Opinion: What a rooster taught me about my social media-numbed students

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. At first, I was annoyed by his constant crowing. 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.

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.

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.

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-doodle-doo,” 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. ©2023 Chicago Tribune. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.