How Mahoe Children Saved our World Chpt 2

Chapter two, in which we learn the story behind the Story of the Children of the Mahoe Tree.

By now you may have many questions about the children of the Mahoe tree. How many children were there? Who was their teacher? What is their classroom like? What were all their names? Where did they live? What clothes did they wear? Which colours were their skin and hair and eyes? What is so amazing about their story?

The answers to these questions are so many and varied we would never get to their story. Perhaps it is enough to say there were about 20 children. Those of you who are not yet good at counting can know there were as many children as you have fingers and toes. They had black and red and blonde and brown hair like children the world over. And, like most 5-year old children, they loved a good story, enjoyed a good laugh and their eyes sparkled with the spirit of inquiry and discovery.

Their story begins with them all sitting cross- legged in a group on the floor in front of their teacher, only this day in 2011 it was not their usual teacher but a special visitor. How did this come to be?

Well, Lizzie was the name of their teacher or kaiako. “Wait, wait,” you say, “What does kaiako mean?” Kaiako is a Maori word in the land of Aotearoa that means both student and teacher.
“How is it possible to be both a student and a teacher at same time? Who is boss?” you ask.

The word “kaiako” means there is no boss when it comes to true learning and teaching. It means to teach is to learn and to learn is to teach. It means we are always learning to live well and we are always teaching others with our actions.

Sometimes when we grow up and become adults we become too clever and busy by far. So we stop seeing the changing world around us and cease asking good questions. We forget the wise things we learned as a child. In fact, we tend to believe children are just like empty jam jars waiting for us to fill them up with goodies.

Once upon a time Maori grown-ups understood how and why adults stop seeing miracles and inquiring about everything. So they learned to ask lots of questions of their children so as to regain that precious wisdom. Maori adults understood their children are great teachers because they are great learners and students. They understood their children were precious kaiako.

It so happens Lizzie, the teacher of Mahoe class, was still learning to be a professional teacher. To become a teacher in a New Zealand school you have to get a piece of paper or certificate from special bosses who know all about teaching in a New Zealand school. There was one last test Lizzie had to pass in order to get her special piece of paper, her professional, teaching certificate. Lizzie had to prove to these education bosses in New Zealand that she had learned how to involve people in the school’s local community to help her teach about things she knew little about.

This is not as easy as it might seem. We can know Lizzie thought and thought a lot about it. She probably asked and asked questions like these:
What is a story I don’t know much about?
Which story is really important for our children to know?
Why don’t I know much about it?
Who is a person in our school’s community that might know more about this important story than I do?
When will he or she have enough time to help me?
How and where might we tell this story to the Mahoe children?

It so happens that many people all around the world were beginning to worry air pollution in the year 2011 . Lizzie knew we need good clean air so we can breathe and plants can grow. She knew the air has to be just right for clouds to form and provide fresh water for us to drink. She knew the story of air is very important. However, like many teachers, Lizzie was not sure how to teach five-year old children all about air and how we can care for it.

“Who,” Lizzie asked, “Just who in the Houghton Valley community might be able to help me?” Then an idea occurred. There was a person who came to her Mahoe classroom every day. He lived near the school. Some people thought him a bit strange because he did not own a car or fly in jets like they did. Some people thought him a bit dumb because his job was that of a cleaner. However Lizzie knew he always got very excited when he talked about the wonders of air and rainbows and clouds and the changing weather and caring for them all.

Yes, this person was Dave the Cleaner of Te Kura o Haewai, which some people also call Houghton Valley School.

Dave the Cleaner believed the air we breathe is a miracle. A miracle is something super amazing and wonderful. A miracle makes you clap your hands and smile and even dance. The more he learned about our air, the more Dave the Cleaner said to himself, “Ah, what an amazing story our air is. Surely the air we breathe is a miracle.”

So when Lizzie chatted with Dave the Cleaner about her problem, he immediately offered to try to help her. And he was delighted when they decided to try to teach the children of Mahoe about caring for our air. In fact he jumped up and down with such excitement that he nearly flipped himself into the rubbish bin he was busy cleaning.

Now Lizzie could sleep easy at night. Now it was the turn of Dave the Cleaner to sit up at night thinking, thinking, thinking.

For many years now he had searched and searched to find the best teachers of Air Care in the whole wide world. However, just when he got all excited to learn of some new, famous teachers, he would discover their stories about the ways of the universe were far less than true.

This made him feel sad for our children’s children because we all need to care for air as it is such a miracle. It has to be just right for us to be alive and so we have to try to tell the best true stories about how air works.
This is why he was happy living without a car.
This is why, unlike most of his friends, he was more than content not flying in jets.
This is why he now sat up in his bed in the dark of the night wondering and thinking about how best to play with air with the five-year old children of the Mahoe tree.
“Why,” he kept saying to himself, “who wants to mess up a miracle for anyone or everyone?”

Sometimes, deep in his dreams, Dave the Cleaner heard the stern voices of some teachers in New Zealand schools warning him, “It is wrong, it is wrong, it is terribly wrong to worry little children about pollution and global warming”
Some teachers laughed at him and told him, “Huh, it is impossible to teach five-year-old’s about air because it is invisible.”

These voices of doom and gloom sometimes woke him deep in the night and he would sit in the dark thinking and asking and thinking how he might talk about the invisible with the children of the Mahoe tree.

