MISQUAH — The third-grade class at Oakview Elementary has named its classroom trout — all of them, individually — against the express, repeated, and ultimately futile advice of its teacher, setting up what veterans of the school’s Trout in the Classroom program recognize as an emotionally complicated June.

The class is raising rainbow trout from eggs supplied by the Department of Natural Resources, toward a release into Big Pelican later this month — a popular unit that teaches the water cycle, the life cycle, and, inadvertently, grief. The trouble, every single year, is the naming. Teachers advise against it. Teachers plead against it. The fish, the teachers patiently explain, are going to be released, and a released fish is easier to let go of if it does not have a name, a personality, and a well-documented preference for the left side of the tank.

The advice never once takes. “You cannot stop a third grader from naming a thing,” said teacher Sandra Halvorsen, who has run the program for years and lost the argument in every one of them. “I tell them on day one. I tell them again every day after. And by the second week there is a fish named Sparkle, and a fish named Dale, after the boy’s uncle, and a fish they have all solemnly agreed is the smart one — and we are no longer raising fish, we are raising forty individuals with names and reputations, and the release is going to be hard, and they know it, and they name them anyway.” This year’s tank includes trout christened Goldie, Bubbles, Steve, and “The Champion.”

The release is scheduled for later in June, weather and the fish permitting. Mrs. Halvorsen has begun, as she does each spring, the quiet work of preparing the class for the goodbye — the speech about the fish “living their lives,” the moment of silence for any that do not survive the season. She has long since made her peace with the naming. “It’s the naming that makes them care,” she said. “And the caring is the whole unit. The water cycle, they’ll forget by August. Letting go of something they named, on purpose, into a lake — that one stays with them.”