Dear Students-of-This-Year’s-5th-Grade-Class:
I wish you were not using facebook. Maybe this opinion proves I turned into a fuddy-duddy the moment I turned 39. Maybe it is a result of the Santa-fiasco.
We were discussing the Boston Tea Party in one of my classes when a student became skeptical. “The tax rebellion, I understand,” he said, “but adults wearing Indian costumes? That is stretching it.”
I assured him that the account of the Boston Tea Party, including the disguises, we know to be accurate. It is “not merely an American cultural myth like Santa Claus,” I said. That was it. We moved on. The “Santa” vein of the discussion did not continue.
A myth like Santa Claus. A simple analogy was the nail in my proverbial coffin. Parents wrote me disappointed emails. There were phone calls. There was crying. One parent said I had “ruined Christmas.” Yikes.
Dearest students, there is a great quandary about Santa Claus going on behind your backs. Parents don’t know what to do. Through sites like Pinterest they post various options of how to handle “the reveal.” They forget that you are still supple in body and thought, and the younger you are, the more supple you are. They forget that right in the middle of any kind of make-believe, you have always been able to say, “Wait, ‘tend like I’m not a little blond girl named Rose who travels with the circus! ‘Tend I’m a mommy and I have a husband who is off at war. And I live on a farm! And I have to take care of the crops all by myself! And I have eight kids at home!” Then you can seamlessly resume the imaginary scene, as if this revisioning were only a hiccup. They forget you are reading books like The Lightning Thief, Eragon, Warriors, and Inkheart, and have no trouble at all popping back from a fantasy world to eat your supper or do your math homework.
The reason the adults in your life struggle? The older people get, the more difficult it is to move in and out of make-believe. No wonder you consider adults in Indian costumes to be “stretching it.” Grown-up imaginations grow stiff, less limber. Listen, my two year-old nephew can put his toes in his mouth. But if I tried to put my toes in my mouth, someone would have to take me to the hospital afterward. Imaginations are like that; the older they get, the less they can stretch. Adults shouldn’t wait too long to tell you the truth; it might hurt you to stretch. I think adults should tell kids from the get-go that Santa is a fun pretend-game that the whole world plays every December. That’s what my mom told me. My childhood was delightful, and I never once thought Santa was real. It’s enough fun to pretend he is.
Believe me, it is not as if I am to out to ruin the Santa-thing for everybody. That is not my place; beliefs of all kinds are a family decision. But I think parents are assuming a great deal of risk these days if they intend to be the primary source of information but then send their children off to school or let them engage on the Internet. Eventually there will be a slip, and more than likely not by a teacher. Trust me, children hear about a lot more than Santa from their friends at school. In fact, I am still wondering how parents think kids are NOT going to hear about Santa if they have a facebook or Pinterest account, as that is where the major discussion seems to be.
Kids, your parents mean well. They want you to remain a kid as long as possible. Hey, I do, too. That’s why every time one of you “likes” my page on facebook, I slap my forehead and groan. If you are in my class this year, you are 10 or 11. However if you are using facebook, you checked a box that said that you are 13.
Don’t let yourself grow up so fast. By putting an age limit on social media, adults are not trying to withhold fun from you. There will be a right time to enjoy the fun of adult/young adult privileges. Yet, I promise you, it will not be fun when you grow up and realize you hurried your childhood and can never go back.
Besides, checking a box that says you’re 13 when you are actually 10 is lying. (Confession: In the past I had my 6th graders using goodreads when most of them were only 12. Sure, I had a stack of signed parent permission forms in my hand, but I also had a tug in my heart when I said, “Just check the box that says you’re 13. You’re almost 13.” You’re almost 13. Ugggh. Sweet kids, your teacher wasn’t almost lying. I was lying, while urging 75 young people to do the same. There is a terrible fate for people who lead children the wrong direction, so I don’t do that anymore. I wish I had never done it in the first place. More than anything, I want to be a person of truth. Let truth be the example I set, nothing less.)
As a teacher who loves you, I am going to ask you to do something that will take a great amount of courage: tell the truth. Deactivate your facebook, instagram, goodreads, twitter, and any other accounts until your 13th birthday. Then go play. Enjoy your childhood. You only have a year and a half left. Soon you will be a young adult; school activities will become more difficult and less free. Growing up is great fun, too, but there is something so wonderful about your first 12 years that you really can’t afford to miss a minute of it. Besides, your social media accounts will be found exactly as you left them when you finally turn 13.
I realize that this call to quit facebook will not be popular. But I don’t care about being popular. I care about you.
Rest assured, when you grow up, you will still play pretend. In fact, facebook is the biggest pretend-game of all. But that is another post entirely.