As a high school math teacher, I struggled early on to try to make my class accessible, fun and engaging to my students. I was lucky to stumble onto memories of my childhood when I had teachers who kept class pets and how cool I thought that was.
My classroom environment changed immediately when I added my first ball python. Students loved the snake, Nagini, and it frequently became a topic of conversation in the classroom. In order to connect Nagini to our classroom activities and lessons, I started devising ways to incorporate our pet into each lesson.
So we focus on charting snake growth in the first two years of high school math and analyze it by year, which appears to be linear. Each of my classes adopts one of 8 snakes: 1 male and 1 female in each of the four age ranges(hatch, juvenile, subadult and adult).
In the third year we combine four years of growth data to show that it’s a curve bc all living things must stop
Growing. And logarithms are the first unit in the third class. We also do some lite breeding for students to study dominant and recessive genes before working on probabilities, market research, expected values and more.
So it’s a big classroom project that students love to engage in.
My students responded in a survey that the class pets made them 70% more likely to come to class.
71% of students who admitted being afraid of snakes asked to learn more about the snakes and did
not see them as a distraction.
Our class mission is to educate, rescue, rehabilitate, and rehome snakes in need. Most of our snakes are actually rescues that we have worked hard to rehabilitate and gain the trust of which is a powerful non-academic lesson for our students which allows them to share their experiences as good will ambassadors for reptiles everywhere.
I would lke to thank the Pets in the Classroom Foundation for supplying funding for some of our pets and
Cat 5 Reptiles who have helped us acquire some of our pets through rehoming.
Ball Pythons
Other Snake Breeds
Upcoming Additions
Beardies and Geckos
