In The Eyes Of The Beholder

I have my 5 year old son enrolled in what is called a “Homeschooling Program.” What that means is that I teach him the fundamentals and anything else I want at home and he has the option of attending educational workshops with other children in the program 2-3 times a week. It’s all run by my school district so the whole thing is free. That’s advantage number one. The second advantage for me is that while my son is very advanced in some areas he is also a bit behind in others which makes both skipping him ahead and holding him back a practical impossibility. So this allows me to hand tailor a curriculum that works for his learning needs.

However some families signed up for an entirely different reason, mainly that since it is a homeschooling program it is the only so called public school in which you can fully integrate religious studies into the curriculum. This little detail makes for an interesting mix of students. We have everything from Atheists to Evangelical Christians. We also have a very religious Hindu boy and the son and daughter of our local Rebbe. Rebbes are rabbis except more so. Think long beard, dark clothes and a hat and you pretty much have an accurate visual.

So last week right before Spring Break I took my son to the beginning Spanish workshop. It was his first time attending this particular workshop so I decided to stay and see how it turned out. The teacher wanted the kids to color a worksheet in accordance with the written directions (which were predictably written in Spanish). She held it up high for the whole room to see and then zoomed in on the small Star Of David pendant around my neck before glancing at my son, the Rebbe’s children, and the Hindu boy. A little extra color crept into her cheeks.

“This is the worksheet,” she said quickly. “Now some of you may feel a little put off by it since it’s a picture of an egg and a bunny and...well…we all know bunnies are mammals and they obviously don’t lay eggs.”

She glanced again at the Rebbe’s children and cleared her throat. “This picture is a celebration of spring. Spring is about new life and that’s what an egg represents and the bunny...well bunnies are sometimes born in the spring! So it’s symbolic.”

One of the young children tentatively raised his hand. “It’s an Easter Egg.”

“NO!” She looked at me but I couldn’t meet her eyes---I knew if I did I’d start cracking up. She cleared her throat for the second time and continued. “It’s not an Easter egg. It’s a colorful egg, that’s all. Eggs come in all kinds of colors.”

A second grader shook her head. “I don’t think any of the eggs in nature have flowers printed on the side of them.”

“Probably not, but we don’t know for sure.” The teacher was getting redder by the second. “For instance, nobody knows what color the dinosaur eggs were because dinosaurs have been extinct for millions of years!”

“Nuh-uh,” said the Evangelical boy. “The earth has only been around for like 5000 years.”

“That’s not true!” my son cried and then looked at me for verification.

I smiled and bent over him pretending to kiss his cheek while hissing “Let it drop.”

“But it looks like an Easter egg,” the first child said, now genuinely confused. “There’s a basket in the background and everything.”

"Yeah," said another kid, "and that's not a normal bunny. I mean, he's really, really big. If it's not the Easter Bunny then there's something wrong with him."

“It’s not an Easter egg and it's not the Easter bunny." The teacher's desperation was palpable. “But if you think it looks too much like an Easter egg and you don’t want to color it you can color something else—it’s just going to take me a few minutes to come up with something.”

This appeased everyone and the kids had a great time coloring their perspective worksheets. It’d be easy for me to chastise the teacher for not considering the strong beliefs of the children who made up her class but to be honest I think she just had a “blonde moment.” The worksheets were left over from years past and she thought it would be nice to put them to some use. It didn’t work out exactly the way she planned but it did provide me with some great writing material.

Kyra Davis
www.kyradavis.com
Sex, Murder And A Double Latte---May 2005