Damn that Cat and his Stupid Hat (Week 10)

If there's ever an article on English literature that I would suggest to any audience, it's Louis Menand's Cat People and really, even if you just read the first three paragraphs and the very last, you've caught at least part of why I absolutely love this article.

We ask ourselves a few questions about Dr. Seuss's Cat in the Hat and Menand asks these questions as well: Where is the Mother? Why should we care about this cat? Who is this cat causing chaos and being a menace (not unlike Denis)? Admittedly, we ask ourselves these questions as adults about a variety of children's books and we do not necessarily get that answer. It makes me wonder, do the children reading this book ask themselves these questions?

This brings another line of questioning to mind: Is a child's curiosity innate or learned? Do the questions that they ask come from the adults around them or from themselves? I suppose this could be a question of nature versus nurture. Most people can agree that we are born curious: we try to touch and eat everything (our natural oral fixation stage), when we learn to crawl we want to get into every nook and cranny we can find, etc. It can be assumed that after that we learn whether it is okay to be curious and whether we should continue to be it.

We've seen in other pieces how curiosity can be treated. In Little House, Laura is just brushed off when she shows curiosity while in Roll of Thunder Hear my Cry, Cassie's questions are answered in usually vivid detail. Renea Arnold and Nell Colburn quote Bruce Perry (a neuroscientist) in their article on Children Curiosity (posted below):

" 'If children are restricted too much or told not to ask so many questions, their curiosity will diminish," notes developmental neuroscientist Bruce Perry in Early Childhood Today. 'The less-curious child is harder to teach because he is harder to inspire, enthuse, and motivate. A less-curious child will make fewer friends, join fewer social groups, and read fewer books.' "

If this is the only moment in their article we pay attention too, that is enough. We know Laura will eventually because less curious and Cassie will become more curious. So when we read books like Cat in the Hat to our children and they don't ask the same questions we do, maybe we should not only be encouraging their questions, but teaching them about the questions we have as well. 

And when one isn't equipped to be curious or doesn't have enough information, well the internet has the answer for that. The Teaching Children Philosophy website  is just one of the great websites where parents can learn what to ask their children about books. This may seem just about teaching philosophy, but the questions that are given, can help a child learn to ask these questions themselves. Even if they aren't asking the philosophical questions on their own, maybe they'll at least be asking the one question that's on my mind at least:

Who's more annoy that Damn Cat in his Stupid Hat 

or 

that Nosey Fish who's confined to his Dish?

More Links On Dr. Seuss:
The Cat in The Hat know A Lot
Dr. Seuss National Memorial
The Art of Dr. Seuss 
Teaching Children Philosophy- Cat in the Hat

More on Children's Curiosity:
Natural-Born Scientists: Children's curiosity about the world begins at birth 
Children's Need to Know
Children's Curiosity and Parental Attitudes (JSTOR)
How can we encourage creativity in today's children?

P.S. There are obviously a multitude of articles on how to teach or encourage curiosity to a child, I did not really post any, but if you're in need of some, just use Google and you'll find plenty to your liking.

Adult Writers: Teaching our Youth (Week 8)

First off, let me apologize for my rambling, maybe a bit off-kilter blog last week. After two 10-11 hour works days in a row and balancing the rest of the week, occasionally add up to really late night and spaced out blogging. Tonight might not be too much better: I've been fighting a migraine since last night and can't seem to shake this throbbing in my head. However, at least it won't be 3 AM, and baby, I'm not lonely.

Alright, enough with the 90s song references.

Like most of the literature we've read so far in my Senior Seminar course, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor is not the stereotypical children's book. When we think children's literature, we think Dr. Seuss and See Spot Run and The Bernstein Bears collections, but in reality, those aren't
really what children read and if we think about it, we know that. We all read books like Little House on the Prairie and  The American Girl book Collections. So why do these come to mind and not books like Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry which is focused on the racism in a small town?

Maybe it's because we see childhood as a world of innocence that we would rather not tarnish. All we want to see is Spot chasing after his ball, but children are looking for more in their literature. People writing for children understand this. Kelly McDowell states early on in her article ("Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry: A Culturally Specific, Subversive Concept of Child Agency"), that an "adult writer" instructs "the child how the adult world desires her to be" (Pg. 214) through their works. We discussed the same thing when it came to faery tales and it still rings true in modern works. We've seen it in Little House when Laura questions the world and is considered the bad one and Mary, who is subservient and quiet, is considered the good one.

I could point out in everything we've read that could children learn (including disembowelment and thievery), but in Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry I think children learn a much harsher lesson than in the other books. They learn the terror of racism in a descriptive and powerful manner. Men get burned to death and lynchings are barely avoided let alone the fact that children on the end of ugly teasing (harassment?) dig a ditch to trap a bus full of children in it. Through out this book violence and vulgarity seem to breed the same. The characters on either side of the race argument are tearing at one another in any way the kind in a small town civil war of sorts. These are hard things for children to handle and a part of me wonders what they take out of this book. Is it violence as an answer? Or do they see the destruction in the hate and seek out ways to handle society in a productive manner? I like to think the author is pointing out how the world shouldn't be, but will children take it that way?