Several years ago, my dear friend Jeff Pulver invited me to give a talk called “What I Learned in Kindergarten” at his 140 education conference in New York (you can see the lecture itself at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGLwZnv8ZLo ).  I gave a talk about how schools try and force us all to look the same and swim together, much the same as a school of herring. But even at the tender age of five, I was destined to stand out, to be different. In the middle of my talk I wanted to say that I was a misfit, but somehow it turned into “mis-fish”. Suddenly I received over 90 tweets from the audience. “Mel, I’m a mis-fish too”, and “Mel, we are all mis-fish”. This experience prompted me to write a children’s story called “Jeff the Mis-fish meets Jimmy the Whale”, and you can guess who the protagonists are named after.

The book was beautifully illustrated by the magical Rotem Omri, who has illustrated many of my stories. Originally we offered it as a free interactive app on the Apple Store. And perhaps it’s still there, swimming upstream.  More recently we have published it on our new self-publishing platform, www.ourboox.com

If you want to see the single spread version with updated text, then this is the version for you.

http://www.ourboox.com/books/jeff-the-mis-fish-meets-jimmy-the-whale-2/

But if you love to see the original gorgeous double spreads, you are invited to see this version.

http://www.ourboox.com/books/jeff-the-mis-fish-meets-jimmy-the-whale/

If you want to read the gist of my presentation for Jeff’s New York meeting, it went something like this.

Good morning, kindergarten graduates. Do you all remember show-and-tell? I think that show-and-tell is such an important part of education that several years ago I recorded ten segments on youtube, called showandmel, one word, which is short for “show and tell with Dr. Mel”. And I was Dr. Mel. We often had letters on showandmel, and one inquiry (a real one) came from Eva in Milano, who wanted to know why her goldfish never closes its eyes, even when its asleep.

My answer went something like “Well, first of all in order to close its eyes, goldfish would need eyelids and apparently, they don’t.  But there may be an even better explanation. Perhaps your goldfish is on guard because it is afraid that it be taken off to school”.

I’m a biologist and biologists like to compare species with one another, so let’s compare a school of fish and a school with young humans. In a school of fish you thousands of fish of about the same size, the same color, all swimming in the same direction. That helps them escape predators who have trouble focusing when there are so many individuals to choose from. A fish who has a different size, a different color, a non-comformist fish with a mind of its own who swims in a different direction is quickly noticed and caught by the predator , make no bones about that!!! You are all familiar with the song:

All the big fish are swimming after me,

they might catch the others but they won’t catch me

they might catch the others but they won’t catch me

they might catch the others but GULP

(a song I first heard from Jack Lightstone, don’t know whether he wrote it though)

And by conforming, fish in schools have managed to survive for tens of millions of years.  Until the last century that is.  Because the world has changed.  The biggest predators of fish now are us humans. We humans are predators of a new type. We hunt with fishing vessels, giant nets and sonar.  We actually go after the schools of fish, trapping tens of thousands of them in our high tech nets.  And then we stick them in sardine tins, and if the heads are too big, we lop those of too. The only ones who get away are the rare ones that swim in a different direction from the rest. The mis-fish.

Are the stories of the schools of fish and our own schools so different? We try to get our kids to conform to what we think are their needs and the needs of the society we live in. We get them to conform by giving them tests which they have to answer correctly, questions whose answers we think are relevant for their future life on earth.  But in this wired day and age how on earth can we know what lies ahead for them in twenty or thirty years?  We haven’t a clue.

I survived my own schooling because I was an oddball from the get-go. From the first day of kindergarten, the teachers set to work on me, preparing me for society and grade one. A society of right-handed, God fearing students.

They put the fear of God in me, yessiree. But it was the wrong God. We were supposed to pray to Jesus every morning, and I had learned in home that we did not pray to him. Nevertheless we were told to close our eyes and pray, otherwise a terrible surprise would await us. And it did. I once peeked and I saw my teacher gazing at me ominously. 

But the icing on the cake was that I was left-handed. The teachers spent a year trying to force my crayon into my right hand. But I was a stubborn, little left-handed Jewish kid. What I did learn during that seminal year is that you can’t always trust teachers.  

How many of you kept any of your report cards? How many of you have your kindergarten report card? I still have mine, after 57 years! I have no idea where my Ph.D. diploma is. But I have my kindergarten report card. It says that I graduated, but between you and me, they were just trying to get rid of me. I never really finished kindergarten.

So I formally passed into grade one, but never fit into the sardine can. I wondered why two and two is four (it isn’t always, you know), and  why you flip over one of the fractions when dividing, why it was so important to know who Vasco da Gamma was, why we had to study Latin in order to learn Russian, and who really won the war of 1812.

Then on to university and an academic career – I became an expert in the field of bad breath, not exactly a career for conformers. But when I became a professor in academia and got to the top, there was nothing left for me except teaching about biofilms to medical students. That’s no fun. So I quit and now teach academic courses on the things I love: creative thinking, music of the sixties, and children’s book writing.  My love for books led me to

join forces with the amazing developer Ran Shternin and an eager team of volunteers to create www.ourboox.com .  But that’s another story.