Ben and the Burger Buns - A Teacher’s Lesson by Joseph

Ben and the Burger Buns - A Teacher’s Lesson by Joseph - June 2019 Scholarship Essay

It has been a long time since I was in grammar school, since I had a favorite teacher. It’s a funny lesson to be thinking of at forty six years old and re-entering college, but the lesson and the teacher have come to mind three times in the last year. Audrey Sokol was the teacher that taught me to read and to write - she was my first grade teacher. She was my favorite teacher because she taught me one lesson that has stayed with me through my entire life. I’m eminently grateful for her lesson - the lesson of Ben and the Burger Buns.

The book we learned from in first grade was called Webs and Wheels, and it was a typical schoolbook of the late 1970s. It contained the entire year’s curriculum of reading, science, math and more. Each chapter was a week-long exercise that we would read on Monday and analyze until Friday. This paragon of textbooks also had problems of logic and morality to solve. One chapter on bullying taught us to be nice to our peers and treat everyone fairly. I have no recollection how far into the book the chapter on Ben and the Burger Buns was, and to be honest I don’t even know if Ben and the Burger Buns is the correct title. It’s just the name that’s stuck with me.

In this life-defining chapter of Webs and Wheels, Ben, a child of about the same age as I and the rest of the first graders reading the book across america and also the hero of the book’s many lesson-stories, was going to a family picnic. Lo and behold there was, as usual, some crisis that Ben, with his friends and family, needed to solve. This time there were way too many hot dog buns and not enough hamburger buns. We spent time reading the story, dissecting the vocabulary words and spelling them out. We learned math counting buns and the dogs and burgers, as well as the potato salad and the watermelon and more. It was just like any of the other stories, except that I was hooked. I don’t know why, but I hung on every word of this tale. Maybe because I love picnics, or because this was when my love of learning first blossomed - I have no idea. I was six.

At the end of the chapter was the big conundrum - how would everyone get to eat their hamburgers without buns? It was such a seriously-presented problem that it seemed that surely the mere idea of eating burgers without buns would lead to savagery and the eventual destruction of modern civilization. Forks and knives be damned, without buns we were surely going to be forever lost, at least until Ben figured it out. Ben, the brightest mind on earth, looked his confused father in the eyes and offered the one thing that could save the picnic, and by extension, all of society…

…Ben’s dad could roll the bunless hamburgers up into the shape of a hot dog before grilling them, and then he could use the extra hotdog buns as the medium of our savory salvation.

This prompted Audrey Sokol to ask the reading group a question - Had we ourselves ever needed to come up with a creative solution on the fly in order to solve a problem the way Ben had just done?

Of course I had! My hand shot up like a rocket, and I was called on immediately because obviously I must have some great tale of creativity and childhood worldsaving to equal the great Ben and his Burgerdogs. No. No, I did not.

Maybe I had once done something of note, but if there had been something it was gone from my mind. I doubt now if such a moment of Ben-like brilliance had ever shined in my beginner’s brain. I fumbled around like a lost in a mire of brain-swelling confusion, and stammered out a terrible rehash of Ben’s own tale of picnic derring-do. Right then I knew I had blown the chance to be an equal to Ben, the great hero. Red-faced, I sat still in my place at the reading table in embarrassment, with hot eyes and wet lids, a second or two at most from losing it in a manner so further embarrassing that I might not have dared show my face on the monkey bars for a month.

Audrey Sokol, rather than taking me to task for being an empty headed lunk who had just lied through his terrible teeth, instead took the time to communicate. In a few short words, most of which are lost to me now, she somehow taught me to be honest about what I was going to say by first slowing down, thinking, and waiting until I really had something to contribute before rushing forward. My eyes dried just in time to prevent a new river from erupting in the classroom, and I got my cool back. Good thing to, because Anna was sitting next to me and she was the best thing ever. Even better than Ben’s Burgerdogs.

I haven’t forgotten that lesson. I don’t always live up to it, but I always try to keep my mouth from running ahead.