Mary Brackenbury
Do you remember the Great Space Race?
If you were teaching then, you will also remember how Canada, along with other countries, was embarrassed into upgrading its science and math curricula with a view to creating a new generation of intellectual leaders. Overnight, it seemed, subject matter became secondary to the processes through which students were learning to think like scientists.
But if you were to ask my first class of Grade 6 students, now mature men and women with children of their own in school, what they remember from our process-driven science class, there is not a doubt in my mind that they would say: "Chickens."
In my efforts to make science a meaningful experience in learning process skills, I sought to combine the magic of life with the magic of spring—always a big event in northern Alberta—by having my students predict, measure, observe, interpret, analyze and evaluate their way to witnessing the wonder of newly hatched chickens. What could be better than that?
Of course, this meant finding an incubator and a home for the chicks to go to after our study, but I brushed these trivial matters aside. Begging an incubator from the high school was easy. Purchasing a dozen fertilized eggs from the hatchery was easy. Persuading a friend who ran a small farm to give the future chickens a home was reasonably easy. The project was ready to roll.
"You’re going to what?" our resident farmer-teacher asked in disbelief. "Don’t you know how much chickens smell? They stink!" he said, snorting. The home economics teacher thought I would be creating a class of future vegetarians. The principal gloomily observed: "The janitor isn’t going to like this one, that’s for sure."
The kids loved it and applied themselves with gusto, although the hatching seemed a long way down the road.
I was besieged by chicken-and-egg jokes from my colleagues. On the board in the staff room, one teacher wrote the question, "Why did the chicken cross the road?" People posted answers as famous authors would have. My favourite was Ernest Hemingway: "To die. In the rain. Alone."
The morning of the 21st day of incubation was epic. The tapping that signalled the beginning of the hatching process was soon joined by a chorus of faint but distinct cheeping as the babies worked their way out of their shells.
The first egg slowly gave in to its occupant’s incessant pecking, then another. Soon a dozen exhausted chicks rested under the heat lamp we had rigged up in the large aquarium that was to be their home. By mid-afternoon, the little bundles of cheeping fluff were ready to be held in eager hands.
The next day, small groups of children wheeled the babies from classroom to classroom, giving talks to various classes. Everyone in the school was enchanted with the newborn chicks, with the exception of our resident farmer and the janitor.
How quickly the chicks grew! We had to borrow larger and larger containers to house them, until in the third week we were forced to expropriate the large packing case used to deliver the tuba.
Finally we exhausted the process skills. The chicks were well on their way to becoming adults. They were going to my friend’s hobby farm as soon as the weather warmed up. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t sorry to see them go. They were beginning to smell, and the innocent baby charm they had radiated three weeks earlier was beginning to turn into gangling adolescence. Watching a chick step on the head of a sleeping neighbour, whose subsequent squawking awakened the whole flock into mindless babble, I thought, Chickens are definitely stupid.
My students shared my disenchantment the day our chickens staged the Great Eggscape. The children were quietly working on their assignments, accompanied by the omnipresent cheep-cheep-cheep from the big packing case at the front of the classroom. Suddenly, in a great flurry of noisy flapping, the box tipped over and the chickens flew out.
The first escapee landed on a boy’s head and dug in. Another got tangled in a mobile and hung there, making foolish noises. Yet another landed on a girl’s assignment and shat all over it. A fourth flew into the open drawer of a filing cabinet and set up housekeeping. And one earned itself immortality by flying directly at the principal, who had opened my classroom door to see what all the screaming was about. It perched on his shoulder, where it crowed the first cock-a-doodle-doo of its adult life and then deposited a watery calling card on the lapel of his beautiful new suit jacket.
I won’t bore you with an account of the early-spring blizzard that blew in the day before the chicks were to go to the farm (the first day of spring break). My friend wouldn’t be able to take them until the weather warmed. The only option was to house those beastly, noisy, smelly and by now flying-in-earnest birds in my basement for 10 days.
We only need to pass lightly over my family’s reaction to this new development. It didn’t help that we were preparing to move house in two weeks. With the cover of the box closed, we were able to contain the chickens most of the time. Nevertheless, my family and the neighbours rejoiced when the chickens finally went off to the farm.
Was the venture worth it?
I’ll always remember the look of wonder on the children’s faces as they listened to the cheeping of those about-to-be-born chicks, and the way they cheered the little things on as they hatched. Capturing the imagination—that’s the magic of science.
"Would you do it again?" the Grade 7 science teacher asked me when it was all over.
"No," I replied. "Next year we’re going to hatch ducks!"
Mary Brackenbury taught for 10 years with the Parkland School Division. She lives in Victoria, B.C.
