Yertle the Turtle

While visiting my grandma in Santa Cruz a few weeks ago, I found our old collection of children's books still in tact in the playroom room, furnished not only with books I read as a kid but with books my dad read as a kid. I've been slowly re-collecting my favorite children's books, in digital and paper format, and so asked her if I could take a few of my favorites. This led me to the copy of Dr. Suess's Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories, published in 1950, and enscribed with my 2nd grade father's name and phone number inside the front cover. Needless to say, this one came home with me. And today, I took Yertle the Turtle with me to City Heights, to Tewen and Awot.

Tewen is one of my students, a tenth grader who is currently marking As and Bs in all subjects except History, in which her negligible reading comprehension skills are preventing her from keeping her scores up. Did I mention she and her family are Eritrean refugees who only moved to the states a little over a year ago before which they lived in an Ethiopian refugee camp and hardly if ever had the opportunity or the need to use English? Awot is her 4th grade brother. I could tell about a hundred stories of how amazing it has been to work with Tewen and her family, but tonight Yertle the Turtle gets the stage.

I sat down with Tewen to finish work on her History vocab before bringing out Yertle the Turtle and Awot sat down with us, chatting away with me while I tried to help Tewen write coherent sentences about Militarism and the Triple Alliance. This is what Tewen and I typically do, a little work on her homework then read a new book, asking questions at the end of each page. This is often difficult for her and we have downgraded from the Island of the Blue Dolphins to my favorite picture books to help with that. Yertle the Turtle was the best choice I've made. Frequently throughout the evening I felt like I needed to be video-taping our reading as an advertisement for Dr. Suess's work crossing cultural boundaries and sharing important messages through laughter in spite of age, race, gender, or nationality. We read two of the three stories within, "Yertle the Turtle" and "Gertrude McFuzz".

Yertle the Turtle is about Yertle, King of the Turtles who live in the pond on the far-away Island of Sala-ma-Sond. He proclaims himself ruler of everything he can see. In order to see more, and thus rule more, Yertle shouts at the other turtles and builds himself a throne on their backs. In the end, he tries to build a turtle tower tall enough to reach above the moon, but Mack, the turtle at the base of the two-hundred turtle throne, burps, shaking the tower and sending Yertle hurtling into the mud. In the end "the great Yertle, that Marvelous he, is King of the Mud. That is all he can see. And the turtles, of course... all the turtles are free, as turtles and, maybe, all creatures should be."

Gertrude McFuzz, on the other hand, is about a bird with one small puny tail feather who sees Jolla-Lee-Lou, another bird, with two beautiful long tail feathers and jealously desires to have the same. Her uncle informs her of a berry bush which will grow more feathers on her and Gertrude greedily gobbles down 3 dozen berries. She proceeds to grow a beautiful tree of tail feathers, gorgeous beyond all other birds. However, the feathers weigh 90 pounds and she can no longer fly, nor run, nor even walk, and must be transported home over the course of two weeks by a dozen other birds. She takes another week to pluck out the extra grown feathers. "And finally, when all the pulling was done, Gertrude, behind her, again had just one... That one little feather she had as a starter. But now that's enough, because now she is smarter."

Reading with them, they were both excited by every page. More emphatic and enthusiastic than with any other book we've read. Commenting on Yertle or Gertrude's actions and feelings at each page. "He crazy turtle" and "But she can fly with one?" and "Why she want to be like Lolla-Lee-Lou? She's not ugly; Just only has one." At the end of each story I asked Tewen what the characters learned and what she learned (Awot volunteered his own opinions too, of course.) Yertle the Turtle evoked: He thought he was better than the other turtles but we are all supposed to be the same. He can't stand on other people just to get higher. Gertrude McFuzz called up: She looked around at her friend and thought "I need to be just like her," but we don't. We shouldn't think like that. We are just ourselves.

Finally, I asked the two of them which story they liked better. Tewen preferred Gertrude McFuzz emphatically while Awot liked Yertle.

"Why, Tewen?" "She tried to be something else, but she went back. Yertle, he was just bad. I mean, she was bad too, but she realized and corrected. She went back to who she was and was happier in the end being who she was before. He was just a bad king who kept doing bad things and never corrected. He--can I talk about it like people? Okay. He just did things for himself. He's the king. He cannot do things just to be higher; He should act like whatever is better for *gestures to the turtles in the pond* I mean, all people."

Awot liked Yertle because in the end all that stepping on his own people got him was ruling over the muck.

I love Africans.