Recently, a thoughtful person in the community donated a guinea pig to my classroom. I have several pets in my class, making it smell the way a science class should smell. We all do our part.
If you know much about rodents (don't we all?) then you know that guinea pigs are not specially suited for life in a classroom. They are very nervous, timid creatures that tend to flip the heck out at crowds, loud noises, lots of people trying to pet them, etc. So you can imagine the havok that in unleashed in their world in a hands-on classroom.
Nevertheless, I thought we'd give him a try and see how he handles it. If he does good, we'll keep him. If not, he can feed one of the pet snakes. (Note: That was a joke. The guinea pig will NOT be fed to a snake. Guinea pigs are too large a prey for my snakes. So we'll go with option 2; raffling him off to a willing kid.)
My largest class came in at some point, and I told them about the new pet and how nervous it is and that we need to try to be as quiet as possible (I love the little guy already. An excuse to make them be quiet that they feel guilty about lol). The class, normally, started to get a bit loud. A quick glance to the cage showed that yes, our little friend was indeed flipping out by literally flipping around his cage, sometimes getting almost a foot into the air.
I watched for a moment, then yelled at the class, "Ok, you need to keep it down! The GP (Guinea Pig) Level is too high. Anything over four inches is just not acceptable."
I thought it was a good way to say be quiet. And not one kid mentioned my ability to speak in parenthesis :)
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