Grey's Journal:
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In order to do so, I sent a history of my life, including all the places I've lived for the past five years, to the Criminal Record Bureau. Then I waited nervously as the English police called who-knows-what crime/terrorism agencies in the US and poked around in my life. Eventually the CRB sent me a letter, with boxes for various crimes, `arson,' `grand theft auto,' and `assaulting the Queen'. In each was printed `NONE RECORDED' which, though allowing me to temporarily work with children, sounds awfully like the CRB knows I've done illegal things but can't prove it. Yet. My first day with the primary school kids was in the basement gymnasium of a Large Oil Corporation which was sponsoring an `educational experience'. Really a sort-of field day for schools. The lesson plans were about renewable energy, but the real message to the children was `Large Oil Corporation loves you!' During preparation the day before, our instructor emphasized several times that we should mention Large Oil Corporation by name as concerned about the environment. Our instructor also gave each of the King's College students shirts emblazoned with the company logo to wear. I made it a goal not to mention Large Oil Corporation by name to the kids. On the morning of the event, I paused to gather all my knowledge of children. It didn't take long. Perhaps children, I thought, are little savages yet unschooled in the ways of civilized society. I imagined them circling around me with Crayola Crayons sharpened into crude weapons while I wielded a flaming torch yelling ``Back! Get back!'' Images like this are an indication of my ignorance of children. The local branch of my family tree is disinclined to reproduction. Between my parents and their three siblings, I am the only child. No sisters, brothers or nth degree cousins, where n is a single digit integer. While growing up I was simply the shortest of adults sitting at the dining room table and, unlike the dog who also rated herself this way, my parents treated me as an adult. My first tangential experience with children didn't come until college. On my first day of college (and his first day of work) one of my physics professor's wife gave birth to a baby girl. He often brought her into the department, where she played among industrial electromagnets, plasma chambers and the particle accelerator. She even proctored my final examination. Nothing keeps students quiet during a test like a sleeping baby on the front desk. It was with great interest I watched her grow over the next four years and I asked many questions of her father that a college student should have known the answers to: ``When will she start talking?'' ``Why does she want to eat everything?'' ``Does she know who you are?'' ``When will she stop floundering helplessly around and start walking?'' Because of my interest, the professor offered me a babysitting position, which I forcefully turned down. My wholly serious reason was, `I might accidentally kill her'. Strangely, my fear of babysitting wasn't related so much to the actual death of the baby, but having to explain to the parents how she ended up in the washing machine. This meager experience of watching a baby grow over four years of college was the closest I came to interacting with a ten-year-old child. So, the fear of unintentional death rose in my mind as I tried to imagine what my day would be like with the ten-year olds. I feared that after I handed out marbles for a demonstration, some misunderstanding of my instructions would lead the children entrusted to my care to swallow the marbles in unison -- like a suicide cult -- leaving me to explain why mine was the only workstation with thirty dead bodies cluttering the floor. The only thing I had in my mind as I waited for the children to show up was a determination not to speak to them as children. I would not patronize them by raising my voice and speaking slowly. This is the sort of thing only a person with no real experience of children could think. I soon discovered that the concentration required not to raise the pitch of my voice when talking to a child simply isn't worth it. It's like trying to talk to my dog in a normal voice: I can't look into that cute face, behind which sits that tiny brain, and still speak in my normal way. When we ran through the demonstrations with the Large Oil Corporation representative the day before, I was worried. The demos seemed either way too complicated or way too simple for what I guessed (based on almost nothing) was the cognitive ability of a ten-year old. The first demonstration involved setting up a simple circuit using solar panels. Using wires, they could connect the panels to various items like a motor, a buzzer and light bulb. Some items required two solar panels, some items should be done in a series circuit, some in parallel. It seemed complicated for a little kid. In the second demonstration, I was to give the kids a huge sheet of cardboard, some paper, scissors and tape and instruct them to build a race track for a marble. When they were done, I'd prop up the racetracks, and the marble that took the longest time to reach the bottom would win. This I thought would bore them into a scotch-tape-and-scissors-wielding rebellion. But, much to my surprise, when my group arrived I discovered that everything in the whole wide world is interesting when you're ten. The kids hooked together the circuits or they didn't, but they all seemed involved with the task, regardless of their ability to perform it. The marble track demo proved amusingly beyond their abilities, but again they seemed to enjoy themselves, building all manner of improbable race tracks. It was strange to be on the other side of the educational experience, giving out instructions and information while waist-deep in children calling me `Sir' and wrongly assuming I was a qualified professional. Fortunately, ten is an age apparently too young to recognize incompetence. The kids noticed my accent right away, so most times as I tried to explain something to an individual child, she would interrupt me: ``Are you American?'' ``Yes.'' ``I've never met an American before. Where are you from?'' ``New York.'' ``That's where Friends is. You got to see the shows before we did. That wasn't fair.'' ``I didn't watch Friends.'' ``But you're from New York. They're Americans just like you.'' ``Perhaps that's why I didn't watch it.'' ``What are you doing in London?'' ``I like it here.'' ``Why? England's rubbish. America looks great. Why would you leave?'' This is a question I have enough difficulty explaining to adults, so I would do my best to divert the child back to her work, but soon I would have the same conversation, word-for-word, with the child next to her. I was surprised at the attention my accent garnered with the children, as I am now used to being nothing special among London's cosmopolitan populous. The way these children liked me right away for no better reason than my foreign nationality was the sort of attention I expected to get from people my age when I first moved here. Instead of being instantly popular, the way foreigners are in the US, I got comments like, ``Well, I don't mind your accent.'' When I mentioned this to an English friend, he responded in the stereotypically dry style: ``The kids think Americans are cool because they're too young to know better.'' At 3:00 PM, the kids packed up and disappeared out the door with their teachers as the other King's College students and myself cleaned up the gymnasium and organized a trip to the pub. On our way there, we passed one class of the kids waiting for their bus. They called and waved at us as though we were important people. As none of them had died under my watch, I counted the day as a success. |
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Copyright © 2004 Wellington Grey  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. |
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