I Cannot Tell A Lie

There are many rewarding moments when working with children. Some of these include being a role model, watching them reach their goals, and seeing their faces when the light bulb finally goes on. One thing no one ever talks about is how completely blunt and truthful young kids are. Spending 3 hours a day, 5 days a week with a group of 25 1^st graders gives nothing but truthful comments. The great, and sometimes awful, thing about 6 year olds is they have no filter between what they think and what they say, providing some pretty priceless conversations.

A little girl in my class came up to me one afternoon and said, “Your hair looks like you just woke up.” That day, instead of slicking my hair back in a ponytail, I took the time to apply product and hairspray, embracing my natural curls. Apparently, 30 minutes of prep time= bed head.

A coworker of mine experienced a similar situation. A child in her class told her she looked pretty that day and wondered why she didn’t look pretty every day. A simple compliment can turn into an insult in a matter of seconds when talking to a 6 year old.

The only time a 1^st grader can lie is when they are tattling on someone or they desperately want something. Most of these white lies are so obvious that anyone but a 6 year old would know it’s not true.  Every day there is a countless amount of tattling about physical fights. A little boy runs up to me crying and says, “The boy in the white shirt kicked me.” About 30 seconds after that, Jimmy comes running up to defend himself, saying Ben kicked him first. So I ask Ben, “Did you kick him first?” “Well yea, but…”  He still doesn’t realize he turned himself in.

The second most told lie in my classroom has to do with homework. Every kid has homework and every kid doesn’t want to do homework. Getting them to complete their homework is a chore in itself. So, of course, I bribe them. It’s amazing how much motivation a bucket of candy can provide. Knowing they get a prize for reading, they say “I read these two books already. Do I get candy now?” I glance up at the clock, realizing only 3 minutes have gone by. Knowing quite well that a 1^st grader cannot possibly read that many pages in 3 minutes, I ask what the books were about. The only response I get is an “um” and a blank stare.

If we all think about it, maybe the 1^st graders have a good thing going there. Granted, when they lie, they hardly ever get away with it. But the part about being extremely truthful, to the point of being blunt may be a brilliant thought. It would make things a lot easier for everyone and people would benefit from the truthfulness. Husbands could simply say yes dear, that dress does make you look slightly fat. Or that your meatloaf is a little dry. We always tell children to tell the truth, yet we tell little white lies every day.

Imagine a college university filled with students with the truthfulness of a 6 year old. All of the comments whispered under your breath during class can be expressed without concern. With this technique, teachers will always know how stupid their assignments are and how much of a waste of time these math problems truly are. There wouldn’t be a filter stopping people from expressing the thoughts they were always taught to keep to themselves.

We’ve all had classes that seem to be filled with nothing but busy work. There are ways to learn materials from classes without having to answer pages full of analysis questions yet it seems these are the types of assignments due every other day. When students receive this assignment, everyone always accepts the inevitable but there’s always a hand full of students thinking, “Are you kidding me? I’m not doing that. What a way to completely waste my time.” Expressing these views to teachers will help them realize students aren’t doing the work anyways and they will eliminate it from the workload.

Writing for the school paper can be difficult. There are so many special rules that go with media writing that applies nowhere else in the writing world. The team was handed a worksheet to practice our editing marks and abbreviations. A classmate of mine turned to me and said, “A worksheet? Really? What are we 12?”  I couldn’t agree with her more.

I absolutely love the professors that deduct a significant amount of points for simple grammatical mistakes in papers. Their reasoning being we need to take the time to proofread our papers more thoroughly. Yet students receive study guides and paper assignments with grammatical errors all over the place. There’s a huge difference between the Sahara Desert and the Sahara Dessert. Do I get to take points from your teacher evaluation?

There’s always that teacher that drills into your mind the fact that “you’re going to need this someday.” There’s always that student that thinks, “When am I ever going to need this someday. I need a time and a place, ‘cause I don’t see it ever becoming essential.” Maybe someday teachers will actually explain when class material will show up in real life.

Take the pledge to become blunt from this day forward. Help those who are stupid enough to not know the truth and help those who can’t help themselves. The whole world will prosper from our honesty. The next time you find yourself thinking up a lie, just spill out the truth. What harm can it do?

Two Perspectives

Hola. Mi nombre es Quinta. Yo soy una estudiante de Español.

Rummaging through my old spanish stuff from high school, I found some really interesting things. Never thought I’d keep something as useless as this introductory level sentence. I’m sure a four year old could have said it better. But there it is, amongst the mementos from my years of study. This past fall I took a class where we learned all about El Salvador. That’s a country in Central America, kinda squeezed off to the side. The first day of class, no one could point to it on a map. I didn’t really think anything important would stick out to me from that class, but it didn’t take long before I realized how much I’d learn.

