The Origin of Pickles

by

07/26/2006

PS 26 Rufus King School 195-02 69th Avenue Fresh Meadows, NY 11365

Neighborhood: Queens

“Where does a pickle come from?” I asked my second grade class.

“It comes from a diner,” one student answered.

“And before it got to the diner, what was it?”

“It was always a pickle,” he said.

“It was once a cucumber,” I countered. “It was soaked in vinegar until it became a pickle.”

“You’re wrong,” he argued. “My mother cut them in half. There was no cucumber inside. It was all pickle.”

Thus ended my attempt to educate my class on the origins of pickles. My student’s view was accepted over mine. I couldn’t override his experience.

Teaching, I have come to realize, is a race to see who can get to impressionable children’s minds first. There are educational experts who claim that using the scientific method – hands-on experiments – work best. But I tried that once and it didn’t go over well: I was teaching the principle of gravity. I had each student put a stalk of celery in a cup of red dye. I wanted to show them that sometimes, nature works against gravity (the red dye creeps up the stalk). But I had to discontinue the experiment when I discovered that a student had been eating the celery. The other students were so angry about the missing stalks that they weren’t able to concentrate on their schoolwork.

A few weeks later, I taught my class about how to protect themselves against diseases. I gave each student a slice of white bread, which was already moldy. I figured that would ruin the thief’s appetite. I was trying to show them how the refrigerator protects food from going bad. But I hadn’t foreseen the invasion of ants. They swarmed into the classroom every night.

In the end, I tried to look on the bright side: at least the ants in our ant farm had made some new friends.

Comments
Rate Story
1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...

§ One Response to “The Origin of Pickles”

  • Kaylyn says:

    i am so interested in pickles i make a pickle club at school there is over 100 people and some of our teachers joined we made a pleage and are makeing money for pickle shirts it is so FUN

    p.s
    our pickle homework was to find the origin of pickles

§ Leave a Reply

Other Stories You May Like

Nearby Queens Stories

The Spirit Tree

by

Rising, miraculous, precariously leaning in front of the attached one-family, red brick house in which I grew up in Jackson [...]

A Trip to Aqueduct

by

The day after I turned ten, my mother took me to my first horse race at Aqueduct. Hitting the regular [...]

Taxi Driver: The True Story of a Man Who Saved My Life

by

I’d written down the wrong rotation number and reported to LaGuardia instead of Kennedy. Easy mistake for a new [...]

Gone to Flowers, Every One

by

“Okay, so now whatta my gone do? Phone won’t charge. Can’t read another word. Thirteen hours sleep. Chocolate’s gone. Weed [...]

Mirrors

by

 I was eleven when I got my first paper route. You had to be thirteen.“If the route manager approves it, [...]