March 29

I now appreciate the meaning of the expression “running around like a chicken with its head cut off.” I am a killer. The slaughter of the chickens by grade 9 was today. After the other teacher demonstrated slaughtering a chicken, I had to demonstrate chicken #2. Luckily I didn’t cry in front of my students. (I was concerned that I might lose it. Some of you might remember the summer I got a job in a lab and after sacrificing some mice for an immunology experiment, I cried through my lunch break and then quit the job.) Anyway, no crying but it was pretty awful. I won’t go into too much detail, but in brief: I didn’t use enough force with the panga (small axe) and my chicken suffered more than necessary. I made the mistake of looking into the chicken’s eyes, then I felt really bad about slaughtering it. The other teacher was in charge of supervising the slaughtering, the dissection of the digestive system, and the removal of the feathers. I organized and supervised the cooking. There were 50 hungry kids and only a few healthy chickens made it to slaughter day, so there wasn’t a lot of meat for them to eat. I made some rice, too, with some onions and tomatoes. They said everything tasted good. I didn’t try it. I think it will be a long time before I have an appetite for chicken again. I like teaching this class, but I prefer taking care of the chickens to killing them.