On Kids and Old-Timey Days

In one of the episodes of Alvin and the Chipmunks (not every day I get to start a sentence with that) that I watched at the age of eight or so, the Chipettes are being babysat by this old lady they don’t like because she’s strict and not “hip” enough for them. Although the Chipettes bitch about having to be with her and revolt against her every command, they finally find a common bond through song: it turns out the old lady liked music in her day, too, and the Chipettes and the old lady give a bouncy rendition of “I Wanna be Loved By You.” Moral of the story: even old-timey things can be fun.

I remember even as a kid cringing a bit at the awkward schmaltziness of that episode, but that’s not what really strikes me about it. About ten years after seeing that episode, I watched Some Like It Hot for the first time and was astounded to find that contrary to what the Chipmunks episode implied—-that "I Wanna Be Loved By You" was a saccharine piece of shit--it was in fact a seduction barely appropriate for kids (especially with the blush-inducing, practically see-through dress she’s wearing), making it way more badass than the Chipettes could ever make it seem.

Of course, Marilyn Monroe could even make the Happy Birthday song sound raunchy, and I haven’t heard the Helen Kane version, but I bet it’s more in line with the Chipettes’ and is probably actually the version the old lady knew and loved. But that’s beside the point. The creators of that episode chose that particular song—-out of all songs they could have chosen—-to represent the old-timey days, and they chose one of the dorkiest songs ever (if the Helen Kane version is, in fact, as dorky and obnoxious as the Chipettes’ version), making the “old-fashioned things are fun!” message all the more sugar-coated and unconvincing.

The fact that it’s apparently necessary to sugar-coat the old days to make them seem “more entertaining” is clearly because most kids are resistant to anything created prior to their birth. My sister vehemently refused to watch black and white movies until she was about eighteen. My brother has actually insisted on wanting to only watch something made in the last ten years. I have never been able to understand this, having never been resistant to anything from any age (except the Middle Ages—-they sucked!). It wasn’t a matter of having been more disciplined or tolerant, or even convincing myself that old-timey things could be fun—-it’s that I don't see them as "old-timey". Yes, they were from long ago, but I just see them as different as opposed to quaint and laughable. Because as much as external things change, human nature never does (at least not yet, Isaac Asimov). Therefore, if Marilyn Monroe singing “I Wanna Be Loved By You” was sexy as hell in the 50’s, it’s still sexy as hell now.

How is this different from the moral of the Chipettes? It’s the difference between some idiot saying “LEARNING CAN BE FUN!!” and dressing up a math book with all sort of colors and shit, and saying, no, I like my learning straight up, please. Because in that case, it’s the learning itself that’s fun—-not that all the crap around it is fun in spite of the learning. To me, the idiot saying “Learning is fun” actually serves only to convince me that learning is not, in fact, fun, as if it “protests too much”. Of course, I say this having grown up on Sesame Street and Square 1 TV, whose sole purpose is edu-tainment, but I suppose the difference is that they’re actually effective: they bury the hidden intention to educate so deeply and so skillfully that it feels more like an entertaining show that happens to include educational things-—because why not? The whole world is educational, really. Here’s an example: that famous thing on Sesame Street where they “Brought to you by the letter G” or some other number or letter. Strangely enough, I totally didn’t get that it was a parody until just recently when I happened to randomly think of it, but even if a kid doesn’t get that it’s a parody, they know that many shows say “brought you you by”, and this particular show happens to be brought to you by letters and numbers instead of products (hence this is also an example of Sesame Street’s extraordinary double-layering of humor for both adults and children—-as well as the fact that it’s, mercifully, public instead of commercial television. God, Sesame Street rules!).

I had to confront the horror of “Learning can be fun” head on when I was teaching the SAT to high school students.

The director of the program twice told me that according to the surveys they gave the kids, the area of teaching I was most deficient in was motivating the kids to learn (although even in that I still got about 4 points out of 5). My attitude was like, motivating them to learn is their own damn responsibility! Which is of course exactly why I failed to motivate them. The director’s suggestion to me to solve this problem was to make the class more fun. And I was like, it’s the SAT—-it’s fun already! (Hahaha.) Apparently the director’s concept of fun was doing word games like hangman with the vocabulary words for that week. And I was like, a) how can hangman teach anyone vocab?? and b) that’s not fun. Apparently I was the only one who thought b), because the kids actually did seem to enjoy it the most out of everything else we did. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to go through round after round of hangman (and other word games), bored out of my mind, and not because I was the teacher: I’m sure I would have felt the same way as a student, too.

As far as I can tell, by the time you get to the SAT, the time for fun is over. By that time, all you can do is really learn the test. It’s all the learning on the way to sixteen that can possibly afford to be fun, because fun takes time. I so badly wanted to take those kids to plays and get them listening to NPR and reading books on subjects they were interested in instead of random excerpts that were often snoresville even to me, but with a hundred vocab words a week to memorize and the test a semester away, we couldn’t afford to go the organic route, so hangman was all we had. (Not that learning a hundred vocab words a week is a great idea anyway or would really help you on the SAT. Surely there must be some pedogogical theory against it, like there is against cramming.)

I guess what I’m trying to say is that most kids hate the old-timey days and learning, and that this completely baffles me. I once had an argument with a kid I was tutoring over the necessity of algebra: you know, the age-old crap about how “I’m going to be a rock star; I’ll never have any use for algebra,” and while I gave him the age-old answer of “you never know,” all I was really thinking was “why wouldn’t you want to learn it just for fun?” I know this seems really goody-two-shoes, but that's exactly the problem I'm talking about: because authority figures ram learning down kids' throats, actually genuinely being interested in something is seen as being "goody-two-shoes". And since when did kids do things based on practicality, anyway? I bet that kid played video games hours a day, which (unless he wanted to be a video game designer) was just as useless to his supposed future career as algebra.

But here’s what I wish I could have said—-to him and the kids in the SAT classes: curiosity is a sign of intelligence. You are not curious—-in fact, extremely INcurious. This is a syllogism. But since you don’t know what that is and have no desire to find out, I guess you’ll never know what I meant by that.

(By the way, this essay would not pass muster for the SAT graders.)