What Does ‘Green Eggs And Ham’ Have To Do With The #MeToo Movement? – By Chantal Da Silva (newsweek.com) / Oct 7 2018
“Do you like green eggs and ham?”
It’s a seemingly innocuous question—and one that children and parents around the world will be affectionately familiar with as the first line of Dr. Seuss’ beloved Green Eggs and Ham children’s book.
First published on August 12, 1960, Green Eggs and Ham follows a particularly persistent character, “Sam-I-Am,” who pesters another character, who is never named in the tale, to try a plate of green eggs and ham, despite the second character’s repeated refusals.
Actress and producer Genevieve Goings reads Dr. Seuss’ ‘Green Eggs and Ham’ during the White House Easter Egg Roll on the South Lawn of the White House April 6, 2015 in Washington, D.C.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty
After being hounded by the determined Sam-I-Am across several locations, including in a car, on a train and on a boat in the middle of the ocean, the second character finally relents, agreeing to give green eggs and ham a chance.
The story is supposed to be one about persistence, about trying new things.
But one high school teacher says the tale could also be interpreted to have a much darker connotation—and could have an important lesson to teach us about consent.
“I had been thinking about this ever since I read the book to my daughter,” who is now five,” Mike Fishback, a San Diego humanities teacher, told Newsweek.
“Every time I read the book, I think about how this is a really bad example of how to have relations with people,” he said. “Then it occurred to me, now that we are in the MeToo era that this could really be interpreted as a story about lack of consent.”
Fishback said that Sam-I-Am’s repeated badgering of the second character, demanding that they try “green eggs and ham,” despite their refusals, could be seen as a form of harassment.
A portrait of Dr. Seuss (Theodore Seuss Geisel) is seen during a press preview of an interactive exhibition dedicated to Dr. Seuss at the Children’s Museum of Manhattan July 6, 2004 in New York City. Mario Tama/Getty
“If someone says ‘no,’ you do not persist and badger them until they break down and say yes”, the teacher said.
“When the second character at the end of the book says, ‘ok, Sam-I-Am, I’ll try it,’ he’s not saying he tried it because he’s changed his mind. He’s doing it because he’s exhausted, tired, worn down and trapped,” Fishback said.
Fishback said he had initially wanted to teach his seventh grade class of 12 and 13-year-old students about how they could use literature to support an argument.
When he realized the connection between Green Eggs and Ham and the issue of consent he knew it would be the perfect example while also providing a lesson on consent for his class.
A week before delivering the lesson, Fishback read the book to his class and asked them for their thoughts on what the story might mean to them.
Like many, the main takeaway from the tale was a message on the value of persistence.
When the teacher suggested that the book could also be interpreted to be about harassment, Fishback said students were not immediately able to make the connection.
“Most of them had already loved this book and they talked about why it was important to not give up on your efforts to convince someone of something,” Fishback said.
On the day the seventh-grade teacher decided to teach his lesson and see if he could show his students another side to the Green Eggs and Ham story, much of the world was looking towards Washington, D.C. where senators had gathered to hear the testimonies of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and Palo Alto University Professor Christine Blasey Ford who had accused the judge of sexually assaulting her at a high school party in 1982.
Judge Brett Kavanaugh testifies to the Senate Judiciary Committee during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill on September 27 in Washington, D.C. Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images
Fishback said his students had been aware of the news story and had been following it.
However, the teacher said that regardless of whether his students were aware of the details of the allegations against Kavanaugh, he decided to focus the lesson specifically on consent and sexual harassment with the guidance of his school’s principal.
“I want to emphasize that if teachers would like to pick this up and use Green Eggs and Ham to teach about consent, that it’s really important to be careful about how you speak about sexual harassment and sexual assault because we don’t want to trigger any students,” he said.
As such, Fishback did not discuss the full details of the allegations against Kavanaugh.
Instead, he decided to tell them about attorney Anita Hill who testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee 27 years ago after accusing Judge Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment during his own confirmation hearings in 1991.
The teacher also addressed how Hill’s experience was connected to Ford’s before giving other examples of stories in the news that covered sexual harassment.
“Then I told them, ‘when I read stories like this it makes me really angry. This should never happen to people’,” Fishback said.
“I’m a man and I’m embarrassed. As a parent, I would never want my children, especially my son, to think this is okay,” he told his students.
Then, in a “slow and intense voice,” Fishback said he told his students: “This is why I don’t like the book Green Eggs and Ham.
“There was an audible gasp in the classroom,” the teacher said. “It was definitely a eureka moment.”
Fishback said that after listening to stories of what sexual harassment looks like, the connection between harassment and Green Eggs and Ham seemed to click immediately.
“What I really wanted to focus on is that ‘no means no’,” he said. “We should be teaching kids how to listen to the word ‘no” and to take it seriously and step back.”
Books like Green Eggs and Ham, Fishback said, can be used as a teaching tool to start those important conversations.
“I am by far not the first teacher to use children’s books as an entry point,” he said.
“The difference is that I’m using a beloved book that kids have fond memories of and turning it on its head and showing there can also be a dark side to this book too.” “Then, we can have conversations about serious issues on a deeper level because they have a prior story that they can reference-and that really is the power of using these picture books,” Fishback said.
“You can still love this book,” he said. “But what I hope is that when you think about this book, you will consider this angle too.”
https://www.newsweek.com/what-does-green-eggs-and-ham-have-do-metoo-movement-1146951
