Baby You Can Drive My Car

Since August, my preschool class has had a collective and fervent obsession with cars. As if my chubby cheeked, sticky fingered, thigh high learners have carburetors for hearts and petrol for blood, long before I attempted to harness this interest to a pedagogical purpose, books became steering wheels in the Cozy Corner, wooden blocks drove on the tables during Free Play and the steady throb of engines rattled in my students’ throat every time I tried to speak (often to say, “books are for reading,” “blocks are for building,” and “now is not the time to make that noise.”) I thought every now and then about developing a car unit of study, but had visions of being run over by zealous vehicle-loving three year olds and losing any semblance of order I had developed over the past three months. I steered them toward the wonder of colors and the magic of spiders and insects. I let them get loud and wet and outside at every opportunity, but there was no way around it. My class decided what they wanted to learn about, and that was cars.

I started the unit with a tour of the cars in the parking lot, talking about the colors and sizes of different cars during which I fruitlessly tried to convince my students that silver is not white (so much for learning about colors in September). The entire thing turned into sit on the damn walkway in case a car pulls in or out because I am not mopping up your blood session, and threats of not letting them make a crayon license plate rubbings if they so much looked in the direction of a moving vehicle. Now may be a good time to mention that I have a particular dislike for cars. Even if I hadn’t been knocked off my bike here and there in New York City, and even if cars didn’t destroy the planet, the drivers here are particularly nuts. I was once in a taxi (“taxis” are minibuses and “four plus ones” are taxis) in which the driver leaned out the window to punch a car that wasn’t making a turn into oncoming traffic. I’d like to say that I loosened up somewhat about my class’s proximity and interest in moving vehicles as the weeks of this project went on, but I don’t think I’m self-aware enough to make that call.

As if I didn’t have my own neuroses to deal with, I had parents of girls question why I was devoting some much time in the school day and over the term to a “boy’s” subject. Meanwhile, I was wrestling the pink Hot Wheels corvette out of their daughter’s snatching, polished fingers. “But pink car is for giiiiiirls!” they patiently explained to me as if I am very, very stupid, which at this point, I was starting to think I was.

I regrouped. I let the children dip the wheels of toy cars in paint and make technicolor tire tracks on the biggest paper I could find. I scrounged up cardboard boxes that we painted, and affixed with construction paper headlights, taillights and windshield wipers (pardon me, windscreen wipers, oy, British English), tin foil windows and paper plate tires and steering wheels. I added elaborately conceived, but not structurally sound toilet paper tube steering columns (they kept stabbing the children and/or falling off). The children scrawled out letters and numbers with their whole-fisted crayon grips to make license plates, and I tied string corner to corner so the children could drive Flintstones style. I masking taped a road to the floor the children could drive on and I had to remind myself to tell them to stay on the right side of the road, and more importantly, to look right, then left, then right again when crossing. Crashing proved more fun than I had anticipated and I resorted to arresting the reckless drivers, and sentencing them to merciless tickling. I soon found when walking from the door to my computer, or from the bookshelf to the bathroom, I became very uneasy if I was not walking inside the taped boundaries, and noticed that when other adults passed through our room, they compulsively veered toward the right side of the masking tape road.

I stripped the library of every car book, and reveled in my brief status as a Bostonian as I read Make Way For Ducklings to a class of enraptured preschoolers practically wetting their pants with the suspense of whether Mack, Pack, Quack and co. would escape the likely outcome of road kill. I gathered the lyrics and music to relevant songs ranging from the practical “I Want to Cross the Road,” to the annoyingly contrived, “Twinkle, Twinkle Traffic Lights” to our first Beatles song of the year, “Drive My Car.” But the class wide favorite was definitely Woody Guthrie’s “Take Me Riding in the Car,” which includes verses made entirely of noises and tongue twisting lyrics that made my octolingual, Zambian, co-teacher’s head spin. When one of the custodians heard it, she made me play it on repeat for 30 minutes, and said, “this is so melodious and entertaining!”

Maseru isn’t a very fieldtrip friendly city, and the Lesotho school systems are very traditional (sit, stare at the blackboard, don’t move), so when I went to the local Toyota dealership (hereafter to be known as “The Car Store”) to inquire about a field trip, I got a long blank stare from the manager. This was followed by the request that I repeat myself in the style of a formal proposal that was taken as dictation on several yellow post-it notes. I got a phone call a week later in the form of an official invitation to The Car Store, followed by several apprehensive questions about what they were supposed to do with a dozen three and four year olds.

The first part of the fieldtrip consisted of practicing crossing the road in front of the school and it took even longer to load into the school bus, which riding in was one of the most exciting parts of the field trip. When we arrived at the car store, the managers gasped, “they are even smaller then we thought!” But they were fieldtrip host superstars. They let the kids bounce around the showroom, leave their greasy handprints on the car doors and clamber on the seats with their muddy shoes. They let the kids climb into the trunk, open the door for the gas, raise and lower the windows, turn the steering wheel while the car was on and roll down the wheelchair ramp like it was their own personal playground (all of which was followed by frequent teacher interjections of, “do NOT try this at home.”) We were then led into the garage where the mechanics raised the cars up and down to the tireless delight of my class, and then explained that cars can break, as their audience nodded dubiously. We left the garage for the car washing area and threatened to bathe our class. Then we went into storage and the managers blew their minds by showing them disembodied car parts (wait, rearview mirrors don’t grow from the windshield?) Finally my over-stimulated children were bestowed with Toyota-emblazoned bears and replied with a rendition of “Take Me Riding in the Car,” that accurately reflected their level of exhaustion.

After a few days of discussing what we learned at the car store, we wrote the following treatise for our fabulous Toyota guides: “We liked two cars. A little red car. We were driving. ‘Mé Nthatisi showed the steering wheel. We went in the bonnet. The car was coming up. It was a 4x4. A man was fixing it. Washing the car. It was a man. The water is coming, you need a wiper to go up and down. Food for the car goes in a hole in the side you to open. You can’t eat it. Thank you for cars and for teddy bears. We liked it.”

Then I decided to end the unit with a schoolbus washing party. This idea was received well due to the popularity of swimsuits, water and the school bus driver. The school bus driver is Ntate Fred. Ntate (“nn-dotty”) means father but is also used as the title, like Mister. Although he is the current class celebrity, most of the children cannot get his name right, and he becomes either “Dr. Fred” or “Ntate Friend.” The kids stripped and struggled to get into their swimsuits, and squirmed while we slathered them with sunscreen. They burst out of the classroom and we blasted Putamayo World Playground while they soaped up the car and each other. When everyone and everything was more than squeaky clean, I introduced the children to the concept of water balloons. The children were afraid to pick them up, so the water balloon toss turned into the teachers pelting the children. After that we filled up little pools of water for swimming. Justin claimed his shorts were cold, so he took them off, peed in a pool and bolted. And this is how our car unit ended: with a little yellow haired, pink cheeked, three year old streaking across campus wearing nothing but a celestial motif, batik sunhat.