Story Time: Emotional Support Pickles and Chickens in the Classroom

What if classroom management didn’t start with charts and systems — but with something soft, weird, and surprisingly effective? Meet the emotional-support pickle: a small, sensory tool that helps students reset, refocus, and get back to learning. Sometimes the simplest solutions really do work.

You can purchase emotional-support pickles online—just search for “emotional support pickles” and “plushy”.

For my school's Secret Elf gift exchange (everyone buys a gift for a “secret” person), I received these ridiculous plush emotional-support pickles and chickens. They were gifted to me, by lot, from the sweek school office lady, "Ms. Lia". They’re oddly perfect for managing the emotional weather of a high-strung middle and high school classroom. I love my school, but some days I just need to hug my emotional-support pickles.

Everyone’s out here talking about fancy classroom-management systems and color-coded behavior charts and the newest acronym-of-the-week. And I’m like: listen. Get some emotional-support pickles. Put them in your classroom. Especially if you teach sixth or seventh grade like I do.

Kids love sensory stuff. They love something tangible. And if a plush pickle helps a kid settle their nervous system and get back to learning, then fine. Call it “emotional regulation.” I call it: the pickle works.

First, you’ll have your Velcro students—the ones who will attach themselves to that pickle like it’s a life raft. They will want it all day. Forever. In perpetuity.

Second, you’ll have… let’s call them the tiny chaos scientists. One or two. The ones who look at an emotional-support chicken and think, What if I took this apart and learned what’s inside?

So yes: you are the therapist in this situation. You are also the bodyguard. You have to protect the emotional-support pickle at all costs.

Note: I don’t make any profit from the sale of these plushies. This post is simply based on my own experience.

And honestly, you can substitute any school-appropriate plushy toy and get the same effect: an axolotl, reindeer, oyster—whatever works for your kids.

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On Carnival Wins, the Ephemeral Nature of Childhood Toys, and Short-Term Goals: It ain't pretty!

Who can relate? I can!

I sometimes wish I could pull a tape of tickets out of a machine and win. Win big. Don't you? It's an analogy. The analogy is something like this. Just like playing games at the arcade hall will garner you tickets (that win big!), once you go home you put the toy away; you forget about it. How many carnival game toys have you won and treasured? None. But I bet when you won that damn thing you were as hot as dry ice. You were stone cold happy. Winning a stuffed bear at the shoot out booth or scoring some plastic dinosaur from the crane game made you goofy happy. And you loved it. Sure. I remember going to the parish fair (we call state counties parishes in Louisiana) and feeling like I had won it all when my dad gave me a crisp twenty dollar bill and instructed me to play some games. I won a bouncy ball and a stuffed lizard. It was euphoric. I was so mad crazy over winning games I remember once my aunt took me to the arcade with my brother and we spent way too much money playing Smash TV. Quarters into tokens. Tokens add up. So do quarters. I took a recent troupe of students (I am a teacher) on an end-of-the-year trip to Dave & Busters. Those kids were as happy as the proverbial pigs in slop with their hard-earned won trophies. Plastic guns; plasticine bears; laughy taffy; yo-yos and other knick-knacks and treasuries that sure did seem like treasuries to them. I was just happy that they were serving lunch for the adults too; we got to eat crap-food on a Tuesday. Priceless.

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Essay: How to be Generative Without Having Kids

Learn how my Uncle gave me his set of matchbox cars to me when I was young and how this influenced my understanding of passing something down from one generation to the next.

image credit: Tilt-Shift Photography

   When I was a boy my uncle gave me his complete set of diecast matchbox cars.

   There is a photograph of me as a toddler hanging on to our family coffee table, grinning in the flashlight of the camera’s aim, illuminated – darkening the background where you can see strewn on the carpet a multitudinous display of diecast cars. Not only did my uncle give me his entire set of matchbox cars but he and my aunt would take me on Saturdays to the flea market to scout out hidden diecast cars buried underneath piles and piles of junk. I was especially in love with the Matchbox brand, which started out in England as the Lesney company in the 1940s as a cheap way to sell toys to children during the war. I had Hot Wheels too. And I liked Corgi's models. But, my heart, in the end, was stuck on Matchbox.

    Visiting the flea market was a big deal. My aunt sold fashion for porcelain dolls. When she and my uncle frequented the flea market stalls, they were looking for deals on doll fashions. My aunt instructed me on the first day I tagged along to help them pick out fabrics. "Don't touch anything," she told me. She put her arms behind her back and turned around to show me, saying, "this is how you walk. Hold on to your arm so you can catch it if it tries to grab something on the shelf." She was right. The flea market stalls were filled with items that screamed "tangible!" The musty smelling curtains and chain-smoking clerks, ogling collectors handling precious prints of Andy Warhol Marilyn Monroe's and 1950s Hugh Hefner Playboys were for me, a boy's wonderland. I obeyed my aunt, though, and tried not to touch. Besides, I had no interest in handling thin veined china or opaque Depression-era glass. I wanted the toys. While my aunt and uncle felt and measured lacy fabrics, I would look for cigar boxes and glass cases filled with diecast cars, hoping to find the prized Matchbox models that would add to my collection.