Llamas, Tigers, and Ducks

My wife is out of town for a week, so the kids and I went to the zoo this morning. It was probably the single most impressive visit I've ever made to any zoo. The tigers (a mother and two "teen-age"? cubs) were frisky. Wrestling. Pouncing on one another. Chasing. Even, at times, standing up on their hind legs swatting at one another like sparring partners. In the truest sense of the word, it was quite awesome.

Of course, when we got home (after a trip through McDonald's), I asked my kids about their favorite things at the zoo. My son (3) informed me he didn't have one. My daughter (5) rattled off the following list:

• the mama duck with chicks that ran across the rhino's pen.
  
• feeding the ducks and swans.
  
• the duck that half bit her finger while she was feeding it.
  

No tigers. No bears. Not even the llama-like creatures getting it on while all the parents snickered nervously and the children asked "Why is he making that noise?"

My daughter, the more conversant of the two kids, then asked me about my favorite thing, at which time I reminded them about the tigers. Her reply was, "Oh, yeah."

The conversation got me thinking about the extent to which learning is often serendipitous. My kids may never see tigers playing so actively at any other point in their lives, and chances are they won't remember this moving sight. Had the event occurred five years from now, the impact may have been different. Similarly, I've heard folks say of any number of novels, "You have to be at a certain point in your life to really enjoy it." While I suspect that line is often used as some combination of excuse and encouragement, I also suspect that there can be some truth in it.

The point I guess, is this: The feeling I had today with my children was not entirely unlike the feeling I sometimes get with my first-year composition courses. Some of the students are "ready." The events in their lives have brought them to a place where they are receptive to and appreciative of the discoveries and the challenges and the rewards of writing. Others--even while academically and intellectually prepared--see the course as a hoop to jump through. (Perhaps because we've framed it that way?) Certainly, I was in these same shoes as an undergraduate. In such instances, I find myself wishing for something along the lines of a "ghost of Christmas future," some way to provide a bit of perspective that hasn't yet been generated in the course of one's life to date.

gad