Mid-July. I’m in the middle of a billion summer camps and writing my research proposal for my dissertation. I find out that I’m moving classrooms…..Maybe… I could either suck it up and start the move now, or, wait until literally the first week of school. Uh, no. I’ll just move I guess.
Five years. Five years of labs, decor, specimens, and enough supplies to stock a small natural history museum, all of it needed to migrate to a new room before the first bell of a new year. And somewhere in that inventory: a 40-gallon fish tank, fully stocked, fully alive, and fully unbothered by my life plans.
Let’s talk about the joys first, because there are some, I promise.
Read more: The Great Classroom MigrationThe Joys (Yes, Really)
There’s something strangely cathartic about being forced to go through five years of accumulated classroom sediment. You find labs you forgot you wrote. You find the good scissors you thought a student stole in 2022 (a student did not steal them; they were in a drawer behind the stapler, judging you silently). You find the energy to finally throw out the mystery liquid in the back of a cabinet that may or may not have started as ethanol.
Moving is an involuntary decluttering service. Nobody asks to reorganize five years of teaching life in three weeks, but once you’re in it, there’s a weird satisfaction to starting over with an actual plan instead of “wherever it fit in 2021.” New room, new bulletin board layout, new chance to not have sixteen extension cords tangled behind a bookshelf.
And there’s the specimens. Say what you will about jars of preserved organisms making a move interesting, but nothing bonds you to your labs faster than personally, carefully, individually wrapping every single one so it survives a cart ride. You develop a genuine tenderness for objects you previously just pointed at during a lecture.
The Bitter Sides (Buckle Up)
Then there’s the fish tank.
A 40-gallon tank does not care about your timeline. It does not care that you have only like one day with minions to help you relocate it to the building next door. It has fish in it, and those fish have opinions about being relocated. The process went something like this: drain the water, catch every fish, transport them and their water in a fleet of 5-gallon buckets like a very stressful goldfish carnival game, haul the tank itself to the new building, refill, and then top off the water once everyone was resettled.
Every fish survived. I want that on the record, because it felt like defusing a bomb made of gravel and anxiety. The sea urchin did not make it, and if you’ve never had to explain to yourself why you’re mourning an invertebrate at 2pm while unloading buckets from your cart, I don’t recommend the experience. You don’t expect a classroom move to come with an actual moment of grief, but there it was, sitting quietly next to the boxes of aquarium testing solutions.
Beyond the tank, there’s the sheer physical unglamorousness of it. Nobody warns you that “moving classrooms” means becoming a furniture mover, a hazmat handler, an art installer, and an aquarium technician within the same 72-hour window, unpaid, in July, while also trying to plan the actual curriculum for the fall. There is no line item in a marine biology degree for “small-scale aquatic evacuation,” and yet here we are.
What’s Left When the Boxes Are Empty
By the time the last poster was re-taped to a wall that isn’t quite the same shade of grey as the last one, I had a new room, a slightly rearranged fish population, and a profound new respect for buckets. Moving classrooms mid-summer is nobody’s idea of a good time, but there’s something almost fitting about it. Teaching is already an exercise in adapting on short notice, rebuilding what you can, and doing right by the living things depending on you, scaled up to include an actual apartment’s worth of stuff and an actual living tank of fish.
The new space is up and running now. The decor’s back on the walls, the specimens are shelved, and the tank is humming along with its full, surviving crew. Ask me again in September whether it was worth it (give 3-5 business days for pictures and response). Ask the sea urchin never, because I still feel weird about it.
