So many things you don’t get the chance to explain...
We were going about our first-grader business, whatever that was, when our teacher went to the door for a little confab. She let in some other teacher, who set up a record player (like an iPod -- look it up) and started playing marching-band music.
Then in came a whole class of fourth graders. Single-file, they marched the perimeter of our room, pretending to play invisible instruments. When the music stopped, they marched out without a word, followed by their teacher. No one explained it at all.
It was one of the saddest things I’d ever seen.
First of all, fourth graders, pretending? That was our purview -- surely fourth graders were too old for our nonsense. Heck, they were practically grown-ups! Still, they hadn’t looked like they were being forced ...
Second, we’d played real instruments (my specialty was grabbing for the triangle) back in kindergarten. How was it that fourth graders weren’t allowed to have them?
Long after our class had moved on to, again, God-knows-what and then God-knows-something-else, I sat pondering the implications of that strange pseudo-performance.
It must be a matter of money, I thought -- so many kids, the school probably can’t afford an instrument for all of them. Surely we could remedy this, if we all put our heads together ... say, if everybody brought in whatever instruments they had lying around at home ...
Now, I knew we didn’t have any musical instruments lying around at my house. But maybe there was still something I could do to help, to kick this thing off ...
And that’s how I came to waggle my raised hand in the middle of some subject, get the teacher to call on me (she sounded a little impatient, God knows why) and, once I had their attention, volunteer to the whole class:
“I have a baton ...”
When everyone’s laughing at you, with the spluttering teacher standing ready to make some kind of point once the room dies down, you don’t get the chance to explain.
I surmised only many years later that it must have been a lesson on using your imagination.
Still, they really should have explained it.
We were going about our first-grader business, whatever that was, when our teacher went to the door for a little confab. She let in some other teacher, who set up a record player (like an iPod -- look it up) and started playing marching-band music.
Then in came a whole class of fourth graders. Single-file, they marched the perimeter of our room, pretending to play invisible instruments. When the music stopped, they marched out without a word, followed by their teacher. No one explained it at all.
It was one of the saddest things I’d ever seen.
First of all, fourth graders, pretending? That was our purview -- surely fourth graders were too old for our nonsense. Heck, they were practically grown-ups! Still, they hadn’t looked like they were being forced ...
Second, we’d played real instruments (my specialty was grabbing for the triangle) back in kindergarten. How was it that fourth graders weren’t allowed to have them?
Long after our class had moved on to, again, God-knows-what and then God-knows-something-else, I sat pondering the implications of that strange pseudo-performance.
It must be a matter of money, I thought -- so many kids, the school probably can’t afford an instrument for all of them. Surely we could remedy this, if we all put our heads together ... say, if everybody brought in whatever instruments they had lying around at home ...
Now, I knew we didn’t have any musical instruments lying around at my house. But maybe there was still something I could do to help, to kick this thing off ...
And that’s how I came to waggle my raised hand in the middle of some subject, get the teacher to call on me (she sounded a little impatient, God knows why) and, once I had their attention, volunteer to the whole class:
“I have a baton ...”
When everyone’s laughing at you, with the spluttering teacher standing ready to make some kind of point once the room dies down, you don’t get the chance to explain.
I surmised only many years later that it must have been a lesson on using your imagination.
Still, they really should have explained it.
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