McElligot's Pool

Although I've always been a big fan of Dr. Seuss, I used to think that my friend Athina's wild devotion to his teaching methods were a little excessive. She is a nerdy English major, and insists that there is a gleaming gem of genius nestled within his works. In fact, she is so convinced of this, that she plans on doing her master's in children's literature, and eventually writing a dissertation about the philosophy of "Green eggs and Ham." Whenever she would start on one of her soliloquies in his praise, I would nod my head in approval. But secretly, I would be thinking, "has she gone off her rocker?" Such days have forever gone. I am now a devoted convert! For the past few months, I have been attempting to tutor four eighth-grade girls in the subject of English. None of them possessed an inherent "thirst for knowledge." In addition, none of them were particularly pleasant to one another or obedient to me. This can be illustrated by the fact that my class size recently dwindled by three quarters: one dropped out of school because of teasing from the others, one was sent home for bad behavior, and one was permanently expelled. Now, it's just closed-mouth Sarah and I. It had previously taken all the effort I could muster to coax from her any sort of utterance. But while searching through the library for a read-aloud book which might loose her tongue, I lit upon a Dr. Seuss treasury, and a visage of Athina floated up to haunt me. Why not give it a shot? I placed the book in front of Sarah and told her to pick a story that we could read together. She stared blankly at the cover, flipped it open, and casually indicated the very first tale: McElligot's Pool. Slowly, I read for her the first couple lines. She painstakingly repeated them after me, a glimmer of interest creeping into her eyes. As we crawled from page to page, looking at the sketches of silly fish and eels and whales, her mood lightened even more. It took several days to make it through the entire book. But by the end, she was laughing quite openly and had learned the subjunctive verbs "may" and "might." She was even tripping lightly over the mouthful of "McElligot's." Plaudits for Dr. Seuss! Perhaps there is genius in the cat's hat.