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TEACHER EDUCATOR
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CHAPTER 2
R
ecently, I had the pleasure of observing one of my student
teachers performing a dramatic reading of Caps for Sale:
A Tale of a Peddler, Some Monkeys & Their Monkey
Business (Esphyr, 1947) with her pre-K–K class. As I watched the
unfolding of this experience, my mind wandered and wondered
about the relationship between being a book lover and the
peddling attitude I have for supporting teaching from a more
authentic stance. I hope I can explain how this attitude enlivens
how we live, how we read, and how we teach.
Beginning with the events of the pre-K–K classroom I was
visiting, I celebrated the value of time devoted to playing with text.
I watched the students become physically and emotionally
engaged by this classic tale about a peddler walking from site to
site, day after day, with a varied load of caps to sell, all of which are
balanced precariously, yet colorfully, on top of his head. As the
story unfolds, one afternoon, weary from his wanderings, the poor
peddler stops to rest in the shade of a single tree and is soon asleep.
He awakens sometime later only to discover that he is capless. As
folk tale luck would have it, the tree that offers him respite from his
daily task also happens to be the favored gathering spot for a group
of mischievous monkeys. The monkeys are presented in the
illustrations quite humorously because each is wearing a new cap
plucked from the peddler’s stack. As each page is read aloud to the
students by the intern, the adventures of the peddler and the
monkeys are given life by these pre-K–K actors. The preferred
scene of the young students listening to the tale was obvious as
they anticipated the confused awakening of their classmate who
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was playing the peddler character, the opening of his eyes to see
them all wearing the caps that once had been atop his head. More
fun ensued as the illustrations of the monkeys mimicking the
peddler’s appeals for the return of his goods are presented and the
students interpret the process by stomping their feet like the
peddler does and eventually throwing the caps supplied as props
by their teacher on the ground just like the peddler in the picture
does in his final act of frustration. This desperate action
miraculously generates the response that nets both the storybook
peddler and the student peddler the return of their wares. The
children were joyous and seemed satisfied that all is once again
well and good as the peddler is able to continue on his way and
carry out his life’s work. I, however, was left with an altogether new
spin on the situation. I reconsidered the part where the peddler
throws his hat on the ground and receives the benefits of an
unexpected response from the monkeys. Could it be that as soon
as the teacher throws his or her cap into the ring as a real reader, so
to speak, the students will do likewise? Is there something here to
inform my wonderings about the value of students and teachers
being actively involved with texts, making connections back and
forth between text and life’s work?
It is a stretch, I understand, to consider the plight of the
peddler in such direct association with teaching and learning, but I
would like to engage this image as a point for attending to what I
perceive as a sad situation in schools today, a situation in which
teachers are peddling the current culture of schooling without
realizing that students are watching us and
mimicking our behaviors, perhaps seeing
Could it be that as things we don’t mean for them to see. When
soon as the teacher students mimic our actions, what will that look
throws his or her cap
like? What view of reading, for instance, are we
into the ring as a real
reader, so to speak, modeling? If we take risks, will they? This
the students will do concern became more and more of an issue for
likewise? me as I participated in our Readers as Teachers
and Teachers as Readers seminar and heard my
teacher friends proclaim that once students got
past the pre-K–K stage, there was little time in the curriculum to
learn through story; there were standards, pacing guides, and
schedules to keep.
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The Reading Life: It Follows You Around
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Bisplinghoff
program. It was all fiction, but anybody who read the paper
nowadays knew things like that were happening all the time.
(p. 8)
All was fine with Mattie’s clandestine routine until one fateful
afternoon when she decides to remove the bottoms of her chairs
for reupholstering and forgets about this detail when she moves to
sit, relax, and watch her show:
She had started sitting down when a mental picture flashed
into her head: the chair without a bottom. But her leg
muscles had already gone lax. She was on the way down.
Gravity was doing its job. She continued on past the
customary stopping place, her eyes fastened to the New Blue
Cheer box on the TV screen, her mind screaming no,
wondering what bones she might break, wondering how long
she was going to keep on going down, down, down. (p. 10)
Once she finds herself safe yet totally stuck within the
confines of the remaining chair frame, she panics:
Lord have mercy—what if Alora [her best friend] comes in the
back door and sees me watching this program? What in the
world will I say? Well, I’ll just say I was sitting down to watch
the news when I fell through, and so of course I couldn’t get
up to turn off that silly soap opera. That’s what I’ll tell her.
Then she will see my dishes stacked over there…. (p. 11)
As time ticks by, the ultimate worry presents itself to Mattie, “What
if she died one day during the hour her dishes were dirty? She
would have to change her routine” (p. 12).
When I was growing up, I knew many women like Mattie.
They held themselves to locally contrived standards, questioning
only how well others were living up to the given codes of conduct
but rarely challenging the sources or broader worth of such long-
held habits. I distinctly remember my aunt talking about how her
new neighbors were suspect because they did their laundry on
Sunday and even hung the clothes out to dry so everyone could see
they were not very Christian folk. The “real” Christian folks
responsible for supporting my informed passage into their
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The Reading Life: It Follows You Around
REFERENCES
Chiseri-Strater, E., & Sunstein, B. (1997). Fieldworking: Reading and writing
research. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Blair Press.
Collins, P.H. (1991). Black feminist thought. New York: Routledge.
Florio-Ruane, S. (2001). Teacher education and the cultural imagination.
Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures. New York: Basic Books.
LITERATURE CITED
Bragg, R. (1998). All over but the shoutin’. New York: Vintage Books.
Bragg, R. (2001). Ava’s man. New York: Knopf.
Edgerton, C. (1987). Walking across Egypt. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin
Books.
Esphyr, S. (1947). Caps for sale: A tale of a peddler, some monkeys & their
monkey business. New York: W.R. Scott.
Gibbons, K. (1987). Ellen Foster. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books.
Goldberg, M. (2001). Bee season: A novel. New York: Knopf.
Lamb, W. (1996). She’s come undone. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Theroux, P. (2000). Fresh air fiend: Travel writings, 1985–2000. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
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