I've been working at an elementary school in Seattle with the Children's Literacy Project (CLP), which sends tutors to schools to work with kids. I'm a tutor, and I'll be posting exerpts from my CLP journal.
One girl I worked with couldn't have cared less about the vocabulary words we were reviewing. The second-grader had a larger-than-life crush on teen sensation Justin Bieber, a YouTube star turned musical protégé. I’m not sure how it came up, but she said something about one of the words and related it to Justin Bieber in some obscure way. As she said his name she leapt out of her chair, clutching her heart and wailed “Oh Justin Bieber, I’m going to marry you!” I was so surprised I wasn’t sure what to do. I tried to convince her to move on to the next word, but she would have none of it. She continued carrying on about Justin Bieber for some time before she settled down. I fought to keep a straight face all the while. The next word was “cattle”. I asked her what it meant, but she ignored me.
“You don’t know what it means, do you?” I asked, in an effort to get her to speak. She crossed her arms and looked at me.
“Sure I do. Like Justin Bieber is a cattle.” I tried to contain myself, but failed. I laughed and said,
“I think the only thing they have in common is brown eyes”. Then I explained that cattle meant a bunch of cows, and she laughed too. When we got to the word “single” she again jumped out of her chair and pointed her finger high to the sky and began to sway back and forth singing Beyonce’s hit song, “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)”. She’d even memorized the choreography from the music video. I was really beginning to like this girl until one of her classmates sat down at the table next to her. She immediately made a face and said,
“Jenna is so fat, I don’t want her sitting next to me.” My mouth dropped open, and I was once again struck dumb by a second-grader. While the other little girl isn’t skinny, she certainly isn’t morbidly obese.
“We don’t talk like that to other people,” I said to her, but she ignored me and continued to mutter under her breath about Jenna. Jenna was distracting her, she couldn’t concentrate with Jenna there, and Jenna was dumb. All the while little Jenna said nothing, just concentrated on her work. When she said Jenna was dumb, I was done listening.
“Knock it off, quit being so nasty,” I snapped. “That’s rude.” She looked me right in the eyes with a condescending sneer. I hadn’t expected this previously bubbly girl to display such nastiness. “What did she do to you?” I asked.
“We were best friends,” she said, and indeed I’d seen them playing together inseparably just last week, “until she said I was cuckoo, and so now I’m going to be mean to her.”
The bell rang and every kid leapt to the door. The bell always seems to intercede at important moments. I walked home with a furrowed brow, thinking about what she said. It made me think about the influence media has on kids. She listened religiously to Justin Bieber songs, which are rife with messages to girls about having boyfriends. Beyonce’s music is lovely, but she doesn’t perform in 2nd grade classrooms for a reason. She’d hadn’t mentioned the TV shows she watched, but I was reminded of the statistic I’d read recently that ABC’s show Desperate Housewives is the most popular broadcast-network television show for kids ages 9-12. I wondered if this girl’s animosity toward Jenna could be due in part to negative media influencing her behavior.
The topic for my Psych term paper was born. I will be exploring the negative effects of media on children for my big final Psych paper.
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