"The School," Donald Barthelme

I like Barthelme's "gas stations" of elevating the joke from plants to animals to humans and making blacker and blacker humor as the story progresses. However, as Saunders points out, your audience becomes very aware of the pattern, so you cannot stay on one path too long, which I feel he did when he mentioned the two kids in his class dying. There's nothing significantly different between that gas station and the last - they were both about humans. And then he does it again in the next paragraph, mentioning that someone's father was killed. He should have quit while he was still ahead.
Why are these young kids tackling existential philosophy with collegiate vocabulary? If he wanted to make the kids really smart, he should have introduced that idea earlier in the story. It was distracting where it was.
Now that I think about it, I could accept the smart dialogue from the kids if this story is about the kids gradually growing up. They learn about death and how cold and indifferent the world is when they are young, and it becomes more and more painfully obvious for them as they get older. So the kids are young adults when they start asking the questions. And the gerbil represents a reversion to childlike innocence and enthusiasm about life.
I also like the rhythm and repetition of the dialogue ("I said, yes, maybe - they said, we don't like it - I said that's sound). I also like how the dialogue was not in quotation marks, so it feels more like the author is trying to tell me a story. I also like the way the author tries to explain away all the deaths, as if to suggest that death isn't mandatory. To me, the last line is a punchline with a meaning behind it. The gerbil is, of course, not only subject to death, but according to the rules of the story, will die soon. So it's only a quick fix. Perhaps the author is suggesting love and reproduction are our only vindications in the face of death.