As the nation welcomes the Year of the Rooster, Dashan Elementary School principal Hsu Ching-hung (徐慶宏) talked about teaching students about life and nature by raising chickens on campus.
Hsu, who is also the deputy convener of the nature education section of the Miaoli County Government’s public education advisory group, said he started using chicken-raising as an educational aid when he received a donation of live chickens from a professor of medical biotechnology when he was the principal at Daping Elementary School in Miaoli.
Hsu said he knew nothing about raising chickens at the time, but learned how to do so together with his students.
Photo provided by Hsu Ching-hung
Hsu said he had to convert his office into a hatchery with heat lamps one winter to keep the chickens warm when the weather turned cold.
To keep the school clean, students help with cleaning the coop and the campus every morning, he said.
Chicken excrement is collected to be added to the compost pile for the school’s vegetable garden, he added.
Many of the school’s students volunteer to help him first thing in the morning after arriving in school, and have found it to be a “happy” experience, especially when they see a chick hatching, he said.
Dashan Elementary School’s life education classes teach pupils in the lower grades to identify animals in their environment, and those in the higher grades to observe and understand animal behavior, such as feeding and mating, Hsu said.
Students at the school treat the chicks like their pets, while the birds also get used to human contact, Hsu said.
Interacting with chicks seem to have a calming effect on children, making them more sociable and well-behaved, he said.
The school’s chickens have plenty to eat, including feeds, leftovers, worms and bugs in the compost area near the coop, the principal said.
While the chickens at the various schools where he served as principal were never slaughtered for meat, their lives are not without risks, Hsu said.
For one, the chickens at Daping Elementary School were often threatened and sometimes killed by stray dogs, he said.
That prompted the students to build a dog-proof coop with the help of their carpentry teacher to protect the birds, Hsu said, adding that it became a teaching opportunity for math and science.
Birds of prey also often attack the chickens at Dashan, with the students once witnessing a hawk swoop down and kill a hen, Hsu said.
“The children were upset, angry and crying,” Hsu said.
The teachers were shocked, but it also compelled them to teach children about “death, which is part of life education,” Hsu said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater