It was Tuesday morning. I was up at the blackboard teaching a Science lesson to a class of high school students. Suddenly the telephone rang.
This was a new school building and the classroom telephone was part of the public address/intercom system. The main speaker of the public address (PA) system was in the ceiling tiles directly over the centre of the classroom. The telephone ring sounded just like the school bells or the fire alarm. It was a loud, annoying, electronic, siren sound that came out of the main speaker and often startled at least some of the people in the room.
As the students in the back row were stretching and looking around - now that they had been suddenly awakened - I walked over to the telephone on the wall in a corner of the classroom. The little display on the front of the telephone indicated that it was the school principal who was calling. Well I guess I had better answer it if I want to keep my job.
The principal asked which grade I was teaching. I answered him. He then told me to send a hardy male student to his office.
At this point a militant women's libber might have argued with the school principal. "What is wrong with female students? Why can't I send a female student? Are you prejudice against females?"
Throughout the early part of my teaching career there had been militant women libbers teaching in the classrooms on all sides of mine. I heard every one of their protests. The arguing, the yelling, the crying, the frustration, and occasionally the squeal of success when some male administrator gave in and let them have it their way. Often the squeals of success were later replaced by grunts and groans as the female teachers and their female students found they had been left to lift or move something that was just too big and heavy for them.
I looked around my classroom and quickly realized why the school principal had asked specifically for a "male" student. There sat his daughter in the front row of the classroom. A smart student. She probably had all of the notes written down from the blackboard. Under normal circumstances, if I was asked to pick any student to send to the office I may have chosen her.
I understood why the principal may not want his own daughter sent to the main office of the school today. Once she got there she would probably start to mooch. She would have no fear in just serving herself any food, candies or drinks she found there. She would be into the principal's desk looking for any unique pencils, pens or other items that she might fancy. She might ask the principal for his wallet and the keys to the school bus so she could take all of her friends to the local convenience store during recess to buy pop and chips. She was just a normal teenager who behaved like any one of us might behave if we had grown up spending all of our weekends and evenings playing inside the school as our parents worked.
Yes, I fully understood why the school principal did not want his own daughter sent to the school office. He was a busy man and did not need the distraction of a family member being present as he tried to get his work done.
I looked around the classroom and told one of the fellows waking up in the back row that he was wanted in the Principal's Office. Now for most students that might spark a bit of fear in them as they wondered if they were in trouble for something. But not this fellow. He was as big as King Kong! Even when he got into trouble or someone was angry with him no one would ever dare yell, scream, or say anything nasty to him. He was just too big and strong. Whenever teachers wanted to modify his behaviour they spoke very meekly to him and used the word "please" a lot. He knew from experience that whenever he was being summoned to the school's main office it was usually because they needed his muscles to lift something, or they needed his height to reach something. He found it difficult to sit squeezed into the small student furniture of the classroom so he would appreciate having the chance to go for a walk.
As the big fellow left I resumed teaching the Science lesson and the students gradually resumed their previous behaviour of either paying attention or dozing off toward sleep.
By the time that we had all forgotten about the telephone call the big fellow wandered back into the classroom. Between his thumb and index finger he was holding one leg of a dead bird. The bird hung upside down from his hand. As he approached me at the front of the room he lifted the bird up high and slowly swung it back and forth to make sure that all of the students saw it.
You can imagine how the students reacted seeing the dead bird. Female students always seem to over react in such circumstances. At one extreme there are the macho female students. The ones who will try to pretend that they are remaining calm and cool. They act as if nothing bothers them - unless of course the dead bird gets too close or is dropped on their notebook! At the other extreme are the feminine female students. The ones who will scream or squeal. Historically they used to faint or become paralyzed by fear. Today they are more likely to lift their arms or books up in front of their heads to protect themselves as they try to back away. As for the male students, there is an immediate response of feeling disgust at having a dead bird swung slowly across in front of your face. Beyond that, the males tend to suppress any immediate feelings, thoughts or response as they wait to see what is going to happen next. Many male students tend to become distracted by the reactions of the female students - which they find entertaining. Thus the males will be pointing and laughing at the most extreme female responses rather than focussing their attention and reacting themselves to the gory spectacle of a dead bird dangling at the front of the room.
The big fellow put the bird down in front of me on the teacher's science experiment demonstration counter that runs across the front of the room a meter from the blackboard. I immediately went to the science equipment storage room located behind the blackboard and found a large zip lock food storage bag. I returned to the classroom and we put the bird into the bag.
When the students began asking where the bird came from I suggested that the bird may have flown into one of the school windows and broken its neck. The principal had sent a janitor to my classroom with a bird that had died that way the previous semester. The big fellow corrected me saying the bird had been road kill, meaning that the bird had died after flying into a collision with a moving car or truck on the highway.
When we later dissected the bird we found a large open wound and scraped skin covering an area about 2.5 cm x 2.5 cm (1 inch x 1 inch) on the birds lower abdomen just in front of the legs. The wound is hidden by feathers in our pictures. The wound is large enough that the bird may have lost a lot of blood and some internal organs through the wound either during the impact with the vehicle or immediately afterward.
At the end of the period I took the dead bird down to the Home Economics room and placed the zip lock bagged bird in a refrigerator. I then silently prayed that no cooking class or community group using the kitchen would find the dead bird and freak out.
On Thursday afternoon, just after lunch, I returned to the Home Economics room to retrieve the dead bird. There was a junior high class in the room receiving instructions from their teacher just before they started cooking. I walked over, opened the refrigerator, and pulled out the zip lock bag with the dead bird in it. I held the bag at arms length in front of my chest and quickly walked past the class of sitting students. At first the students did not know what I was carrying inside the zip lock bag. But as I walked out the classroom door I heard one of the students exclaim "It's a dead bird!"
That afternoon I let the students in my high school Science class dissect the bird.
The bird is actually a robin, which is a very common bird probably across most areas of southern Canada and northern United States. The robin is characterized by having a red or orange coloured chest. It is a common sight to see half a dozen or more robins down on the ground searching for earthworms and bugs in the grass surrounding peoples' homes. The birds will fly up into a tree if a cat or other danger is spotted.
Prior to the dissection the students spent two quick lessons working with plastic models and studying diagrams of human anatomy. In the pictures that follow you will notice some students are using computers and the internet to search for diagrams, photos and information on dissecting a bird. The previous semester the students in one of my classes found some information in our collection of school textbooks and on the internet about high school students dissecting earthworms, grasshoppers and frogs. We did not find any information in our school textbooks or on the internet about how to dissect a bird and identify the parts of bird anatomy.
Photographs
The following pages contain photographs of high school students at Wacihk Education Complex in Pakwaw Lake, Saskatchewan, Canada dissecting the bird. The school is operated by the Shoal Lake Cree First Nations band.
