Day 43: Lingering childhood misperceptions, Part 2

(Not my misperception this time!)

Imagine the scene:
A ten-years-younger me, more energetic, svelter, in front of about 35 students, in an aging classroom with blackboards, big windows open onto a quad.  I'm leaning against the desk up front, leading a discussion about I don't remember what - something incredibly insightful and educational, for sure.  Students are lively and engaged (except the dude in back who was attending carefully to his fantasy football picks, but there's only so much I can do), asking questions, offering answers.  Basically, your standard college classroom.

A student raises her hand and asks, a propos of I can't remember what, why the symbology of Easter has all those rabbits and chicks and eggs and things? 

An aside: my students know about my magpie brain.  They know that I delight in finding lovely shiny thought-objects and taking them home and turning them over and poking at them.  They also know that I can be easily distracted by a new bright and shiny object, like an interesting question.  And they know (because I tell them) that I think curiosity is the number one hallmark of a lifelong learner, and that I really want them to be lifelong learners even more than I want them to be linguists.  So they ask random questions, and I answer them.  The one thing that saves me and them is that I tend to be unexpectedly excellent at relating apparently-disparate bits of information - so whatever distraction they think they're offering almost invariably leads us right back to whatever it is that we're covering in class.

So, student raises hand, asks question, and I take it as a totally legitimate turn in the conversation and hop up to sit on the desk and start talking about spring and the return of life after the winter and Eostara and fertility and how this relates to resurrection in Christianity and in other religious-symbolic systems as well, etc etc.  As you do.  And then I say that nothing really symbolizes fertility like rabbits (which, I point out in an aside, breed like, well, rabbits) or like seeing a little chick hatch from this seemingly-lifeless oval rock-like lump.

And this young man in the front row, right smack in the middle, gets this dawning look of horrified enlightenment on his face.  He may even have made a sort of mumbling oh no really sort of noise.  All I know is that his neighbors and I all looked at him, and I asked him what he'd just realized.  And he, in tones of embarrassed misery, says:

"I always thought the rabbits hatched from the eggs!"

People, you'd be proud.  I did not laugh.  I didn't even snicker or make smirk-like motions with my mouth or eyes.  I did say that no, rabbits are mammals - and that they aren't echidnas or platypuses, so no body-external eggs involved in their birth. 

And then I went home and promptly ensured that both of my daughters knew very clearly that rabbits didn't hatch from eggs.

Because, of course, I totally know where he got that idea - from the Cadbury egg commercials, right?  And all the Easter bunny delivering eggs stuff.  And he just never revisited it in light of later information (like, mammals bear live young - barring, as I'd mentioned, the echidna and platypus).  It stuck around there, in the recesses of his mind, until the dawning light of a random classroom conversation got him to put two and two together.

I suppose one moral of this story is that my willingness to entertain apparently-random questions has broader educational implications than I give credit for.

Other morals to this story will be addressed in Part 3 of my little narrative.