When my youngest son was in Grade Two, there was an occasion for my wife and I to meet his teacher. We lived only two blocks away from the school, so the three of us waddled through the fallen sycamore leaves to his elementary school after our supper. The students first took their parents on a little prepared tour of the classroom before having a one on one session with the teacher.
The boy's teacher was a pleasant young Chinese woman and I remember that she smiled often and genuinely. When I asked her how our son was doing overall, she asked if she could tell us a little story of an event that had happened at the beginning of the year during the inaugural Show and Tell. My wife and I drew our chairs closer to her desk with great interest.
It seems that after a long parade of stuffed animals and action figures, it was my son's turn. He had brought one of his beloved books from home. It was called The Amazing Egg. There were audible groans of boredom and disapproval from the other children in the classroom. According to his teacher, my son first waited like Cicero and let the crowd revel in their derisive abandon.
After precisely the right delay, he stretched to his full three feet of height and in a strong clear voice asked them, “How many of you think that you came from an egg? Raise your hands.”
This riveted the teacher’s attention on both the audience and the young orator. The children laughed and hooted while keeping their hands lowered.
“How many of you think you didn't come from an egg? Raise your hands.” The children all vigorously and unanimously raised their hands.
The speaker cast his gaze across the room and said, “You're all wrong!”
He then explained from memory to a captive and silently intent audience, the reproductive cycles of every creature from sponges, to trees, to birds, to reptiles, to mammals in general and on to humans in particular.
The teacher told my wife and I that she wouldn't have dreamed of stopping him. According to her, about thirty children from at least a half dozen different ethnic and cultural backgrounds and believers in several distinct religions; all went home knowing much more of practical biology than they had that morning upon their arrival to school.
"And isn't that precisely the purpose of education?” she pondered out loud.
We three adults giggled as we contemplated the supper table discussions that must have ensued that special evening. After learning of that event, my reward for both my sons each and every report card was a trip to a good bookstore with no spending limit on a single volume of their own choice. I tossed a few Oxford dictionaries around our coffee table and then let nature take her course.
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