That Ain’t No Mountain Dew

By Beth | August 16, 2013 |

The LORD looks down from heaven on the children of man, to see if there are any who understand, who seek after God. Psalm 14:2

She’s gone so I can brag on her. Every year my sister and I would go the beach for a couple of days and (as anyone knows who knew her) she would talk. Mostly, I think she used the time to decompress from her school year where she had taught kindergarten for about thirty years.

One year she told me she wanted to write a book about her teaching experiences before she died. Though death got here before she could do it, she even had a title chosen.

Some years ago she took her kindergarten class and a few parents as chaperons on a field trip. They stopped for a picnic lunch where the kids were given sodas to drink. She did a check as the kids were getting onto the bus repeatedly making the point that there were to be No Sodas On The Bus!

After they had been on the road for a little while she looked down at the floor and there it came — a little stream of yellow liquid coming toward her front row seat. She stood up, put her hands on her hips (kindergarten teacher style), and said, “I said there were to be NO sodas on this bus!”

As soon as the sentence was out of her mouth, a little boy stood up at the back of the bus and he said, “Miss Emerson, that ain’t no Mountain Dew!”

It seems that one of the chaperons had to go to the bathroom so she just slid off the seat (where she was sitting with kindergartners all around her) and positioned herself to go on the floor!

Now, this story really doesn’t leave a bad impression about anyone in the school. But many of the stories she told were far more eye opening to what has happened to the school as an institution. At her retirement party I sat and listened to other teachers in their fifties and older lament what has happened in their classrooms. The bottom line is that they are not able to teach the children to think or to discover. There are so many requirements for the standardized testing that there is no freedom in the classroom. They clearly miss it.

There are also new “understandings” of behaviors and discipline that have these older teachers (and maybe a few younger, they were not well represented in the conversation) horrified at what children are allowed to do and say to a teacher with no repercussions. There are kids who are learning at an early age to “work the system”. My sister (and many of the teacher’s I heard that day) tried to stay “under the radar” and teach the kids as much as she could without caving into to new ideology she saw as preventing children from thinking and moving forward. How sad it is to need to stay under the radar in order to teach something worth learning.

The flip side of this is that our children in public schools today are being taught to obey a list of rules set for them and to just stick with the program. When they fail to do so they are punished with suspensions and expulsions for offenses that were considered teaching opportunities by the teachers of my sister’s generation.

For instance, I read an article today that gave examples of how the schools have become little more than prisons for the kids as they are taught to tow a line of thinking that will keep them from challenging anyone else’s thinking or actions. The article seemed a little “over the top” to me until I read all the examples of punishments for things that twenty years ago would have been forgiven or treated with some compassion and understanding. (Example, grabbing your father’s lunch bag with a paring knife in it to slice up his apple instead of your own lunch, the punishment? The young lady was referred to the police, who in turn charged her with a Class 1 misdemeanor for possessing a “sharp-pointed or edged instrument on educational property.”).

This may not seem like a relevant post from someone who wants to teach the Word of God. But it is most relevant for future generations of children whose parents want to raise them in the fear and admonition of the Lord. That is clearly not happening in our public schools. If you have to send them in there – make sure you fight for the “Mrs. Emerson’s” who are still out there, the ones who would rather think a yellow stream in a bus is Mountain Dew than assume the worst of her students.