One of my favorite movies is Roald Dahl's "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory." While channel surfing on a boring weekend as a young lad, I would always stop on a channel if the original 1971 movie was playing. I loved the story, the sets, and the music. I consider Pure Imagination one of the greatest songs of all time. One of the other things I have enjoyed about this story is how my understanding of it has changed as I have grown older.
After watching the new Broadway production of Matilda one year (another favorite of mine), I decided I was going to start every year reading Roald Dahl as part of our guided reading groups. I'm not even sure guided reading is a thing anymore, but the way we did it at our school was by splitting up students according to reading levels and Dibels scores. Each of my student groups ended up reading either "Matilda," "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," or "The Twits."
My main focus during these reading groups was to help them learn how to read and understand punctuation and dialogue. I would give them specific characters to read and they would have to use expression to act out their parts. Another thing we focused on was the parts of the story like the setting, characters, and theme. We talked about the elements of a story arc like the exposition, conflict, climax, and resolution.
One interesting thing that stuck with me when we were reading "Charlie and Chocolate Factory" was our discussion about the protagonist and antagonist. The Protagonist is somewhat easy to understand, but it wasn't until we really thought about the antagonist that we realized it wasn't even a person. The antagonist in this book is not Willy Wonka, but it's the Factory. Every room had something that tempted a kid to throw caution to the wind and prevent them from becoming the heir of the chocolate factory.
Each character has a nasty behavior they manifest like Augustus Gloop (Gluttony), Violet (Pride), and Mike Taevee (Sloth). All of the characters are memorable in their own way, but Veruca Salt holds a special place in our hearts because I think we all know that type of person and have had to deal with them at one point.
When I think of Veruca Salt I think of an entitled girl who wants her daddy to give her everything she wants without having to work for it or earn it in any way. This is why I think, educators are the Veruca Salt of working professionals. I gave away the plot in the title of this post, but I'm a sucker for exposition I suppose.
The additional point I wanted to make is that the machine, which is public education, is merely enticing them to act on their worst desires. Every year they want more, but what are they willing to do for what they want? Work more days or hours? Improve student outcomes? Before we cave into Veruca's screams of "I want it now!" we should first ask, what are you willing to do to in order to receive the golden egg (or squirrel, for the book lovers)? If we keep giving into demands without getting anything in return, our education system will surely end up in the same place as Veruca.
To end on a positive note...
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