Teacher Stories…Post #2 of 3: Canadian of the Week

***Post No.1 in this series can be found here.

One of the keys for adults when it comes to working successfully with small children at home, on an athletic field or in a classroom is to acknowledge that their base of general knowledge and understanding of the world around them is not the same as yours. As an adult, you have a wealth of experiential learning that has given you knowledge and wisdom. Children have not yet had the benefit of such experience. For the most part, their world is limited to what they can see and hear and feel directly in front of them. It is often a very tactile and sensory-oriented level of interactivity but it is what it is. As adults, we do children a disservice when we assign our own levels of knowledge upon them and expect them to navigate the world as if they know what we know. There are many examples of this but, for the sake of this post, let me focus on history.

Chances are good that if you were to ask a child who the fourth Prime Minister in Canadian history was, they wouldn’t know and furthermore, they wouldn’t care. It is a factual tidbit of information that has little to no meaning for them in their lives. Most of you reading this post don’t care either, let’s be honest. However, if you were to ask a Canadian child if they have ever had a doughnut, most would answer in the affirmative and then probably tell you that they got that doughnut at a Tim Hortons store. The historical significance of it all would be lost on them because they were not yet aware of who Tim Horton was and what connection he had to Canadian culture. To them, Tim Horton must be baker of doughnuts. As an educator who worked with small children, one of my prime philosophical pillars upon which I built my career was in helping my students make sense of the world in which they actually lived. Consequently, my approach to the subject of teaching history or social studies, as we call it in the lower grades, was to make history connect in meaningful ways to the experiences they were actually having. Thus, I started a weekly educational feature in my classroom that I called the “Canadian of the Week”. This would be a relatively short segment where I would introduce some person from the past or a newsmaker of the present and tell their story in a way that established a real life connection for the kids. As it turned out for many of my students, it was through these Canadian of the Week lessons that they first learned that Tim Horton was more than a doughnut maker but was, in fact, a National Hockey League champion defenseman for several teams but most famously, for the Toronto Maple Leafs. Canada is known for having hockey as an integral part of its culture. Many of my students would play on hockey teams. Some kids would even have backyard rinks of their own to skate on in the winter. Hockey was a meaningful entry point for many students when it came to understanding the world around them. But more than that, by talking about someone like Tim Horton, I would draw attention to the fact that place names out in the real world often have a meaning and that by paying attention to the stories behind the names of places, you will learn a lot about the world in which you actually live. 

From a discussion about somebody like Tim Horton, we would talk about the name of our school. Was it named after someone? If so, who was it and what did they do to deserve having a school named after them? Instead of letting the world simply wash over them, I would challenge my students to be curious and to ask questions about what they were seeing whenever they went somewhere. The annals of history are composed of stories of people and places and events, many of which started in towns like the one we happened to be living and learning in. Understanding stories was the key to understanding our world.

I could talk about many of the men and women who ended up being featured as a “Canadian of the Week” over the years but for today’s post, I want to talk about one person who went by the name of Robert Munsch. Robert Munsch is arguably the most influential and successful children’s author in Canadian history. He is easily the most prolific and successful in terms of the number of books published and the number of books sold. He is one of the very few Canadian children’s authors who was so successful as to be able to write for a living without requiring a secondary source of income. While never considered in the same literary company as other Canadian adult book writers such as Margaret Atwood, Mordecai Richler or Alice Munro, Robert Munsch was, nonetheless, a rock star in the Canadian book publishing world. 

I first came to know Robert Munsch while in teacher’s college at the University of Western Ontario. As part of an assignment on developing an awareness of children’s literature, I was given his name to research and report back on. At the time, he had just released a new book that was to become his most famous book called “Love You Forever”. I read that book for the first time in the campus bookstore at U.W.O. and cried as I stood there in the aisles. What a lovely story of generational love! I bought the book on the spot…after frantically attempting to dry my eyes. It was my first of many future Robert Munsch book purchases in my future. While “Love You Forever” was written more for parents than children, the majority of the rest of his forty plus published books were written primarily with children in mind. Robert Munsch started out as a school teacher and was used to speaking in a manner that could make children laugh and smile. Thus, in his books he often created silly situations that children could relate to and used words in such a way that children could easily understand. Robert Munsch books also often possessed a structure that repeated key phrases or even whole paragraphs. This allowed his books to be easily read by beginning readers who, if their confidence was shaky, could always rely on the repeating structure of the books to help them along. Needless to say, Robert Munsch books were always wildly popular in every classroom I ever had.

One of the things that I always admired about Robert Munsch was his awareness of the things that mattered to children. Not many adults respect children enough to care about what they are thinking and experiencing but Munsch certainly did. He wrote stories about the arrival of new babies (for those children whose world’s were being rocked by becoming older brothers or sisters for the first time). He wrote a story called The Paperbag Princess that is a simple fairy tale that flips gender roles on their ear by having the princess rescue the prince. It is one of the very few fairy tales written (Hansel and Gretel being another) in which the girl becomes the hero. He also wrote stories about icky and gross things that appealed to the tactile nature of a child’s way of interacting and understanding their world. Robert Munsch understood children and they, in turn, regarded him as a trusted adult.

As Robert Munsch’s fame grew, he started to receive letters from children who liked his books. Many of these children would tell Munsch how much they liked a particular story that he had written. They would send him drawings of their favourite part of the story. They would even send him drawings of the two of them doing something from the story together. Some would even invite him to come to their school or their classroom and read stories to them and their friends. Robert Munsch tried to answer every child who wrote to him. He even managed to visit schools and read stories to some of the kids who wrote to him and sent him pictures as well. For most adults , our lives were filled with stories about Prime Ministers and millionaires and music stars. But in the real world in which many Canadian children lived in the 1990s and early 2000s, there was no one more important to them than Robert Munsch. It was a role that was perfectly suited to such a natural storyteller and champion of children. It was a responsibility that he took very seriously. Which brings us to the point of this entire post. 

