LESSONS FROM A SCHOOLYARD ROOSTER
From August to November, I taught high school English alongside a few roosters who lived in a coop in the courtyard outside my first-floor classroom. Hatched in an incubator in the science department in the spring of 2022, the roosters became, during these few months, the most vocal sentient beings at my school.
I became increasingly drawn to their circadian rhythms — their internal clock that helps them self-regulate — because I’m watching my students lose theirs.
When students are on social media apps, their eyes glaze over like kids who’ve eaten too much sugar. They’re bombarded with a constant scroll of advertisements that are indistinguishable from the videos they watch. They become unreachable to those around them, strangers to their own selves, anxiously waiting to get back to their apps. This mode of being — or not being — contradicts the very purpose of education.
The students named one of the roosters Tyrone. Opinions about him were mixed. One teacher suggested Tyrone become the new mascot of our school “since it’s all anyone talks about.”
Some days, it seems the world students are tuned into is a simulation on the apps streaming through their phones, watches and laptops rather than the world teachers are trying to create for them. It doesn’t seem to matter if a cellphone policy exists.
Several parents email me with great concern asking if their kid is focusing in class. Other parents continue to text and call their kids during the school day.
“Parents are worse than we are with social media,” one student told me recently when her mother texted her during class.
Of course, moments exist when we do have meaningful discussions, when students are present with themselves and with each other.
You can tell they feel better when they’re off the apps, that deep in their hearts and souls they can sense the human connection they’re not getting from social media. You can see it in their body language, how they lean in toward each other and their eyes become fully alive.
That’s why Tyrone’s annoying yet reliable wake-up calls oddly comforted me. They stood in stark contrast to what I see happening in the classroom.
I worry that as time goes on, our students will become even more dissociative, lured more deeply into social media loops with no beginning and no ending to the scrolling, no circadian rhythm, no internal clock that tells them what is real and what is not, when to start and when to stop.
We teach with an awareness of the increasing mental health crisis among youths. The statistics are all around us.
It’s certainly not their fault. They want to do well in school. I’m proud of them, but for what? For maintaining a desire to learn despite the constant messages they get to update their TikTok app or to start using ChatGPT so they don’t have to take school seriously?
It is difficult to imagine — impossible, really, even to fathom — how hard it is for them to stay off the apps in school. They didn’t create this mess. But who will clean it up? If there’s a lesson to learn here, I’m worried we’re missing it.
Last month, our school decided the roosters needed another home. A teacher agreed to bring them to a friend’s farm several hours away. On Tyrone’s last day, I walked to his coop to say goodbye. I crouched on my knees as Tyrone walked toward me. He stuck his yellow beak out of the chicken wire. “Just give me one more cock-a-doodledoo,” I whispered.
I was begging a rooster. It was a pathetic scene. He let out a screech inches from my face and then walked away. His crowing was poignant. It was also a wake-up call. Are we listening?
Liz Shulman teaches English at Evanston Township High School and in the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University.