Those look awesome!

Great 'scape on your 14...

What do you do over the summer? Risk the move and take it home?

What I did last year was to sell as many fish as I thought I could replace easily in early June. The plan was to restock in September. I moved the remaining fish into a BC14 which I moved to a colleague's house since I was going away for a 5 week vacation. The lights on the BC 29 are on timers so it stayed. When I came back, I moved the BC 14 back and dropped by every few days to feed the tanks. Some of the LPS that benefit from feeding were a little smaller after the 5 week absence but some had actually developed new polyps.
So that's the plan for this year with the only change being that the BC 14 will be moved to a new colleague's house. It seems that having tanks in the classroom is not only an attraction for students, even ones that I don't actually teach... but also colleagues. This colleague just picked up a 75 gallon system but still comes everyday at lunch to sit in front of my tanks. Its actually nicer now that I have someone to talk tanks with:mrgreen:.

My plan was the same, as I am hoping to buy/sell/trade different things for the students so that they can experience more than the usual types of things in one year. I'll have to be really careful about it, but it should work. :) And I'm 15 minutes away but come here often, so if it takes a little longer to sell....no worries. :D

Well, thanks to a great deal from a fellow des_merc, my classroom now sports an 85g with a sump. I rigged up a Durso for it today, so it's nice and quiet too, except for the sump, but I'll work on that later. Nice DSB with it, so and he was kind enough to help transport and set everything up as well.

Best part is...we start our Bio unit on Monday. Can't wait. :)

i wouldnt worry to much about distractions, the kids that want to learn will learn and the kids that dont, wont pay attention regardless of whats there or not...

Post some pics when you get a chance! Can't wait to see someone else's setup ...kind of feeding my MTS vicariously through others!! LOL!:mrgreen:

P.S. Got another colleague into the hobby!! He picked up a 14 gallon biocube and has been visiting the LFS every weekend. Can't wait for the infection/addiction to spread!

Looks good! Great idea for the students!

I myself have A.D.D., and when I was in junior high there was a tank in two of my classes...(and one in highschool too) sure they 'could' be distracting if the whole class saw one fish bite another and the kid sitting next to the tank decided to tell everyone... but I thought other students were 200x more distracting than the tanks.

(well, I had my own cooler tanks at home anyways even by then haha... MTS ftw... so goldfish and tetras were hardly distracting).

I have to agree that things like this, the actual things like the symbiosis (mutualism) between the shrimp and goby... or the different phyla of animals, etc... the chemistry... all of that kind of stuff right at your fingertips with a good application to literally 'view' it from, is definitely great for the class. Glad its working out for you (this thread and the other).

Cheers,

Chris

Make friends with the custodians
 

Disclaimer : I work for a school district where I know of about 5 science teachers with various strange living things in their classrooms, but I'm not a teacher.

For starters -- when looking at the whole "distraction" thing, the simple issue is those teachers that have problems with distractions are pretty boring. The guys teaching with SW tanks, lizards, etc usually are good teachers and don't suffer from students drifing off to space all too much.
I mean, if you love teacher so much that you will bring a tank into the classroom, you probably are not reading overheads in monotone :lol:

Secondly, most of the tanks and terrariums get partially maintained by the custodial staff and other staff that DO work year round. In one case, there is a 220 gal FW tank in the entry way to the school. One of the custodians tenks to it during the summer because he likes it.
In other schools, they will take care of basic feeding and check on the tanks every day or so (because the teacher is nice to them).
I work year round, and take care of the tank at our maintenance building when the owner of the tank is away.

The other problem -- HEAT -- during the summer the air conditioning doesn't run at all. If your district has a "salmon" program, you can borrow one of the many, many chillers that would go unused over the summer.

You might just get lucky and find out one of the year round staff is a reef head, and that solves most of the problem of the summer months. In the one larger school, one custodian is a reef head, and the other loves snakes -- so they all take lunch in the one science room with about 5 tanks/terrariums.

I recommend 1 SW and 1 FW. They don't have to be giant....like each 75 gallons.....You can have all kinds of lessons around the two. Maybe make the FW a planted tank.....Have the SW with some interesting inverts and a few easy fish. My daughter is in univ, and she said she would have *loved* that in her class.....If they're smaller in size, water changes are so much easier--especially if someone else has to do them.