ALL I REALLY NEEDED TO TEACH, I TAUGHT IN KINDERGARTEN

By Jerry D. Rose

As a retired sociology professor, l thought perhaps I had taught college students a thing or two over the course of a 35 year teaching career. It now appears to me that I never really taught anything until last week when I read a book to a class of kindergarteners with an Altrussa program for reading volunteers. The book I read was Horton Hears a Who, a Dr. Seuss book from 1954 which was filmed as a movie last year and featured the voices of Jim Carrey and Carol Burnett.

In the ten-minute “discussion” with these children that followed the reading, I had the sense that I was involved in an actual teaching moment that rarely occurred in my “professional” career of attempting to contribute something to the human consciousness in that rarified group of 18-21 year old pre-adults known as college students, and also known for their self-absorption and lack of curiosity in anything beyond their own private worlds and that of their peers, or anything that would allow them to get ahead by their performance on a test in the course. (Will this be on the exam? If not, why bother with it?)

Kindergarten kids are different; an exaggeration of the restlessness and curiosity-on-steroids that actually drove me from an early public school teaching career, though I never attempted anything more challenging than seventh graders. Although it was not required by our reading “program,” their regular teacher did not stop me, so I proceeded to try to develop a couple of “lessons” with the children and, course being the “activist” that I pretend to be, the lessons I tried to “teach” from Horton were those with an activist slant.

Just to review the plot for the unaware, Horton the elephant happens upon a speck of clover blossom that, he learns by surprise, contains in microscopic form the whole town of Whoville (the same from which the Grinch stole Christmas) and begins communicating with them, after which kangaroos and monkeys come along and ridicule him for his apparent insanity, roping and caging him and giving the Whoville speck to a bird who deposits it in a whole field of clover. When Horton retrieves the town by heroic effort and continues his talking with its inhabitants, the animals threaten to boil the speck in a pot of stew and Horton urges them to make enough noise that they can at least be heard if not seen and thus save their town but, to no avail, the animals can’t hear. Finally. in desperation, the Mayor of Whoville searches through the town and finds a boy silent and playing with a yo-yo, and urges him to join the chorus of noise and that “last one voice” was sufficient to make the Whovillians heard and save their town.

Wow, is this some morality play for the world today! We Americans are the kangaroos and monkeys who, absorbed with our own “exceptional” existence, cannot be bothered to hear the cries of anguish of people in Gaza; hell, it’s hard enough just to keep our homeless folk in tent cities out of our sight. We in the “progressive” community can shout our hearts out for peace, justice and economic sustainability, the kangaroos and monkeys just can’t hear, and continue to rain down terror by drone air attacks on Pakistan as our way of fighting the “war on terror.” Couldn’t we have learned anything in kindergarten? Did the bin Ladens and Obamas and Gordon Browns of the world even go to kindergarten? If they did, did they learn anything?

Where Seuss really hits activists in the face, however, is in that dread image of the shirker, the one who plays with his yo-yo in sublime ignorance or indifference to the fate of his community. The symbolism here is obvious. The alternative press has been filled as late with those who lament that the anti-war movement seems to have gone into a shirking hibernation with the election of an “anti-war” President, as more people have gone back to their “yo-yo” concerns, and have even joined the consumerist crowds who treat the President and his family as “celebrities” and, with the fate of the world hanging in the balance as the G 20 powers meet in London, allow the media to define for them a “yo-yo” interest in whether Michelle Obama did in fact touch Queen Elizabeth in a royally “inappropriate” way.

Did I “teach” this lesson of civic responsibility in my “teaching moment” with the 5-year-olds? Of course not; but I feel that in those few minutes I could at least begin the process of children beginning to think and act in a civically responsible way. Did you ever see somebody who was crying in pain and nobody paid attention to him or her? Hands shoot up! Yes, followed by a sometimes tortuous description of what they saw and what they did about it. Maybe they learn that “brother’s keeper” lesson in kindergarten or maybe they don’t, but I think Robert Fulghum was right that everything he learned he learned in kindergarten. My feeling was that the children’s “real” teacher was somewhat removed from the scene of my “teaching”; she sat and seemed to have been removed from my attempted teaching moment, and I don’t blame her for that. Maybe she was getting a moment of much-needed rest from the stress of trying to manage the kids’ frequent requests to go to the bathroom and their periodic episodes of not “paying attention.” Probably, like all teachers in Florida and probably everywhere else in America, she was focused on the survival need of herself and that of her school to “produce” test score results in the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Tests, which have plenty of tests of reading, arithmetic and maybe writing, but none for the quality of the lessons in civics and human decency that children either do or don’t learn as they navigate the obstacle course known as the school curriculum.

In the last analysis, my real feeling of empathy is for those no matter how small people, the “real” 5-year-olds, whose whole school career lies ahead of them and where, at every turn, their Whoville exuberance, curiosity and joie de vivre will be “trained” out of them as their “education” is ignored; so by the time they get to be college students (the only kind I dealt with all those years) they could blow their katoosies and ompapas until the cows came home and no one would notice that, under all the yo-yo nonchalance and studied composure of a “cool” collegiate life, there was anything of what they might have learned in kindergarten still there for the Hortons and the kangaroos and monkeys of what passes for the “adult” world to see and hear.

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Jerry D. Rose – Editor, The Sun State Activist