The Wheel on the School

In the morning it was school again. There they were in the schoolroom again, the five boys and Lina and the teacher. But this Saturday morning they did not start out by singing the old, old song about their country – “my lovely spot of ground, my fatherland, where once my cradle stood.” No, they sat quietly as the teacher stood looking at each one of them in turn. And then he said, “Who wondered why? And where did it take you?”

The teacher in Meindert deJong’s Newbery Award-winning book “The Wheel On the School” asks his six students an important question. They spent part of the previous week wandering their Dutch village of Shora, wondering why the storks that bring the Dutch good luck never stop to stay with them.

Jella, the natural leader of the boys, went as far as to ask his mother why the storks never stayed. “She said storks don’t come to Shora because they never did,” he said. “She said storks go back each year to the same nesting spots. So if they never came to Shora, they never will. So there’s just nothing to be done about it, she said.”

Lina, however, did some wondering. She thought the roofs in Shora were too sharp for the storks to build their nests on. She also happened to ask Grandma Sibble III, whom prior to that day Lina had regarded just as another old lady. As they talked, Grandma Sibble pointed out Shora had no trees – which the storks also liked. She also said Shora used to have both trees and storks, at a little house surrounded by a moat and willows where their school now stood. Sibble’s Corner, it was called, and was owned by her own Grandmother Sibble. A terrible storm came and blew salt spray over the dike onto the trees and killed them. The moat was filled in, the house torn down, and the school built. If they could bring back trees to Shora, Grandmother Sibble suggested, perhaps the storks would return as well.

I’ve just started reading this book – a lucky thrift store find – and am finding it delightful. I love the teacher’s approach: Sending his students out to wonder why, and asking where it took them.

That’s the kind of journey we should all be on.

And it’s tough row to hoe, being an introvert as I am. Talk to people? Yuck.

But I do. Sometimes. And it does work. It’s wonderful, if I can recharge a bit afterward.