Sometimes adults are so busy thinking they cannot find an answer, even if it is sitting right under their noses and buzzing in their ears and tingling in their toes.
So it was with Dave the Cleaner. There he sat in his bed all invisible in the dark of the night thinking and worrying about, you guessed it, the invisible.

You may have noticed how you can puzzle and fret about a problem but no solution comes. Then you have to stop and forget about it while you have a shower or help do the dishes or go outside for a run and skip. Suddenly, “Hey Presto!”, just like magic, a great idea comes to you.

This is exactly what happened to Dave the Cleaner in the dark of his bedroom. It was only when he stopped thinking about his problem that an answer occurred.

“Aha,” he said out aloud so he heard his own voice, “spoken words are invisible yet I still hear them.
The smell of my fresh-washed bed sheets is invisible yet still I can still sniff it. The little breeze through my open window is invisible yet still I feel its soft touch on my finger tip when I lick it wet.
Sound is invisible yet it travels through the air so I can still hear ruru (owl) calling “more pork” and the sound of the waves swishing on the beach below my house.
Why and how have I forgotten my childhood? I was never more alive to the invisible than when I was five years old. Wow, I wonder what more the children of the Mahoe tree can teach me?”

With this pleasant thought Dave the cleaner slipped into sweet dreams.

In the days that followed Dave the Cleaner thought and listened and watched and thought again.

While washing his dishes he heard the invisible voices of invisible people on the radio saying, ” climate change, climate change, climate change, bad, bad, bad…”

While cleaning his lounge he glimpsed young people on the television screen marching with signs that read, “Stop Global Warming!”

While walking down the street he saw adults chatting to each other while their small children walked in bored circles around them. This reminded him of it was like when he was a small boy. He remembered standing knee-high to adults as a toddler and hearing the murmur of adult-speak from way up high above him in adult land.
He had soon learned to detect important words of worry by the way adults drop their voices and speak in hushed tones when they say them. Snippets of these conversations would float down on him like mysterious, dark, snow flakes – serious, sombre words like “Trouble”, “War”, “Weather”, “Winds”, “Rain”, “Fire”, “Crash”, “Change”, “Economy”, “Price”, “Cost”…

He had soon learned as a little boy to pretend not to hear these dark, heavy words because adults would quickly change the topic if they noticed him listening.
Now in 2011, 60 years later, nothing much seemed changed for young children. The main difference was the hushed adult voices on high now used a few new, dark words of worry like “The Environment”, “Plastic”, “Climate Change”, Global Warming” and “Carbon”.

Words. Words. Words. Some adults will say words don’t matter. They believe they can give a word any meaning they like. Dave the Cleaner was not quite so sure about this. Sometimes he found himself humming a Beatle’s song he first heard when he was a young man, 45 years ago.
“You say yes. I say no.
You say stop. I say go go go. Oh no.
You say goodbye. I say hello…”

Snippets of the song often popped into his head while he was waiting to cross a busy road. You probably know what it’s like.
You stand there on the side of the road feeling blasted by the hot, stinky breaths of burly, bellowing trucks and sleek, screaming cars flashing by. You know that one false step, one faulty signal, one wrong word can make the difference between life and death.
What if you mistake “no go” for “yes go”?
What have you confuse “yes, stop” and “no, stop”?
What if you hear the words ” No, stop” when someone actually says “no stopping” and you are half way across a busy road…?

So Dave the Cleaner thought and asked and thought again very carefully about the best, most important words he should use when talking about air with the children of the Mahoe tree.
He made a list of gloomy words of worry. These words say air is mean and dangerous to us.
He made a list of cheerful words of wonder. These say air is amazing, inspiring and helpful to us.

Here he struck another problem. Some adults use a word to say air is mean and dangerous to us. Other adults use the same word to say air is inspiring and helpful to us. This is very confusing. It is like adults talk two completely different English languages.

Finally he decided, “ I will make a short list of words. Perhaps the children of Mahoe classroom and I can have some fun and play together with these words and see where they take us.”
In case you are wondering, the words were: invisible, change, movement, force, up, down, warming, cooling, solid, liquid, gas, carbon, oxygen and hydrogen.

Maybe you are like Dave the Cleaner? At the time he found the list of words rather ordinary and boring.
He could never have imagined the amazing journey the children of the Mahoe tree were about to send him on.

End of chapter two

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Please note: this is a first draft script (Jan 2020) and prototype format of How the Children of the Mahoe Tree Saved Our World. I plan to create illustrations to complement each chapter as soon as possible.
Please enjoy tolerance – my diplopia means I struggle to read what I write.

This story is based on a true event. A class of five-year olds created the central plot. In the process they showed young children, unlike many adults, retain the vital spirit of inquiry and comprehension of the fundamental thermodynamics required to care for Earth’s atmosphere.

Some grand ideas and questions from Chapter Two

Idea: Teach the invisible and the visible teaches itself.
Question: How can we best engage all our senses to learn all about that which is invisible to the eye, for example, air?
Question: How can we use the act of drawing to understand the invisible? For example: drawing an object out of its negative space; drawing an object out of its shadows and darkness.

Idea: We are our lifestyles – our every conscious act is a moral decision.
Question: How in our actions can we best model a civic future for our children?

Idea: The paradox of communication means our use of a symbol (including a word) simultaneously reflects and generates our state of being.
Question: How can we ensure our use of our language sustains all human beings?

Chapter one, in which we met an unsung hero – the Mahoe tree of Aotearoa

Chapter three, in which the children of Mahoe have Fun with Air