The Cat, Green Eggs and Dr Seuss

The Cat in the Hat has recently celebrated his fiftieth birthday. Here is a little on Dr Seuss’s influence.

“Think left and think right

and think low and think high

Oh, the THINKS you can think up if only you try!”.

These final lines of Oh The Thinks you Can Think! could well apply to Theodore Seuss Geisel himself. There seems nothing too bizarre or amazing for him to “think up”, either as Dr Seuss or his other pseudonym, Theo Le Sieg (“Geisel” backwards – when someone else illustrates his texts).

Dr Seuss has made a deep impression on so many people. Among adults, if it happens they can recite any children’s book it will be a Dr Seuss, usually one of his later political ones – The Lorax or The Butter Battle Book for instance. The rhymes make them easy to remember, and the wit and wordplay as well of course. If there is also a message they appreciate as adults, they are even more likely to remember some or all of it when they become adults or “obsolete children”.

Of course he also makes a deep impression on children as well. It appears that out of every four children born in the US receives a Dr Seuss title as their first book. This didn’t apply to my children own two. Rebecca and Ralph are Australian not American, but also they had heaps of other books before their first Dr Seuss. At the time I thought of the Dr Seuss as marvellous for learning to read on, but not so suitable for children younger than four – certainly not as their sole diet.

However these two children did know some Dr Seuss, and could recognise his style. Rebecca often dictated her stories to us. At 4-11 (4 years, 11 months she dictated a story which included the sentence ‘Owls sleep in the day, and hoot up their hootings in the night’. When I read the story straight back to her she laughed and said “That sounds like something in Dr Seuss”. At six she said she was planning to be a children’s author when she grew up, and would write, among other titles, “Dr Seuss’s Awake Book” (in contradistinction to Dr Seuss’s Sleep Book) .This was the Dr Seuss title they had first, and the one we knew best. Ralph at 4-3 did not articulate the style as Rebecca had, but looking through he was chanting similar nonsense rhymes in the same rhythm, but deliberately using different words.

Ralph was able to use the concept of a “word” as early as 2-6. In a joking authorial-intrusive question, Dr Seuss asks “Fish in a tree?/ How can that be?” Ralph was hearing Hop on Pop for the first time in about a year. He gave the question serious consideration, and rather than just laughing or saying it was impossible, he replied “It’s just a word!”.

Dr Seuss wanted to make learning to read, fun. The Dick and Jane readers weren’t, so he wrote “The Cat in the Hat” using only 223 words chosen from of a list of 350 first learned words. Later he took a bet that he couldn’t write one in 50 words, but managed – “Green Eggs and Ham”. My two, as so many others, found this a wonderful starting place in the reading process. At first it was just a hilarious romp.

Ralph first heard it at 2-4. He was delighted and laughed and laughed, especially at the car: “Would you? Could you? In a car? Eat them! Eat them! Here they are. I would not, could not in a car” The first person narrator – the “I” – is sitting on the car’s bonnet while Sam holds up the plate of green food. Ralph said “sit up” to both readings and then “might break” to the tree bending under the car’s weight on the next opening. Also “funny railway” as it runs from point to point over a chasm (with the car on top).

A month later (with numerous readings in between), Ralph (2-5) was eating his meal in a cardboard carton on the floor. Rebecca (5-8) started a game: “would you like it in a box?” Ralph: “I no like it in a box!” This went on and on, with Rebecca asking the questions, Ralph giving the replies.

Rebecca had read it right through at 5-8. She wanted to know how the eggs and ham always landed back on the plate however far off they’d flown, and remarked that he hadn’t eaten any when he said he liked it. These queries were not serious because she knew that the only answer is that it’s nonsense, and you can’t expect logic in it. She loved it and her picking out problems in the pictures didn’t in any way affect her enjoyment.

Ralph demonstrated how well it works for pre-reading practice at 4-5. “Why are all those words the same?” to the lists of “I will not” pointing to the words on the page. Then “But they’re not all the same” as he notices the different endings after “I do not like them…”

At 6-2 he started to join in with my reading, at first picking a word to read, then the last word on each line – pointing to it, not reciting. At 6.7 he came into our bed one Saturday morning, offering to read it to us. “I’ve been practising it before you woke up” He read it all alone, and almost perfect. At “Would you, could you, in the dark?” he remarked “I’ve never seen blue dark!” I said “Well you couldn’t see anything if he’d made it all black” Ralph: “I’d have made it black, with just that end of the tunnel showing up, and the words white”.

In short, the wonderful Dr Seuss added to Rebecca and Ralph’s life-long love of words, and also, through the nonsense, honed their ability to reason logically – as well as helping them learn to read. I think Dr Seuss himself would be pleased with this outcome. “Oh the thinks you can think”.

The Cat, Green Eggs and Dr Seuss