For the longest time, El Salvador had a serious economic problem. It’s been calculated that about 2 percent of the population owned the majority of the land. If you have a brain in that head of yours, you know something is not right. I’m surprised no one noticed it sooner. Anyways, in El Salvador there are great plantations known as haciendas.  These haciendas are usually owned by one family and then these families hire on campesinos to help work the fields. Sounds like a pretty good system right? Wrong. Here’s the problem: these haciendas are owned by the Catorce Familias (14 Families) that are the richest and most powerful families in all of El Salvador. The rest of the population owns less than 40% of the rest of the land, most of it being useless. That’s where the campesinos live. Also, the people that actually work their asses off in the field all day get paid basically nothing.  They have no rights. We learned about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in this class too…ya know, the ones that say everyone has the right to an education or the right to see a doctor. yea..they don’t get any of that. For rights every human being is supposed to get, despite gender, race, and social status, they get nothing. Kinda shitty if you ask me. So the rich people get all of the profits and the campesino farmers get next to nothing. They live in two bedroom houses made of stuff you’d find in the woods and can hardly get by.  Completely not fair to them. It makes me sick inside to think there is nothing I can do.

Hello. My name is Pam and I am the CEO and co-founder of Peace for Kids, a non-profit organization that travels all around the world to help children in need. Before I get into what we do as an organization, let me first get into why it’s so important to get help to those children in need. In the society we live in, children are a huge part of life. Families value children, which is why so many families are having children. Obviously, there are some families that have what I like to call “oopsy babies” but most families plan in advance. These children, whether planned or not, grow up to be adults eventually. They become business owners, politicians, police officers, teachers, and so many other wonderful things. But if a child experiences a bad childhood, where nothing is positive and they live amongst bad influences, he or she will grow up to be the same way. It is the parent’s job to teach a child right from wrong, especially when a child gets to the toddler ages, when everything is new and exciting and kids want to know everything. They say kids are like sponges: they absorb everything they hear and see and experience in the world around them. We want kids to suck up all the good things, rather than the bad.

Peace for Kids focuses on children in conflict areas. What this means is, we help out children in communities that have been struck by war, violence, poverty, and natural disasters. Often children do not know how to react in these cases. The reactions vary greatly, between violence and drugs to crying and isolation. Each child is different. Each situation is different. However, these kids still need help in any way they can get it. Despite their story or the way they respond to their situation, we are here to help.           

The way we help is simple. For about a year, we spread the word. We let everyone know in the surrounding areas about what is going on. People should know these things already but they don’t. If it’s not on the local news at 5, which most of our cases are not, they don’t care. They don’t go out of their way to find out. So, we bring the information to them. So, like I said, we spread the word, we also fundraise to pay for the trips of the volunteers as well as collect donations to take with. Donations also vary greatly, between food and clothing to school supplies and soccer balls. All the things kids here like to play with, kids from different countries like to play with too. So every little bit helps.

So you may be asking yourself: What can I do to help? Again, this answer is simple. Get involved. There are many different levels of this. The least involved would be just to find out more. Learn what’s going on in other countries. The most involved would be to buy a passport and take a trip with us. Otherwise, donations and spreading the word is great too. Every little bit makes a difference. What are you going to do to make a difference?

Thank You.

No Forgetting

No forgetting by Pablo Neruda

 

Translated by Morgan Pelot

If you all asked me where I have been
I must say – it happens
I should speak of the ground that’s as dark as stone 
The river that has been destroyed:
I don’t know  anything without the things the birds lost,
 the sea left behind or my sister crying.
Why so many regions, why a day
joined with another day? Why a black night
 becomes accumulated in the mouth? Why so many dead?
If you ask me from where I come, I have to speak
with broken things,
with so many bitter utensils,
with great beasts, many rotten
and with my grieving heart.

These are not memories that have been healed
 and the yellow pigeon that sleeps in oblivion,
 but faces with tears,
 fingers in the throat,
 and what has fallen from the leaves:
the darkness of a day spent,
a day with our sad blood fed

Here are violets, swallow,
all whatever we love and appears
in sweet cards of long tails
by where they pass the sweet time

But they don’t penetrate most of those teeth,
they don’t bite the coverings that silence builds,

Because I don’t know what to answer:
There are so many dead,
And so many levees that the red sun left
and so many heads that beat the ships,
and so many hands that have locked kisses,

And so many things that I want to forget.