Sunday, November 1, 2009

What We Don't Tell the Children #4

What is the "What" from the title that the adults don't tell the children?
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8 comments:

  1. AnonymousNovember 2, 2009 at 8:39 AM

    I believe the "what" that the father is not telling his child, is the other side of the blacks nature. The father understands the nature of the blacks and what they are capable of. He knows that his child is not a threat to the blacks so he does not feel that it is necessary to share the other actions of the blacks. If the child was to know, it could ruin his innocence and possibly put fear in him where there was none.

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  2. JosephNovember 2, 2009 at 8:46 PM

    The "what" that the adults don't tell the children is that the bad and dark side of our society. He didn't tell to his son what happened to the couple, who left the place and why they left. He just told her son that they left to find the better place for painting. He did not want that his son knew about the dark side of our society because if his son got to know it his son would lose the purity as the child and would fear the world.

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  3. karen-zhongNovember 2, 2009 at 11:59 PM

    This comment has been removed by the author.

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  4. karen-zhongNovember 3, 2009 at 1:08 AM

    I agree with what Blogstalker and Joseph said. That is true that children’s worlds mostly are naivete. The father doesn’t want his son know too much the dark side of the world too early, just let their world “no problems, no animal attacks another, no pollution, no drugs”. The adults still try their best to provide a peaceful environment to the little children to keep their heart still hot, their world still positive because the real world actually exist some vicious things, we cannot perish it, but we can avoid it.

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  5. AnonymousNovember 4, 2009 at 12:14 AM

    The father doesn't tell his son about bad and dark side of our world, in addition to the reason that he wants his son to continue keeping his purity, the more important reason is that he hope his son can still have positive attitude and hot heart after he grows up and face more and more darkness of the world. I guess this is connotation. He doesn't want his son to contact the world too early, because he wants to give his son about a beautiful dream of this world, so that most beauty can be deep-root in child's mind. Even though his son will face a lot darkness after growing up and entering society, his son may still have positive attitude to the world and don't fear any vicious power.

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  6. GwenNovember 5, 2009 at 12:32 AM

    The "what" in this poem is what the father is protecting his son against -- the negativity that most of the world portrays. He wants to keep his son’s innocence in the sense of where he can still view life optimistically. The couple represents the type of people in society that bring other people down. The father wants to keep his son from knowing about the people like that before his son grows up into the real world. He wants his son to continue living and seeing life as a child, so he doesn’t tell his son where the other black is.

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  7. raisinsklNovember 6, 2009 at 10:30 AM

    What we don't tell the kids in this poem could be that the cats killed the rabbit or that something has happened to one of the black cats (in the last verse the child asks where the other Black Papi is and his father says he doesn't know).

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  8. Daniel FreemanNovember 6, 2009 at 3:03 PM

    nice responses; in a general sense, i think all of these interpretations are valid and insightful; on a literal level, however, only raisinskl begins to touch upon the actual "what" from the story: what happened to one of the black cats?

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