“It’s not culturally responsive.”
“It’s outdated.”
“I roll my eyes every time someone suggests a book to me that’s over 70 years old.”
These are the reasons mentioned on teacher Twitter recently for ridding your classroom of Caps For Sale: A Tale of a Peddler, Some Monkeys and Their Monkey Business by Esphyr Slobodkina. Teachers posted this argument on Twitter just the other day. The tweets were met with the Twitter equivalent of applause.
And that’s when I shook my fists and stamped my feet. What is wrong with Caps For Sale? My kids loved it. My grandkid loves it. Why should we dismiss it?
I apologize in advance for pulling out the all caps again, but Twitter made me do it. BOOKS (LIKE HUMANS) AREN’T USELESS SIMPLY BECAUSE THEY ARE OLD.
When I was done fit throwing, I considered the cultural unresponsiveness of Caps For Sale. Is it really culturally unresponsive, and, if it is, is it okay to read it anyway?
Education tosses around new key terms just about every millisecond, so let’s first determine what we mean by culturally responsive. My understanding of the term is that culturally responsive books are stories that take into consideration the culture of your students as well as the culture not of your students. In other words, it exposes students to stories of their own and other cultures in a safe, accepting, and normalizing way. Shannon B. Wanless and Patrica A Crawford, in their article “Reading Your Way to a Culturally Responsive Classroom”, use the example of the popular children’s book I Love My Hair by Natasha Tarpley. An after-story discussion of the various ways families care for a child’s hair boosts the culturally responsiveness of the book. (Great book, by the way. I highly recommend it.)
The argument against Caps For Sale is that it lacks cultural responsiveness. Does it really? Or is it that the teacher who has read the book a million times is simply bored with it? Is it that the teacher has only presented it as a silly book about mischievous monkeys? Is it that the teacher looked at a book that is beloved by children all over the world through such a narrow lens that she/he sucked out all cultural relevance?
Let’s do some fact checking.
Did you know that Esphyr Slobodkina, the author of Caps For Sale was born in Siberia in 1908 and immigrated to America when she was only nineteen years old? Although she’s best known for her classic children’s book, she was foremost an artist. In fact, she was a founding member of American Abstract Artists and was instrumental in gaining acceptance and interest in the American abstract art movement. She was one of the first children’s authors to experiment with collage as illustration for children’s books, influencing other authors like Ezra Jack Keats. Keats’ Snowy Day, which features collage cutout images of an African American boy playing in the snow, is a classic from 1963 and a winner of the Caldecott award for the most distinguished American picture book for children.
Esphyr Sobodkina was an amazing woman, a pioneer for American female abstract artists, and a celebrated working artist until she died in 2002 at the age of ninety-four. Maybe, just maybe, her immigrant status, her trail-blazing artistry, and her dedication to innovation and education make Caps For Sale at least somewhat culturally responsive. Maybe she’s worth keeping in the classroom for no other reason than those listed here. Think of the cultural lessons that can be drawn from her life and her life’s work.
Details of Sobodkina’s intriguing life story can be found on the Slobodkina Foundation website.
But what about the book, itself? Isn’t it just a silly little book about some mischievous monkeys? The genius of the story lies in its simplicity. A quick Google or Pinterest or Teachers Pay Teachers search reveals a whole lot of teachers who agree. In just a few minutes, I found cool ideas for Caps For Sale related patterning activities from the blog My Life in Picture Books. On Domestic Serenity, I found math, money, and motor skill activities. Another blog offers a week’s worth of fun stuff which can easily be used for desperate parents trying to figure out how to teach at home during distance learning. My favorite site is Hubbard’s Cupboard which lists cross curricular ideas in math, science, social studies, art, movement, and cooking. Look at all these exciting lessons, and we haven’t even started on the reading tools, yet. I’m a secondary teacher, and even I can notice the opportunities to teach beginning readers with this book.
Maybe you don’t agree. Maybe author life experience plus supplemental activities don’t equal cultural responsiveness. Even so, the sliding glass door Caps For Sale offers is a fun and friendly entry into reading as a safe, engaging place for laughing and learning. What’s outdated about that? Isn’t that exactly the type of book emergent readers need?
When Slobodkina and her assistant Maureen Mullhearn realized the cross-cultural appeal of the peddler and his troublesome monkeys, they continued his story with More Caps For Sale, Circus Caps For Sale, and Caps For Sale and the Mindful Monkeys. Each subsequent story supports and instills lessons on behavior and attitude. In Mindful Monkeys, the peddler learns the lesson of giving second chances and releasing his judgmental predilections. Outdated? I think not.
Reading and studying culturally responsive books is important. No argument here. Being culturally responsible is equally important. When a children’s book has sold over two million copies and has been loved by kids in over a dozen languages for more than seventy years, there must be something universal about it. The peddler doesn’t need to be from a certain culture or represent a certain race. Nor do the monkeys. Nor does the setting. This simple story with its lively repetition and its lovable characters transcends time, place, race, and culture. To write that kind of transcendent story is the epitome of cultural responsibility.
If that’s not enough relevance for you, check out the new Caps For Sale website. You’ll find home-school projects, printables, and contests. There’s a page where children can learn all about the individual monkeys: their names (e.g., Panya and Bansi), their names’ origins (Swahili and Sanskrit), and their favorite foods, personalities, and birth months. Children are invited to write in about people they know with the same names and tell about where they live. Readers can even learn a little about Essie and the peddler. Essie is helpful and thoughtful and creates art that not everyone understands, and that’s okay. The peddler is good-hearted, but easily frustrated and throws fits when things don’t go his way. I’m betting that no matter the culture or race or upbringing, students will find at least one character to relate to.
CapsForSale.org doesn’t stop there. The site also offers information about real monkeys in real habitats around the world.
This silly little monkey tale sparks so many related teaching opportunities, it will never be outdated. Never.
So here’s my challenge to anyone who thinks maybe this old relic of a tale should be kicked to the curb. Read the book to a group of young students. Read it with gusto. Do the voices and the actions. Have the kids join in with the fist shaking, the foot stamping and the hat throwing. At the end of the story, when you hear the laughter from the children and the boisterous requests to read it again, remind us how outdated this book is. Better yet, sit your kindergartners down and explain how this story is not culturally responsive. It was written seventy some years ago. There’s really no place in forward thinking classrooms for books like this one.
I’m sure they’ll understand.
For those teachers feeling pressure to cleanse your shelves of older books, don’t do it. I’m giving you permission to read books for pleasure. If a story does no harm and students enjoy it, why not? If, like Caps For Sale, it has universal appeal and cross-curricular connections and is written by a trail-blazing, female, immigrant artist, even better.
As a secondary ELA teacher, I ask students all the time when they lost their love for reading because most of them have fond memories of childhood storytime. Their answer is always the same. They learned to hate reading when teachers sucked the fun out of it by telling them how they were supposed to interpret books and by forcing every book to be a thing of study rather than a thing of joy. Please, let them like their books and let them read books they like, even if they were written seventy years ago.
Id love for you to enter the discussion on Caps For Sale and any other titles you’re feeling pressure to delete from your curriculum. Leave your thoughts in the comments below.
Be well. Read well. Live well.
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