Trout in the classroom

I encountered this story through an outdoor segment on one of our local television stations. The story describes a project of Minnesota Department of Natural Resources in which the department provides classrooms with trout eggs and allows students to rear trout in classroom aquariums to eventually release in local cold water streams. The project ties into many science topics, but also offers opportunities in other areas.

Watch the videos. The 55-gallon tank took me back to my days student teaching in an Iowa high school. The biology teacher I was paired with had a tank he raised guppies in. I had several tanks of my own as a hobbyist and brought a large Oscar to share with the students. The Oscar did a job on the guppies.

At a later point, the tank had been drained and was still sitting in the back of the classroom. One of my jobs student teaching was showing movies the teacher had found and used from time to time. I knew how to get the loop just right while threading the film projector so I was left in charge of the class. The students soon figured this out and would grab a handful of gravel from the bottom of the tank when it was film day. With the lights off, they would start lobbing the gravel at each other. I used to use that story when talking about behavioral management techniques with my college educational psychology students. I figured out that consequences are not always the best way to maintain discipline. Behaviorism also proposes you can manipulate stimuli so you don’t have to deal with consequences. I figured out I could just roll the tank into the storage room thereby remove the stimulus for rock tossing.