Most Everything I Know is from Sesame Street
Posted by Troy | Filed under TV
A few years ago I spent some time as an intern at a year-round Christian camp. As part of the training, I wrote weekly journals about what I was learning. One week I wrote an entry called “Most Everything I Know I Learned from Sesame Street.”
I noticed a few years later an episode of Scrubs with the same theme. I don’t know if they’d been reading my journals or what.
In celebration of Sesame Street’s 40th today I’m posting that journal entry… you’ll have to forgive the lack of editing and my just-finding-my-voice writing style (anyone detect a hint of Carrie Bradshaw?)
Most Everything I Know I learned from Sesame Street
May 10, 2005
I have always hated school.
Sitting in a classroom, wearing shoes, taking notes… I hated it all. On the other hand, I have always loved learning. I absorb information and skills wherever I go. The tension has always been strong for me, from kindergarten through college, because I enjoyed growing smarter, but hated the method. It is not because school is frustrating for me, in fact I am pretty good at it. Pop quizzes and tests I forgot to study for usually resulted in still-pretty-good grades for me. I probably could have been one of those kids who never once got anything less than an “A,” but let’s face it… that would have been more work than it was worth.
I had big plans to finish college and grad school in double time (and my Ph.D. by the time I was 26), not because I wanted to feel like I was someone special or smarter than others, but primarily because I just wanted to get it over with.
Of course this did not happen, and being absent from school has been quite as wonderful as I had imagined. The only problem is that I have had to find alternative means to assessing the amount of knowledge to keep my thirst quenched. This was not hard, because I have always found learning possible in venues other than school.
I am a strong believer in the power of TV.
I was not the type of child that sat in front of the TV in my room for 24 hours a day. I loved shooting hoops, building forts, Legos, reading, etc. However, I definitely watched my share of TV. Probably a lot more than The Authoritative Book on how to Rear Children would have recommended. I still do watch more TV than I probably should. I do not think that I risk rotting my brain though (just not getting some other stuff done). In fact, I believe that TV has played a tremendous role in my being who I am.
A couple years ago, I began watching Sesame Street for the first time in twenty-some years. I was fascinated by the quality of the show and the sly way it teaches kids without their realizing it. I also came to an eye-opening realization that much of what I now know I learned from Sesame Street. All my foundational language, math, and social skills can be directly traced to 3 minute sketches performed by Big Bird, Ernie, Kermit, and Oscar.
You automatically recognize those individuals by first name—they are some of the most iconic characters in our culture—and they are puppets! They probably have played a much more crucial role in your life than you realize too. Sesame Street was just the beginning though. I can recognize throughout my life how I learned about our world through TV, and I have retained more of that information than any classroom learning I have ever received.
Whether it was other cleverly disguised educational programs on PBS that I watched through my upper childhood, pre-teen semi-soap opera/sitcoms as a Jr. Higher, or MTV as a teenager, I have been picking up information all along the way. I can see how a child saturated with media can become an adult with misplaced values if he has not the proper lens to filter all the information he receives.
I was blessed with a family and church and school and peer group that provided me the tools I needed to process the information I was gaining from TV and understand it in light of truth (even though now I realize some of that “truth” was distorted too).
It is funny that I have come full circle and am back to watching PBS—and being tricked into learning something new. Not only during Sesame Street in the morning, but through different documentaries, etc. in the evening that I find entertaining and walk away from having (sometimes unsuspectingly) learned something new.
My time here at camp has come full-circle too. In this late-spring weather I am now back to doing the same activities that I did my first week on the grounds last fall. Yet now it is with a different library of knowledge that I perform the activities. I have observed much and soaked up a great deal—much of which will not be fully realized until I am a distant memory to the camp.
And much like TV, the learning I gained most from my time here was not from reading, or sitting in a classroom, or writing, or practicing my arithmetic. It has been primarily from just watching. And that works out wonderfully for me. I can stand still and let the world bustle around me, and just watch and learn.
