Cool kids
by Jon Worley
Let me tell you a story I know nothing about. The details are courtesy of my wife, Barbara. A couple weeks ago, a reporter at her paper wrote a story about how one first-grade class celebrated the local Hispanic Awareness week. The class attended a speech by the mayor and viewed other refinements, and in his story the reporter focused on the fact that the kids seemed to be more interested by the colorful flags they held than by any of the silly speeches.
In other words, a cute story about kids. My personal take was that with proper preparation (read: teaching), the kids might've enjoyed the official proceedings a bit more. I thought the reporter was taking a few liberties by assuming that all the kids we're goofing off. The school board also got hacked, though for a completely different reason. That august authority thought the story made their district look bad (there are eight school districts within a five-mile radius from my house), and so they whined.
A microcosm of why schools suck around here, really. Just down the road in Spring Grove, the school board isn't allowing a soccer league to use its fields before noon because "the kids should be in church". Even with the recent friendlier attitude toward church and state, I can't see any way this rationale works in court. And it's not like the Spring Grove school board is doing anything to help its schools, which are considered to be among the worst in the county.
That's tangential, really. Ever since I could distinguish between adults and children, I've been struck by how the older crowd consistently underestimates the potential of kids. Have you ever said something like "My three-year-old programmed the VCR. I thought we'd have blinking twelve o'clock forever."? Well, you're guilty, too. Kids are generally brighter than adults, because they refuse to recognize the words "don't" and "can't". It's amazing what a kid can do when he isn't told his goal is impossible. Yes, you can beat a chess grandmaster, particularly if you're single-minded about it (and kids are much better than adults at focusing on one thing).
I'm still quite cognizant of the patronizing attitude most folks my age have toward kids. Maybe that's why children in grocery stores stare at me. Of course, it simply could be that I stare back at them, seeing who blinks first. Kids love that. So do I.
All this aggravation probably comes from the fact that I still have a few childlike ways prancing about in my head. I don't like to restrict my options, and I prefer to think of an original way to solve a problem. This makes my behavior somewhat unpredictable at times, which is all the more disconcerting because most of the time I can be counted on to act in an increasingly dull and dronelike fashion. But people remember those flashes of weirdness, and I've often been called an overgrown child and other stuff like that.
Such references are intended to be at least mildly chiding, but I take them as high compliments. I have appropriated certain adult ways of thinking (seeing situations in shades of gray, not black and white, for example), but I constantly challenge myself and generally like to cut against the grain, both very much extensions of my adult child (is that a psychological term?).
Now, if I had been one of those first graders, I would have actually listened to the mayor and offered a running critique of his banalities to my classmates. This might have seemed to an outsider like I wasn't paying attention, but in fact, the opposite would be true. Kids are bright and rather like to devote themselves to a cause. My brothers and I organized our entire school to vote for John Anderson in a mock election in 1980. We got so rowdy my two younger brothers found their guerrilla tactics banned in the lower grades (but apparently sixth graders could handle the hard stuff, because I escaped unscathed). We generated all this enthusiasm for a lost cause despite the fact that both of our parents (and the vast majority of parents in our part of town) were pretty emphatic about voting for Carter.
I think kids are more prone to greatness when they haven't figured out they're supposed to fail. In fact, I failed at many things when I was a kid, but nobody ever told me I should feel bad about it. And so, I still have that childlike boundless confidence. Not a bad attitude, even in an adult.
Despite entreaties from the in-laws, Jon Worley doesn't have any children upon whom to inflict his warped concept of parenthood. Maybe sometime after he leaves York, Penn.
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