A pig puts a tan fox in a box.
The kids are sitting on the rug, reading a story from their first-grade textbook. The school is underperforming by NCLB standards, and thus everything has become obscenely structured in order to, somehow, raise their level of acheivement. This is "scripted instruction," where the teacher receives a piece of paper tracing out every word they're supposed to say, how every minute of classtime is going to be used up.
A pig can fit a wig in a box.
It's my mother's classrom, and she's never been one to follow the script, so while she gets the daily dose of standardization out of the way, I'm in the back tracing nursery rhymes onto pads of paper. These are second-language-learner students, who stare at me blankly when I start a rhyme like "Humpty Dumpty..."I write out "Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jump over the candlestick; Jack jump high, Jack jump low, Jack jumped over and burned his toe." On second thought, I draw a candlestick with a boy jumping over it in bright marker.
A pig can put a big hat in a box.
My pad of nursery rhymes is educational contraband here, as are the giant charts of songs which they sing in the mornings and the dozens of classic childrens books that were mine and my siblings' and now reside in this classroom. The rhymes these kids are supposed to learn are printed in their textbook; here's one for Chapter One: "If we do / All things together / All things can change / Even weather." Now, I admit, I have no idea how to fit four-and-twenty blackbirds into a pie, but it seems to make a lot more sense than that.
A lot can fit in a box!
The story is over, four pages later, and now for the questions. This story is labelled "Realistic Fiction," which confuses me, as I've never seen a pig put anything in a box, let alone a tan fox. What it should be labelled is "Plotless Phonics Stories," because that's what it is--a handful of short vowels and pairs of rhyming words. I have nothing against using phonics to get to meaning, but how much meaning can you get out of pigs and hats and foxes?
"How many things are in the box?" my mother asks.
"Four," the kids respond confidently.
She pauses at the universality of this answer; shouldn't it be three? "What are they?"
"A fox," the kids say, "a wig, a hat, a lot."
My mom and I look up and can't help but laugh. A lot in a box. Of course.
Then my mother tries to explain to them the principle behind a lot, without saying something as unintelligible as "quantity." I just sit in the back and trace "Hey Diddle Diddle" and smile wryly. Their logic is impeccable; lot is a three-letter word, like any other three-letter word to by rhymed and drilled and tested and accounted for. It's all phonics and memorization, very little meaning.
When they are out on the playground looking for meaning rather than inside examining pigs and boxes, though, they come up with such wonderful new coinages as "a muddly puddle." Non-standard, to be sure, but delightfully meaningful, showing that the kids are playing around with language and understanding what they are saying and bending the words to their intended meaning.
A phenomenon that, in school today, we don't see a lot.
