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.
