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.In the Schubart/Mayo face-offs for the Webelo blue ribbon—two so close that a third was needed to determine the winner—it wasn’t one of the adult judges who finally awarded the victory to Steve Schubart.It was Brian Mayo.Even in that third race, Mayo’s and Schubart’s cars seemed to cross the finish line simultaneously, and the judges were about to insist on a fourth race.But with a voice as filled with enthusiasm as when he’d first entered the hall with his car and his hopes, Mayo called out the words that symbolized the spirit of the Derby:“Good race! Steve won!”ISAAC AND GUS SURVIVE GIRL WORLDISAAC AND GUS have been to Girl World and back, and don’t seem any worse for the wear.Cassidy, too.And Dillon? Well, Dillon L’Heureux is only three, so he was happy just to be along for the ride.Isaac Prescott, Gus Yost, and Cassidy Kearns, however, are graybeards at four and five.They’ve been.socialized.They do.boy things.Things with trucks.And tractors.A stick is a sword; a fallen branch is a bazooka.Ah, but there they were at the Lincoln Cooperative Pre-school, at the wedding of the dog and the bear—a.k.a.Girl World.Last month’s ceremony was, without question, among the higher peaks of the alpine ridgeline that makes up the frenetic preschool social whirl here in Lincoln.One would never have guessed that it was only the second time that preschool teacher Kerry Malloy had coordinated the nuptials of a pair of stuffed animals.(The first, of course, occurred when Malloy was five.)It was also a study in just how different boys and girls are.Consider, for a moment, the preparations.The bride’s entourage began arriving at 8:30 in the morning, ninety minutes before the double-ring ceremony.Among the first to arrive was flower girl Bridgette Bartlett, five, wearing a snow-white satin gown with matching shoes.Right behind her was Savannah Mayo, also five, decked out in a hunter-green dress with a scooped neck and poufed ballroom sleeves.Meanwhile, the groom’s pals came in T-shirts and jeans.Briefly Isaac and Dillon had bow ties clipped to their collars, but they didn’t last long.As soon as the moms’ backs were turned, the bow ties were tossed away like roadkill.And while the girls immersed themselves in the massive amounts of costume jewelry and bridal accoutrements donated by a local bridal boutique.the boys hightailed it to the sand table, where Isaac ran the plow and Gus managed the crane.“We’re building a road,” Isaac explained earnestly.The big stuffed dog—the bride—had the ministrations of all the girls in the class.They clipped jewelry to her large, flouncy ears; they placed a veil upon her head.She wore faux pearls and opals and rhinestones.She was offered a gauzy blusher.But the bear, who was merely the lowly groom, was completely ignored by the boys.Finally, Kerry Malloy used a safety pin to attach a bow tie to his woolly neck.The two animals were formally wed by Nancy Stevens, a duly elected justice of the peace.There was a brief moment of gender confusion when she took the animals aside for their premarital consultation, since it is usually the men in this world who act like the dogs.But Stevens rallied, and started the service.First came the bride, escorted by my own four-year-old daughter, Grace (wearing an ankle-length ivory gown, rich with embroidered flowers and lace).Next came the groom, carried by young Cassidy Kearns, four.Grace carried the bride with the solemnity I’d expect her to show if she’d come across the Holy Grail in the nearby sandpit.Cassidy clutched the groom as if it were a giant, bloodsucking leech he’d found in a swamp.Now, I don’t mean to imply the boys were graceless.Cassidy certainly rallied, serenading the bride with an a cappella rendition of the Beatles classic “All You Need Is Love,” in which he made up for his lack of accompaniment with unfettered enthusiasm.And, momentarily, the boys and the girls were truly of one mind: When Stevens informed the bear and the dog they could kiss, Grace and Cassidy cautiously brought the stuffed snouts of the two animals together, and then dropped the creatures as if they were radioactive.Any way you look at it, however, it was a great event.Our planet is, in far too many ways, a man’s world.But for one brief and glorious instant this spring, the Lincoln preschoolers were able to glimpse.Girl World.INSPIRING TEACHERS MAKE EDUCATION WORTH EVERY PENNYI WAS NEVER scared of the principal when I was in elementary school.The cultural notion that the principal is a disciplinary ogre—an image that has filled children’s literature as diverse as Roald Dahl’s Matilda and a good number of the Arthur books by Marc Brown—was not exactly lost on me, but it was always slightly foreign.The truth is, I don’t think any kids at Northeast Elementary School in Stamford, Connecticut, were scared of the principal when I was there in the late 1960s and early 1970s.I should be precise: Nobody was scared of the assistant principal.There might have been students frightened by the principal, though I’d wager that was largely because he had the intimidating two letters “Dr.” before his name.But the assistant principal—in my memory, at least, a heavyset man with a thick shock of hair that was just starting to gray and the sort of boxy eyeglasses that Hollywood always places on the Mission Control scientists in Gemini- and Apollo-era space movies—was always called Mr.D.Mr.D.was Joe Dinnan.And Joe Dinnan knew how to talk to children about the things that mattered to them with a knowledge that in hindsight can honestly be considered extraordinary.It was Mr.D.who recommended to me in the school library that I read Johnny Tremain in the third grade and then, two years later, remembered my interest in the Revolutionary War and suggested April Morning.It was Mr.D.who could mediate a dispute with the potential to grow ugly, a hallway debate in which one group of kids thought Don McLean’s “American Pie” was the best song ever written and another contingent was arguing with equal fervor it was the Jackson Five’s “I’ll Be There.”Mr.D.understood the fact that the New York Mets were in the World Series in 1969 was an event of legitimate historical importance, and we should be witness to it.He allowed my class to watch the game on television—yes, Virginia, once the World Series was actually played in daylight so children could see it, too—even though we were supposed to be learning fractions.And, what is probably the greatest gift any teacher or administrator can give to a child, he knew how to make us feel special.When, somehow, I would find myself completely alone on the playground during recess or lunch, separate from the running and the goofing and the noise, it was always Mr.D.who would track down a baseball glove, hand me mine, and patiently toss a softball with me until it was time to go in.Town meeting is fast approaching, and either on Monday night or sometime on Tuesday, many of us will be staring at the rows of numbers that comprise our local school budgets.Sometimes, it’s easy to forget that behind all those figures are flesh-and-blood teachers and administrators who, more times than not, are inspiring and impressive and wise.The principal at the Lincoln elementary school, Bill Jesdale, is a lot like Mr.D.I understand on occasion he is even called Mr.J
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