A Fish Fry in My Classroom...Not Good!

Here are some things to think about if you want an aquarium in your classroom or home. Some good, some not so good. 🤣

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Welcome back. I'm D-Man, and you're listening to Hang On, Keep Cool, and Stay Calm. Glad to have you here because today I want to talk about what it's like if you're going to have fish or an aquarium to take care of, whether it's in your classroom or even at home. There's a lot of uh work that goes into it every day, and even though you do the right thing, it doesn't always come out the way you want it, which you'll hear about in just a little bit. But first of all, let me tell you about the first fish I have by the door when you come in in a little 10 to 15 gallon aquarium. It's a nice size catfish, and they're very easy to take care of. They live a long time, and here's what we did once a week. On Fridays, when it was time to go to lunch, we would line up, and then one of the lunch people would come down and call us, and we'd go. So I'd line a boy's line and a girl's line, and then whose turn it was got to go fishing. And I kept a little stick with a string on it and a fish hook on the end, and I'd bring worms to school, and I'd bait the hook, and then they'd take turns. Today, for instance, would be the boys' turn. They'd dangle that worm inside the fish tank, and if they had about two minutes, and if that catfish got on the hook and they caught it, then the boys got to go to lunch first. If they didn't, the girls got to go. They love doing this. They look for fry look forward for Fridays, and then the next week it would be the girls' turn, and we do the same thing, and they all wanted to go fishing, and that catfish stayed in there. Oh, we did that for a couple of years, I think. And then finally, I guess I probably moved on to something else. The second thing I wanted to tell you about was a big fish tank we had, 55 gallons, and it was all fresh water, they were easier to take care of than salt water. And in that great big 55-gallon tank, I had two Oscars. And those fish are easy to take care of, and they grow pretty fast, and they can get quite big, but you pretty much have to keep them in a tank by themselves, or at least with other Oscars, because they eat the fish. And what we would do there, the kids love the Oscars, they were pretty good size. I suppose each one uh we had was probably four or five inches uh across, so he got pretty big. We bought them when they were little, and I had them in there for uh probably four or five years before I decided to um oh, we auctioned them off to the kids so they could take them home. But anyhow, once a week I would go down to the fish store, which was real convenient because right in our neighborhood we had a little fish store and it was in their basement. So I'd go down to the fish store and I would buy a dozen gold fish. And, you know, they were about an inch to an inch and a half long, each one of them. And back then they only cost, I think, ten cents apiece. So it wasn't uh any expense to do that, and I'd bring the back to school. And then you know how when you get fish, they send them home in a plastic bag that's full of water with a rubber band around the top so it doesn't leak out. When I get back to school, then all the kids would want to gather around the tank, and I'd open the bag and I'd dump all the goldfish into the tank, and they'd all scatter around and swim. And pretty soon the Oscars would spot these guys. They'd go around, they were like vacuum cleaners. They'd go around and suck up these fish, and I suppose in a matter of uh 15 or 20 minutes, they had these two of them had all 12 fish in their mouth, and they'd swim around for a couple hours with um goldfish tails hanging out their mouth until they could get them all swallowed. And that was fun to watch. Uh that was one of the kids' favorite things of the week to feed the Oscars, and that was nice because you only had to feed them once a week. Well now the third thing is I wanted to tell you about is our tropical fish tank, where it was a 29-gallon tank. So it was about half the size of the Oscar tank. But we had a lot of fish in there. And maybe, I don't know, silver dollar fish, we had some gold fish, we had some mollies, all kinds, maybe 20 or 30 fish were in this tank. Well, you have to keep the temperature of the tank up there around in the 70s, and we had heaters that we put in uh tank, and it has a thermostat on them, it keeps the temperature the way whatever you set it at. Well, one day I came in school on Monday morning, and I don't remember what month it was or anything, but it it probably was uh colder weather. But anyhow, as soon as I opened the door down uh to get in the school, or as soon as I came in the door, the whole building smelled like dead fish. I mean, it was horrible. Um well I knew right away whose room that was coming from, and I'm sure as the everyone else came in the building, they knew too, because I always had something in my room, and uh it would always end up smelling sometimes. I even had one boy whose parents were uh cattle farmers, and he brought the head of one of the steers in for for us to clean. And uh I can tell you about that in another episode, but that ended up into a pretty exciting uh adventure, too. But anyhow, I got up to my room, and that 29-gallon fish tank, the water was in there and it was boiling, and all the fish that I had in that tank were floating at the top in the boiling water, and it was horrible, and the smell was horrible. You might think, well, you know, fish don't smell good when you hear uh smell them cooking, you know, like at a fish fry. Well, this was the fish fry that must have been going on all weekend because they were spoiled, they were floating, and so there's a mess that I got into, and that could happen to anybody, I guess. I never did know why the uh heaters in the tank somehow didn't shut off and they were on high and it actually boiled the water. So it's something you have to be careful about. Never happened again because um I'd heat the tank up good on Fridays and turn those heaters off over the weekend because the room stayed relatively warm. So if you're going to have uh if you're a teacher or you're going to be a teacher, or if you're a parent and you're gonna let your kids have fish tanks, there's some things you gotta look out for because you want to have a happy experience and you don't want to have an unexpected fish ride going on with your tropical fish. So I hope you enjoyed that little episode, and there's more coming up. I can't wait to share them with you. But until then, don't forget, hang on, keep cool, and stay calm.