Friday, August 7 - Living Materials

I've been ordering materials for the new school year these last couple of weeks.

Our fourth and fifth grade science curriculum includes living materials. We get frogs, millipedes, fish, and I think crabs.

Once each marking period a different set of teachers calls up the company in North Carolina and gives them their order number along with the dates that they want each "material" delivered.

These boxes come shipped overnight and they only ship them on certain days of the week so as not to have a box of dead living materials show up.

The teachers take these materials to their classrooms and use whatever the rest of the curriculum prescribes to set up these lessons.

Once the lesson or the marking period is over, the teachers can disperse or dispose of these materials as they wish and by that time they're really anxious to get rid of them because, to put it in their words, "they stink up the room".

One fourth grade teacher even admitted to me that she actually looks forward to the things dying because they smell so bad.

Thankfully, she's also the one who has confided to many that she never intends to have children of her own.

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