The Turnip & the Train

The teacher with the funny accent last week told a Kansas City kindergarten class a favorite story she had brought from London, The Tale of a Turnip. In an "infants' school" in London, the teacher from Kansas City entertained her pupils with a U.S. nursery story about The Little Engine That Could.

Ruth Marshall, from the U.S., and Gwendoline Eades, from Britain, were two of 148 U.S. and British teachers who have swapped places for a year, the better to understand each other's ways. The English-Speaking Union helped arrange the trades.

After three months at Kansas City's Sanford B. Ladd School, 29-year-old Gwen Eades found U.S. youngsters "very much like English children," but not as far along as children the same age she knew at London's Southfield Road Infants' School. There the kids start school at three, begin to read at five--some two years earlier than in the U.S.

She was surprised by America's plenty ("Lots of crayons and paint and paper--It staggers me after being short for so long during the war") and tickled by the education gadgets (building blocks, boards with colored pegs) that helped to make learning more fun in the U.S. Other differences: more paper work; the higher cost of living (her English school still pays her salary, which comes to a scant $25 a week after tax and pension deductions); the unpopularity of walking as a recreation; the way U.S. children sing familiar nursery rhymes, e.g., London Bridge Is Falling Down, Sing a Song of Sixpence, to unfamiliar tunes. A five-year-old in her class is a self-appointed interpreter ("Miss Eades means banana").

In London, Kansas City's Ruth Marshall found one sharp contrast: the fact that English children are more nervous, especially after their naps. She blamed it on the bombings they had been through. Says she: "When some of the children wake up, they have the shakes for a few minutes afterwards. One child walks around like a stiff little old man for a little while."

She sent to the U.S. for health and diet charts and hung them in the school hall. After studying them for a day and finding only milk and cocoa on the beverage list, the Southfield Road children came to her and said: "But please, miss, where's our tea?"

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