Are You Smarter Than A Sixth Grader?

His name was Jeff Franklin. He was the first of a pair of student teachers who came into our class when I was in sixth grade. This was a very loosey-goosey classroom in Boulder, Colorado in the mid-seventies. There was no prescribed curriculum, and we were encouraged to follow our muse. Jeff was well-suited for such an environment, as he saw all us pre-teens as guinea pigs for his polite social experiment.
In the fall of 1973, this included exposing our fertile young minds to the conflict that was happening in the Middle East. He did this by asking us to prepare as journalists to interview Moshe Dayan and Anwar Sadat. We wrote up our questions, and Jeff kept pushing us to get to the root of the conflict. Then at the end of the week, he appeared first with an eye patch as Dayan, and later with a pipe as Sadat. He never let any personal preference or allegiance show as he embodied his characters, and gave very informed and direct answers to our queries. When it was all said and done, Jeff asked us to go back and write down what we had learned. The articles that we wrote varied widely in terms of editorial viewpoint, but we were all completely engaged. And in teacher-speak, it doesn't get much better than that.
Thirty-five years later, I find myself staring at the headlines and listening to talking heads go on about the conflict in the Gaza strip. I know exactly where they are talking about, because I learned about it in sixth grade. I have Jeff Franklin to thank for my awareness of that region and the history of war that surrounds it. But now that I'm a grownup, I don't claim to understand it any better. Maybe that's expecting too much, but I still wish someone could explain it to me like I was a sixth-grader.