That’s what a schoolyard rooster taught me

Liz Shulman, Tribune News Service

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 fascinated with them but not necessarily because they are roosters. Rather, 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.

One time, I asked my students if they were interested in counting the roosters’ cock-a-doodle-doos during class. I knew it was a silly assignment, but I hoped it would force their attention. Several students took turns drawing chicken scratches — a pun not lost on us — each time the roosters screeched, which turned out to be every 13 seconds. After 70 minutes, the rooters had crowed more than 300 times. The students got tired and understandably stopped.

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.” Someone else said he thought Tyrone was angry at everyone in the building. “Instead of screaming c ock-a-doodle-doo,” he texted me one morning, “I think he’s saying, ‘cock-a-doodle-(expletive)-you.’”

Other teachers saw Tyrone as a quirky extension of the classroom. “The rooster’s crowing puts an appropriate amount of exclamation on anything,” another teacher said, just as Tyrone screeched a cock-a-doodle-doo as if on cue to punctuate my colleague’s claim.

At first, I was annoyed by Tyrone’s constant crowing. When students were reading, writing or taking a test — which they rushed through to get back to their apps — Tyrone’s eruptions distracted them. “Can’t someone kill it?” one of my students said. “Thanksgiving is coming up.”

I laughed along with everyone else. But as time went on, my annoyance with Tyrone softened into an unlikely affection. I started to visit him in his coop. Up close, his brown and red feathers looked like velvet and stuck out on his backside like a Victorian-era bustle. His red comb and wattle were as bright as fresh strawberries. A few light brown feathers fanned out above his eye.

One morning, I got to school earlier than usual. Tyrone’s top-of-the-mornin’-to-ya cock-a-doodle-doo greeted me on cue. Roosters have an internal clock of about 23.8 hours, which is why they often crow just before sunrise, in tune with their own circadian rhythms, the internal clocks I see disappearing from students.

The students may be physically in the classroom, but it’s as if they’re overly sedated, on mute. Using the camera app like a mirror, they literally watch themselves dissociate.

Some days, it seems the world they 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. The amount of despair I see among teenagers is palpable.

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? Why should teenagers have to fight against the growing discourse that attempts to convince them that school doesn’t matter?