Teeth, taxes, and the cost of doing history

Tooth culture is a big part of first grade, it turns out.

A few weeks ago Edith was relating her classroom rules. Right up there under no fighting, waiting your turn, and raising your hand, is

"The owner of a tooth is in charge of the tooth: You must ask permission before trying to pull out a friend's loose tooth."

On Wednesday Edith pulled out her own front snaggle tooth, egged on by a classmate. Aside from enjoying the blood and gore that allowed her to pretend to be Bellatrix Lestrange, she was pleased that "I finally got my first tooth necklace!"

Some guidelines if you ever find yourself teaching first grade:

• Establish clear classroom rules surrounding tooth loss. 
• When a student loses a tooth, provide gauze, together with a little TLC and permission to go to the water fountain. 
• Next supply the student with a necklace featuring a tooth-shaped locket, in which she can put her tooth for safe-keeping until she gets home. 
• Send everyone back to their seat post tooth-inspection, and continue with the lesson.

I'm not sure what to recommend on navigating discussion of the tooth fairy's variable rate from house to house.

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Alice from the backseat: "What's under the ground? Mom, I know what's under the ground.Worms, and Alice in Wonderland."

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Alice loves wearing her "bump shoes." You know, the type of shoe that instead of a flat sole has a bump under the heel?

I, on the other hand, hate wearing bump shoes. It no doubt has been a limiting factor in my personal and professional success. I expect great things for Alice.

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I've sold Edith on taxes. 

Yesterday morning I dropped her off at school so I could deliver some gifts to the school holiday toy drive. I'd been moved Wednesday when the school secretary sent out an email saying that many of the families at the school were having trouble buying food and gifts for their children this season. We've been participating in multiple gift drives and fundraisers, but somehow the idea that kids in Edith's own class may be going without Christmas presents got to me. 

When I was in elementary school, it was clear that there were both very poor and very rich kids at my school. That's the kind of town it was and while it didn't make the poverty any better, it was out there that there are disparities of wealth in the world. Everyone co-existed. I'm sure there were hurts and pain I didn't know about, but day-to-day no one seemed like a lesser member of the school population. The number of low-income kids was large, and they were as proud of their neighborhoods (the neighborhoods the schools were in) as any of the kids on Upper Mountain Avenue were proud of their $3 million estates. In fact, the rich kids didn't talk much about being rich, and they didn't seem to have any sort of discernible cliques. I usually didn't know who they were until I was invited to their birthday parties.

Manitou, on the other hand, feels on the surface like a more homogenous place. Houses around town vary, but there are neither slums nor mansions apparent (though here the altitude of your house and its prospect may be a better clue to its worth than size). The school is small and cozy and talks a big game about operating like a family, everyone knowing everyone and all being in this together raising our kids. So the idea that the "we're all cozy, we're all the same" rhetoric might be masking the fact that some kids aren't actually getting any of the toys that all the kids are talking about and that they might even be coming to school hungry seemed more troubling to me. I imagine those kids' reality feeling more hidden, less legitimated in this school culture than in my childhood town. And that was upsetting.

But back to Edith. I told her why I was bringing gifts to school. And she wanted to know how poor kids could afford to school at all.

School is free, I told her.

"What? It's free? I thought you paid lots and lots of money for me to go to school!"

No, we don't directly pay the school anything for you to attend. 

"You mean if you move here you can just walk into the school and say 'I have a kid who is going to come here' and they'll just let the kid start coming for free?"

Yep, that's exactly how it works, I said. And then Edith's history teacher mother began a spiel about  Benjamin Rush and Horace Mann and John Dewey and other towering figures in American history who believed that a thriving republic depends on a robust public education available to all citizens.

Edith was awed. She has been raising money for a school in Bangladesh and is very aware that those children, with whom her Sunday School class has Skyped, can't go to school unless school fees are available.

So how does her school get crayons and paper and stuff?

And pay her teacher, I added. Then I explained. We talked about all of the things that taxes do (well, many of the things that taxes do that a first grader can most easily understand).

Then I told her that taxes are a flashpoint for Americans. Some people think we should pay less tax and have more power to decide what to do with the money we earn for ourselves, spending it as we please as individuals. And some people think we should pay more tax into the collective pool and see that it gets distributed to the things that we think are important for the community as a whole.

I was trying to be balanced. But. 

Colorado has a stingy, pathetic record on taxation in support of public schools. In November voters overwhelmingly rejected a state tax increase of less than 1 percent to keep public schools throughout the state from doubling up grades or closing entirely. I thought again of those kids who aren't getting Christmas presents...and who now may also be in a 35-student classroom with no supplies and one teacher teaching several grades at once.

And I let Edith know where I stand. As a mother, as an American historian, as a taxpayer.

Edith loves school, loves the public library, and is very concerned with potential house fires. She needed no persuading.

***

Another history/government lesson, one I couldn't teach as easily. I was prepping for class at the breakfast table. Edith wanted to know what I was reading about. About a war the United States fought in Vietnam, I told her, a war that didn't go so well. The first war in its history that the United States lost.

"Mom, how do you win a war? Do both sides just kill lots and lots of people and at the end, whoever killed more people wins?"

I thought. Well, yes, I said. In earlier periods that's more or less how it worked.

"Well, how do you win a war now?" she asked.

A million dollar question. Did she know the United States ended a war yesterday?

She looked surprised. (So did my students when I shared this information a few hours later in class: "How was I on Facebook for four hours last night and no one mentioned this?")

Is that the war in Afghanistan? she asked. Her friend Faith's father is in that war.

No, it's the war in Iraq, I said, the other war we've been fighting.

Oh. Well, did we win?

Again, a million dollar question. Or rather, a multi-billion dollar question.

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While we're on the intersection of child-rearing and history: I confess to being fascinated by American Girl Dolls. They first came out just when I was getting too old for dolls, but I remember poring over the catalogs with my friend Kathleen nonetheless, deciding if I liked Kirsten's, Samantha's, or Molly's trunk best, hat best, bed best. I enjoyed looking at how styles changed over time and wished achingly that they made the historical clothes to match your doll in sizes that fit me.

So I can't fault Edith for being interested in the dolls. I still enjoy looking at the catalog with her. But I page through it now with a mounting sense of the deep irony, indeed absurdity, of it all. The company has tried to diversify its dolls since their introduction, in particular adding ethnic and religious minorities to draw in more customers and to tell a broader set of stories about the American experience. But at the end of the day the real point is to sell a doll and a story that has as many component material parts as possible.

How many juvenile, female historical characters -- particularly juvenile females of color -- can you devise who plausibly had a vast array of material possessions? If you want to use the dolls to tell stories about American history, at what point does the push to lavish, conspicuous consumption conflict with the need to tell an accurate story about Americans of the past who, for the great majority of history in the great majority of cases, didn't have SO MUCH DAMN STUFF?

But I'm just a scholar of American history, on the verge of unemployment and penury. I'm dull and stodgy enough never to have imagined that one could sell 21st-century American children (and their parents) on an $800 vicarious experience of slavery, or $1,000 worth of pretend play about the Great Depression. Evidently I haven't studied this capitalism thing thoroughly enough yet.

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