever forget my one classroom pet, Chester.