Scat Test
Categories: Léo’s Insights 2024-2025
In the past, schools operated by the district in which I was working were open to registrations from anywhere. That is, schools were not restricted to accepting students only from within their catchment area. This was especially important to high schools which were catering to an older cohort of students able to travel on their own. My high school did a few things to attract student registrations, the most extravagant being the open house every spring.
When I was mostly teaching French as a Second Language, my students and I were stuck with the question of how we could demonstrate our proficiency in French when the majority of parents did not speak the language. Obviously plays and skits would have limited attraction so we had to come up with something better. Our department head came up with the winning idea of making and serving French crepes. Free food is always a good way to attract attention! I ate my share of crepes and eventually transferred out of the Language Department to the Science Department where I was finally able to teach Biology, the subject I was trained in.
The stereotypical biology display at an open house is usually samples of stinking, formaldehyde-laden, dissected specimens, which do little to attract anything, much less students so I determined to do something different. Remembering the super success the French department had had with crepes, I thought something involving food would probably be more attractive than dissected critters.
I am not sure how I got the idea of serving chocolate at the event, but it sparked the idea of a scat test. (For those of you unfamiliar with the word, scat is another term for animal droppings.) I proceeded to collect samples of animal pellets: rabbit, sheep, deer, goat, elk and moose. I placed them in numbered, sealed petrie dishes and provided a checklist to see if people knew their… you know. I also had open dishes of chocolate covered raisins and almonds strategically placed near the dishes with similarly shaped pellets and invited people to help themselves. No one touched the chocolates, as everyone suspected they were chocolate covered animal scats! After all, chocolate covered almonds do look like shiny moose droppings! The next year, I thought of doing it again but when I asked the lab tech for my scat samples, she responded, “I got rid of that sh….!”
Moral of this story? Be bold and creative when trying to catch people’s attention (especially your children’s!)
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