A Proper Kansas Education

My second grade year book photo.

The class photo: I'm the second from the right in the front row.

My second grade teacher, Mrs. Young who was undoubtedly the best elementary school teacher ever, put a sweet spin on the curriculum. She taught us fractions using recipes for hard candies and then made them in class. She brought an entire Thanksgiving meal to school so that our class could use the Thanksgiving poetry place mats we made. At Christmas, she baked and assembled a gingerbread house for each student to decorate. (She didn't believe in mini milk cartons smeared with frosting and covered with graham crackers.)

Our Kansas Day celebration was no less sweet. You see, an elementary education in Kansas, at least when I was there, includes a celebration every January 29th of Kansas Day, the day that Kansas became a state of the union. It usually involved decorating a manila tab folder with the top right corner cut off in a way to look like the state of Kansas. Inside the folder, were worksheets filled with fun facts about Kansas: the state bird: western meadow lark, the state insect: the honeybee, the state tree: cottonwood, the state flower: sunflower, and the state reptile: the ornate box turtle. (obviously, the indoctrination worked, because I just spit all those facts out from memory) However, Mrs. Young had the most unique celebration of all five Kansas Days I ever celebrated.

Before I tell you about Mrs. Young's celebration, I should explain some pioneer history for all you non Kansans. Kansas is one of the "Great Plains" states, it is large and flat and at the time covered wagons rolled through, there was only grass as far as the eye could see: no trees. This provided a problem for the people trying to cross the state and especially for the people who settled there. How can you build a fire to cook if there is no wood and how are you going to build a house? The answer to both was right on the ground: houses were built by packing sod around shallow pits in the ground making the houses half under ground; (and you thought green roofs were a modern idea!) fires were fueled with what the french called "buffalo wood" and the English called "buffalo chips." What ever you called it, it was a buffalo turd that had dried out in the sun for a few weeks and it was the children's job to collect enough to keep the fire lit. It might sound gross, but "buffalo chips" burned more efficiently than grass, which produced mostly smoke, and were an abundant fuel source, until they almost killed off all of the bison.

Getting back to Mrs. Young's Kansas Day celebration: she read a great story about Pioneers and then she split the class into groups and sent us all on a Kansas themed scavenger hunt to find... buffalo chips!(no-bake cookies piled on a plate)

Believe it or not, I still enjoy no bake cookies. You might think I was traumatized by having a cookie compared to a dried buffalo turd, but you would be forgetting how awesome it is to an eight year old to joke about eating poop. My unique history with these cookies endeared them to me; I have a private chuckle every time I eat one.