An Elementary Perspective: M&E
My daughter Julia came to live with me two years ago for school. It isn't easy for me to raise someone who is practically my nine-year-old clone, but that is exactly what I find I am doing with Julia. Through our judo and soccer practices, reading, writing and arithmetic, Girl Scouts, and Japanese language classes, we occasionally have a conversation that connects us both in a sometimes deep and usually humorous way. Hopefully, you will be as entertained as we are.
M&E
At Judo class, Julia was told a “blonde joke” by her teacher. She now has decided to tell her Papa the joke…
Julia: Papa, do you know why the blondes were fired from the M&M factory?
(pause)
Papa: No.
Julia: …because they kept throwing away the ones with “W” on them.
(pause)
Papa: They also got fired for throwing away the ones with sigma on them.
Julia: (dumbfounded)
Daddy: Sigh.
Dave Buck
1:19 pm on Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Shawn, first, I actually look forward and enjoy your regular blogs and short, little stories and antidotes about life with Julia. But in all due respect, a few things:
1. I don't know if you need to keep repeating your same intro every tme. I think people get it by now and would rather get right to your story. Or, tailor and customize your intro so that it at least helps set up and leads into your specific story below.
2. "Blonde jokes", to me, carry the same meaning as "Pollock jokes". A Blonde joke is usually a dumb blonde joke and is not very flattering or endearing. And as I remember from your "M&W" blog, Julia is a blonde.
3. You seem to be a great person and a kind, loving and caring father, so I can't imagine that your "sigma" response was meant to further a dumb blonde joke, thus making blonde Julia feel even dumber than her teacher did with his original joke. Instead, and much more positively, I view it as an example of how creative you are in how your mind turned the M&M over and saw something different than a "M" or a "W". Thus, I hope it was a joke that further the great cause of creativity and not the insidious and false perception that blondes are dumb.
4. I'm 59 and if you were to ask, I probably couldn't tell you or draw a sigma sign. But maybe if you had said you see a "3" and a "E", maybe Julia would have seen it, gotten the joke and creative solution, and not been dumbfounded.
Shawn Greene
3:12 pm on Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Dear Dave,
First, I appreciate your kind words and the expression of your opinion. I also thank you for reading the column.
I am merely 43 years old and I believe that we were raised with very different societal influences. Despite this, I fundamentally believe that Julia’s notion of self is an endowment granted to her by her parents. I believe that no outside influence can change or supplant the core set of values, beliefs, and examples that her parents grant her.
Because I do not believe in racism and sexism and because I have travelled the world, lived in Japan for a number of years, and (being an amateur linguist) I am experienced in five languages, Julia benefits from a global understanding of manners, etiquette, language, and culture. Julia has lived in an area where her skin colour made her a minority – not that she ever perceived herself as being one – and her father has been speaking and teaching her Japanese ever since she was born – despite her not having a Japanese parent. To Julia, the notion that someone’s hair colour determines his or her intelligence, much less his or her skin colour, is nothing more than a silly superstition that cavemen believed.
Shawn Greene
3:12 pm on Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Poking fun at Julia teaches her to have a sense of humour. It also teaches her how to deal with situations that I mostly will not be there to control. I cannot be there when someone chooses to be mean to her, calls her stupid, or denigrates her because of the colour of her skin and the clothes she wears. These dialogues are truncations that do not include any “life lesson” that might be taught before or after they take place.
Hair colour and gender jokes reach my limitation to denigrating humour and I do not even find them or prefabricated jokes of any kind funny – not that I find them offensive, I simply do not find them funny. To me, the humour is solely in Julia’s deduction of who the joke was about – and that bespeaks intelligence.
Shawn Greene
3:12 pm on Wednesday, February 27, 2013
This week’s joke has nothing to do with treating Julia like she is stupid. The joke is that only 1.5 persons in the room understood the joke – and one of them majored in math at Purdue University. The “sigh” came from a father who wondered if anyone ever found Andy Kaufman funny. Also, to relieve you of any concern over Julia’s confusion in the joke, Julia simply moved onto the next thing on her mind, completely ignoring the comment – which is a further sign of intelligence when dealing with her grandfather’s humour.
I have found parenting Julia a mixture of hope, drive, frustration, thrill, and happiness. Never have I felt concern for her. When we encounter problems, we work on them and move on to the next item on our schedule. I think many parents share the same experience.
As for the “intro,” that is not something that I particularly like either but there are new readers every week. You and I simply must tolerate it like we had to with the Encyclopedia Brown books – albeit that reference might miss you by ten years.
Sincerely,
Shawn Buchanan Greene