Changing tune on money
Today’s kindergartners learn values through song
“I like money
To buy things at the store
Money, money, money
I always want more.”
Almost dozing in the chair beside the table where my granddaughter’s ipad sings out online kindergarten, I startle awake, set down my book, grab my journal and scribble the words. Stunned. Horrified.
The kindergartners are learning about money.
This is a commendable pursuit, especially in an age when their teacher sees the need to mention many people don’t carry coins like these any more, but use credit cards instead. Still, she tells them, they will practice identifying them. (She doesn’t, I notice, explain why.)
I tried to teach my granddaughter coins last September, when she first began spending the days with me while her mother went back to work. She showed little interest. Grandmas, she’s made perfectly clear, are for playing. But she will learn anything the kindergarten teacher wants her to know. So. She sorts her pile of coins into silver and brown, shouts out dime, when the teacher asks which is the smallest, compares what’s on the back of her quarter with what’s on the back of others’ coins.
It’s hard to attend kindergarten in your grandmother’s living room via an 8”x10” screen that holds the heads of your classmates and teacher. Hard to concentrate on counting when someone’s unmuted microphone broadcasts the argument her parents are having in the same room or someone’s baby crying. But the kids have done it. And the teacher has made it happen.
It’s June now as I write this. The tests have been taken. (I’m not sure why kindergartners have to take tests, nor why fitting the answer into the small computer-allowed box had to be the hardest part of the math exam, but that is the subject of a different essay.) This one’s about money. One of the aids to learning that the teacher has employed throughout the year is music. You know the archetypal ABC song. Well, these kids know a days-ofthe-week song, a months-of-the-year song, even a song identifying vowels. It’s good methodology. Songs have staying power. (How many times in the night do I wake with one kids’ song or another replaying in my mind’s ear ad infinitum?)
So this one —
“A penny’s worth one cent
A nickel’s worth five
A dime is worth ten cents
A quarter, twenty-five”
— will be one the kids can call on from their music memory to learn the value of the pocketful of change they may or may not carry when they get older. I’ve no objection to this.
But that first verse.
I have a friend who left public education early on, and whenever the topic arises, he brushes it off, sure in his opinion that all the institution does is prepare children to take up their chains in the kingdom of capitalism. I was a public school teacher for 30 years. Public education is one of my most firmly held beliefs. I like to argue with him that, despite its shortcomings, it does some good.
But it’s hard to argue against the brainwashing when your sweet and beautiful, innocent and good granddaughter dances to the lilting lyrics: “I like money, to buy things at the store.”
Even harder when you yourself are preparing an after-school snack, humming: “Money, money, money, I always want more.”
Surely, there’s another way, another song to sing. Not just in kindergarten. But in life.
I tried to teach my granddaughter coins last September, when she first began spending the days with me while her mother went back to work. She showed little interest. Grandmas, she’s made perfectly clear, are for playing.