Oscar the Grouch

I have a confession to make.  I am a stuffed animal fan.  This does not mean that I was one of those chicks with a thousand teddy bears on her bed.  Heck no! I had better things to purchase with my money.  Actually, I’ve never purchased a stuffed animal for myself.  Others have bestowed them upon me as gifts, and I treasure them for life.

Before I begin this story, I have to go back in time.  It wasn’t until I sat down to write that I remembered I had two similar experiences decades apart.  Let me explain.  When I was a small child, around age 3 or 4, I had a teddy bear named Fluffy.  I slept with him every night and played with him during the day.  We were almost inseparable.  It got to the point that Fluffy’s neck got a hole in it and began to leak filling that consisted of tiny white balls.  Occasionally, a few of those balls were found up my nose.  So, my mother decided to do something about it.  She sewed up his neck, and seeing how filthy he became, she washed him.  When I saw this new, clean, teddy bear, I began to cry and declared to my mother, “You killed Fluffy!”  It took a while but eventually, she convinced me that Fluffy was okay, he just had a bath, and his neck was restored.  I began to love him again.

Fast forward almost thirty years.  I am teaching my seventh-grade class.  After realizing that many of them hated writing, I came up with an exercise that required a stuffed animal.  I stole the idea from an elementary school teacher.  It just so happened that I had an Oscar the Grouch stuffed animal.  This Sesame Street character is a member of a cast of Muppets that brings joy to children.  I knew that he needed to be a part of my scheme, so I brought Oscar to school and introduced him to my class as my special friend .  Of course, the girls gushed all over Oscar.  The boys had jokes.  I offered to lend him out to each of them for a weekend, but with a catch, they had to write their activities with Oscar in a journal that I provided.  This was my sneaky way of getting them to write.  I knew I would face challenges because these were junior high students.  You know, the ones that are just beginning to smell themselves (as the older adults used to say).  I didn’t care; I was willing to try something different. 

At the time, I had six classes a day which totaled about 180 students.  Therefore, I had to be strategic in selecting which class would go first.  I chose the one that was most amenable to the idea.  I made a chart listing the children’s names and their assigned weekends.  To jumpstart this project with a high level of enthusiasm, I chose girls for the first two weekends.  I needed to set the tone, and they didn’t disappoint.  From their stories, the kids began to like the idea.  A few tried to outdo the others. Each Monday, I would read the journal notes to the class.  While some of the writing was lazy or non-existent, there were some amazing stories. 

A few students took the babysitting assignment seriously and carried Oscar everywhere they went.  Oscar got to attend a quinceanera, a Latinx tradition celebrating a girl’s 15th birthday. He also attended a wedding, the movies, and Sunday dinner with extended relatives.  Even the boys jumped on board.  Although they were too macho to carry him around, they would make up stuff about their time together.  That didn’t bother me because the whole point was to get them to write.

The project was working as planned until it was time for one of the future comedians in my class to take him home.  After school, Oscar got kicked around like a football by some of the boys.  Despite this, the young man did manage to write a few lines about how he abused Oscar all weekend.  Regardless of how disturbed his writing, he wrote, fulfilling the goal. He and the boys laughed when I read his journal entry while the girls openly sighed in disgust and chastised him.

Next up was this sweet, soft-spoken little girl who waited eagerly for her turn to take Oscar home.  She wanted to give him tender loving care after his fiasco with my class comedian, and boy did he need it. When the young lady returned with Oscar, she was hesitant to hand him over.  She asked me not to be mad and began to preface how her abuela saw that Oscar needed an operation. I was a little nervous because I didn’t know what she meant by “operation.”  When she pulled Oscar out of her bookbag, I smiled because I had a deja vu.  His neck was restuffed so it wouldn’t wobble anymore, and his fur was a vibrant green that had been washed and brushed.  Oscar looked amazing after his surgery.  I told her to thank her grandmother for me. 

At this point, I realized that I needed to put the exercise to rest because it was getting out of hand.  Also, I didn’t want to lose Oscar at the hands of one of my mischievous students.  I took my clean and newly restored Oscar back home, where he belonged.  I have since lost Oscar in one of my many moves up and down the east coast.  Tonight, I will dream about him and Fluffy as I hug my latest teddy bear named Brooklyn.