All I Really Need to Know I Learned at Recess

I tend to wax a bit peevish when people go on about how everything they need to know was learned in kindergarten.

Now, I must disclose that mine was not a premiere private kindergarten with $10,000 annual tuition and a waiting list.  My kindergarten was a quarter mile away, up a dusty road and taught by our neighbor Mrs. Jones.  Our classroom was in the basement and recess was on the front lawn where there was always a fight over the homemade teeter totter.  Supplies and field trips were minimal.  The snack was a half slice of homemade wheat bread and tap water.

If I had been satisfied with the knowledge I acquired during my fifth year of life, I would still...

• Be wearing pigtails

• Have a lifelong unrequited crush on Peter, the kid with the pumpkin noggin and a love for paste

• Believe that "holding it in" until recess was worth a gold star on my chart

• Be reading about Dick, Jane and Sally who only communicated in 3 letter words and were the most boring family on earth

• Be so gullible that I believe people like my Uncle Jake when he told me that a cockle burr was a porcupine egg and that if I tucked it in my armpit it would hatch

Instead.

 

I moved on

soaking in knowledge like an organic sea sponge

growing and maturing until

now I too

can solemnly present the cockle burr of knowledge 

to my newly minted kindergarten-aged grandson, Liam

 so he can hatch his own porcupine of wisdom.