As children wrote to Robert Munsch and he, in turn, communicated back with them, a conduit was established in which story ideas were sometimes shared. On one such occasion, a young girl named Saoussan wrote to Munsch. Saoussan had immigrated to Canada a few years earlier from the Middle Eastern country of Lebanon. At the time that she left with her family, Lebanon had been experiencing civil war. There was much violence and destruction of property. In her short life, Saoussan had seen and experienced things that no one should over the course of a thousand lifetimes. When her family left Lebanon, they did so with barely the clothes on their backs. They were literally running for their lives. When her family finally arrived in Canada there was not much time to carefully map out future plans in terms of housing, school enrolment and so on. Everything had happened so quickly. When Saoussan was enrolled in school, she had no friends, she did not speak or understand English and was unfamiliar with basic school routines and with Canadian customs and experiences. She was experiencing trauma, not unlike the PTSD that soldiers and police officers and other first responders experience from having witnessed humanity at its worst. One of Saoussan’s first experiences in her new classroom was wetting her pants and peeing on the floor simply because she did not know how to ask to go to the bathroom. At Halloween, seeing skeletons affected her because she had seen dead bodies in real life. It was all so confusing and upsetting. But thanks to the efforts of her teacher and other staff at the school, along with social agencies in her new community, Saoussan and her family slowly began adjusting to life in Canada. One of the ways that her English improved was by listening to stories read aloud, especially those of Robert Munsch. When Saoussan grew a little older and was confident enough in her ability to communicate in English, she decided to write to Robert Munsch in the hope that he would think that her experience as a refugee coming to Canada would make a good story. She also hoped that by telling her story in a book, it would help other children who came to Canada from war torn countries to realize that they were not alone and that there were good, helpful people in Canada who would do what they could to make things better.  When Robert Munsch received her letter he immediately reached out to Saoussan. He assured her that her story had great merit and asked out for permission to visit with her. The two ended up meeting. Saoussan and her family and her teachers all met with Robert Munsch. He learned the details of her experience and agreed to tell her story but on one condition…he would only bring her story to the world if Sauossan agreed to help write the book! So, Saoussan and Robert Munsch (and illustrator Rebecca Green) worked together and came up with a story that ended up being a book called From Far Away. One of Robert Munsch’s reasons for insisting that Saoussan co-write the book is that, as co-writer, she is eligible to receive royalty payments from the sale of every copy sold online and in stores. The money generated from these royalties was placed into a trust fund for her to use to further her education. 

Children experience the world differently than do adults. At the age of six or seven, they don’t yet really understand concepts such as nations and provinces and taxation and history. What they do know is what they have experienced to date. They know about being happy or sad or frightened or angry. They know about hunger and how good it feels to finally eat. They know their home and then, their neighbourhood. They come to school and learn about how to successfully function in that social setting. From there, they start learning about their town or city and the stories behind some of the names they see such as the Tim Horton’s restaurant sign or the name of the school I retired out of which was Terry Fox P.S. From those stories, the idea of what Canada means comes slowly into focus. But this journey toward understanding political concepts such as nation states and the rituals that go along with that takes time to be fully understood in a meaningful way. It just does. No amount of discussions at the Tim Hortons coffee clutch round tables filled with the experts who solve all of the world’s problems can change the fact that kids experience the world in their own way and at their own pace. What is truly helpful to the children of our land is having access to caring adults who possess the empathy necessary to understand how the world seems through their eyes. This is especially true when those children are experiencing personal trauma. It can’t be easy for any child to be exposed to the horrors of war. The nightmares they must have. The fear and anger that they must carry with them everywhere they go. It is no wonder that children who experience war have difficult transition periods awaiting them when they arrive with their families on our shores.  The situation that Saoussan describes so well in From Far Away is not something that is unique to her and her family. Many new immigrants in similar circumstances have experienced a very daunting path ahead of them, even after they were safely housed in warm homes, given healthy food to eat, warm clothes to wear and safe schools for their children to attend. Much counseling is necessary. Much access to caring adults with empathetic natures is required. More than anything, what these troubled souls require is time and peace and love and understanding. 

As caring humans, there should be no question as to whether the needs of children in crisis are important. How can they not be? I applaud people like Robert Munsch and my fellow educators who accept children as being far from fully formed mini adults and, instead, as the wonderful little humans that they are on this continuing journey called life. Thankfully, there are good adults in this world like Robert Munsch who put the needs of children first. But as for the rest of us in the adult world, one shouldn’t have to rate as a Canadian of the Week to do right by those who need us most. We all talk about children being our most precious gift but, as recent events from Halifax have clearly shown, not every adult actually puts that ideal into practice. If you want to do right by our children, the first place to start is by understanding who they really are and seeing the world through their eyes. In my mind, nothing an adult can do is more important than loving and protecting our children. This includes our own children, the children of our fellow Canadians who look like us and also those poor little souls who come to us from all corners of the world and who are filled with fear and rage. Not all children are lucky to have had peaceful childhoods but all children are deserving of love and protection from the adults in their lives. How anyone could think otherwise is beyond me. It truly is.

The link to the official website for Robert Munsch can be found here.

There are many worthwhile organizations that exist to help immigrants to Canada (especially children). One that I support is War Child Canada. The link to their website can be found here.

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