YETMO

“We Are All Children At Heart”

It was time again to be a substitute co-teacher at a school in my neighborhood. This day, I was to help with the Kindergarten classes.

If you’ve read my Second Grade Teachers Are Saints article, you know I’m not your most stellar primary elementary school teaching candidate. But I’m retired, interested in education, and such endeavors offer me one way to give back to society, and also to learn. Learn about our educative practices. Learn about myself.

So, I was very excited about an exercise we had planned in Math for the five Kindergarten classes. The children were to count a large number of “Blaster Bar wrappers” (maybe some teachers know about this book). It was designed to help them understand ones, tens, and hundreds.

It was simple – and fun. Kids would receive a few ‘wrappers’ from the large pile and mingle among each other (Kindergarteners like that. Come to think of it, we all do, don’t we?) so they could accumulate 10 wrappers to place in a “bundle.” Once 10 bundles were aggregated, they were immediately secured with a rubber band and placed in the hundreds bag. Once the exercise was over, the children knew how many wrappers there were by recording the number of packages in the hundreds, tens, and ones bags.

What was so much fun was observing the social dynamics of children communicating with each other to gather and tabulate wrappers. Although the five classes arrived at three different totals, which was predictable and amusing enough, their interactions provided the greatest insights.

Despite knowing that the task was for the ‘class’ to accurately calculate the total number of wrappers, the children couldn’t help themselves. Many (most?) were reluctant to part with their booty. They wanted others to give to them, so that they could deliver the prescribed ten-pack to the teacher, as if there were some intrinsic value in that task.

Some children were quite determined. One child, who was given only one wrapper, was unwilling to provide it to others. He wanted his classmates to give him another nine so that he could proudly present his teacher with his prize. In short, the children were much slower at giving tickets than receiving them. I’ll call this phenomenon the inverse “Golden Rule Corollary.” It is not better to give than to receive. Receiving wins hands down.

Of course, yours truly wasn’t about to let the significance of this exercise remain in Kindergarten class. I needed to globalize it. It reminded me of how similar, at the core, adults and children really are. Many (most?) adults are unwilling to part with their belongings and lavish them on others. There’s a normal conservation mindedness. Why relinquish what I have? Maybe I’ll need it later. Even if the task is clearly neutral relative to possessing versus releasing, many of us have a hard time doing so.

Yes, kids and adults are very similar. Except for paying bills, procreating, and driving cars, I wonder what are our material differences. Sure, maturity enters the picture over time and transforms some outward behaviors, but at our core, it seems as though we are ineluctably human from our earliest years until we pack up our earthly bags and head to other known (or unknown) eternal destinations.

You can sure learn a lot about life – and yourself – by watching little children.