As soon as Susie Anderson-Bauer walked into the first-grade Open House night at her son’s school, she knew. On the wall hung a brainstorming sheet with the encouraging prompt “What do we want to learn in 1st grade?” Nestled alongside “butterflies,” “puppies,” and “volcanoes” was “communism.” Elliott strikes again.
Elliott Bauer is now a 10-year-old 5th grader, and guess what he wrote on this year’s sheet? “It’s been Communism five years running,” confirms his mom.
For his part, Elliott pipes up to say the topic has yet to be adequately addressed to his satisfaction. “They always just say something like, ‘We can’t do that because of the rest of the kids,’ or ‘That’s not part of our curriculum,’” he says ruefully.
As a parent, or as a teacher, there are frequent moments of reckoning that many of us never saw coming. And one of them surely is, “Wait, I think my kid is the weird one.” For sure, more socially hampering qualities exist among all ages of people. And often they turn out not to be such big deals, in the scheme of things. But being the one little dude who can’t shut up about the bubonic plague—morning, noon, or night—can alienate peers and concern moms and dads. (That kid, Plague and Pox Boy, is happily settled in as a Webster U freshman this fall.)
History is, let’s face it, amazing. And thinking that we as adults get to choose what will spark an interest in learning is folly. I spent a bit of time agonizing about how to protect my sweet, innocent son (always a precocious reader) from learning about war at age 6. I wanted to preserve as long as possible for him a bubble of peace and love and the Golden Rule. Butterflies, puppies, and volcanoes were exactly what I had in mind!
But there were these great graphic novels, Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales, that the Carpenter Branch library displayed, and I knew he would devour them. I perused the available titles, rejecting One Dead Spy and Treaties, Trenches, Mud, and Blood (Revolutionary and World War I stories, respectively.) And then, heaven help me, I settled on Donner Dinner Party as the compromise choice.
What was I thinking? I don’t know, that somehow “novelty” brutality in pioneer times was less scarring than the deliberate, chosen violence of war. (I was raised half-Unitarian and half-Southern Baptist, so I come by my muddled worldview honestly.) It made no sense from a “shield my cherub” point of view. Guess what my kid loved? He read the details to me breathlessly. He mentioned the book at a doctor appointment and found out his dermatologist was totally fascinated by the Donner Party, too! She’d just watched a documentary; they had a lot to talk about.
It’s when your kid is the only one talking that the worry wells up. Foristell mom Kris Rattini knows the familiar pattern. She and her husband Tom call their daughter Emily’s intense interest periods “Challenger Deep dives.”
The 6th grader has cycled through the Holocaust, Les Miserables and the Paris Uprising, and the founding of the U.S. banking system (thanks, Hamilton!) But the topics she returns to repeatedly are Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Norse mythology.
“I know every single detail about Greek and Egyptian mythology,” Emily says. “But our history textbook only mentions two to three gods. That only skims the surface. I want to raise my hand and talk more about it, but the girls are like, ‘Really, Emily, can we just move on?’ or ‘That’s nice. Can we just move on?’”
That social tension seems to be at the center of how parents and adults tend to react to our kids’ odd obsessions. From our current perches, we see how the world is not very well set up to handle these detours down the rabbit hole. Teachers have pacing guides that tell them where they need to be at every week of the semester for professional compliance. Parents don’t want their sons and daughters to be the ones classmates groan about sitting next to.
Rattini admits, “Emily is definitely my daughter in this aspect. I was an avid reader. I went through a Mythology phase. I was known for spouting out random facts about whatever recent topic I’d been studying. But now that I’m viewing it through a parent’s eyes, I realize how it creates socially awkward moments now for Emily—and did for me 35 years ago.”
So what’s a modern parent to do? Indulge the interest, try to shut it down, or something in between? Trying to find ways to tie obscure obsessions to the requirements of academic reality is one practical approach.
Elliott’s mom has encouraged him to take any opportunities at choice and use them to spend more time on communism: she remembers that even in a very early grade, a personal project on “space” was his chance to get into the space race and the Soviet/U.S. competition dynamic.
Kim Lackey, a Spanish teacher in the Rockwood district (and my sister-in-law), makes room in the semester for a Lifelong Learning Project. High-school students get to nerd out on a topic of interest related to the Spanish-speaking cultures of the world. “I have had kids go deep into a particular aspect of culture that interests them, like LGBTQ issues related to Hispanics, the Spanish Civil War, or the work of the National Farm Workers Association,” she says. In fact, “I really think that all subjects should have a Lifelong Learning Project!”
And don’t be afraid to draw a line. Rattini shares some practical advice on making a break when necessary: when the mythology obsession was actively hampering school and home life, they rotated out the books their daughter was re-reading constantly and opted for non-fiction, “to help ground her back in reality. We also would set a limit: ‘OK, you can ask three questions about mythology at dinner, then we’re moving on to other topics.’ That way she could be heard, but then would hear about other topics that were of interest to her parents.”
Meanwhile, consider the positives: you have a kid who craves knowledge. Your child is periodically self-pigeonholed and therefore easy to buy for, if a birthday or holiday approaches. And if your fondest hope is to keep your kids close when they get older, St. Louis and its ubiquitous trivia nights will undoubtedly one day benefit from deep background on Norse mythology.
