How Egg Frying and 4th Graders in Vermont Transformed My Thinking

Strange things are happening in my kitchen these days, this month of October -- my culinary skills are becoming predictably questionable. I cooked a soggy rice last week which I literally had to force down my own throat for dinner. Then I  watched the koko (Ghanaian porridge) paste I purchased from the African market to mix for breakfast thicken on the fire into a miserable banku of a sort.

I added cups of water, carefully stirring the mixture with a ladle, to reverse the reaction back into a thin consistent porridge. Maybe putting into practice fleeting high school Equilibrim lessons. The exercise wasn’t only fruitless and futile, I was worn out, totally spent fixing a 5mins harmless breakfast. I accept that life isn’t always fair.

But the last straw that broke the camel’s back and lost me a confidence and half was an attempt at frying some eggs a few days on. It went terribly bad, a downgrade of scrambled eggs gone wrong. Never in the history of cooking in any Vermont kitchen, documented in college text books has life been daunting like in our kitchen on Spring Street. Frying eggs were the least of my troubles, I execute it effortless on countless occasions. So how on earth did it become a mission today?

But this experience puts into parenthetical focus a reality in life that we unconsciously ignore until prompted, trumpeted brilliantly by Mark Twain-- “It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." This rhetoric is reiterated by the poet, civil rights activist and teacher Melvin B. Tolson, “nothing educates us like a shock”. And so when I entered the classroom of the 4th Graders at Bishop John A. Marshall School (BJAMS) in Morrisville to present to the children on climate change and how they can take action in their school, and was once again jolted by this reality, it left an indelible mark on my thinking. Hold your assumptions lightly!

With my co-presenter Collen Hanley at BJAMS

One of the 4th Graders, Natty, wielding an unrehearsed articulated diction blew my mind about his knowledge and awareness of global warming. At the beginning of the interactive lesson, the smooth speaking lad had explained to his colleagues the problem of carbon pollution and the warming effect it has in the atmosphere, with precision and concision. With a dropped jaw, I watched in disbelief as little Natty delivered a Climate Change 101 lesson. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying children cannot be that smart, but hey,for the sake of Albert Einstein, adults like yourself grapple with climate science. Are you smarter than a 4th Grader? No please!

Two days after the presentation, their teacher wrote us an email: “Thank you for a wonderful presentation. My kids and I loved it. Indeed we have been talking about it ever since you left. They have actually created inventions to reduce the production of CO2 - I can take pics and share”. And as if this wasn’t enough, the  4th Graders sent a thank you letter through the mail box with additional questions on global warming and solar energy.

Hitherto, being impressed by the kids of the Sustainability Academy at Lawrence Barnes, I had earmarked them as my favorite school in Vermont. But with the display by Natty and his classmates in October, I blink my mind’s eye and exhale, ‘hold your opinions lightly’.