David Spates "Therefore I Am" Published Oct. 12, 2004

Schoolhouse Rock's knife cuts both ways

My brain has been keeping me up at nights, and "Schoolhouse Rock" is to blame. It's hard enough to sleep some evenings, but when you add a cumulative 70 choruses of "Conjunction Junction, What's Your Function?" and "Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, Get Your Adverbs Here," it's darn near impossible.

For those of you older than 40 or younger than 20 who don't know what "Schoolhouse Rock" is, allow me to enlighten you on what is arguably the benchmark television experience for the us, the members of Generation X and Generation Y. (Who slapped us with those horrible monikers anyway? It probably was the Baby Boomers. They didn't want any generation to have a cooler nickname than theirs.) Anywho, "Schoolhouse Rock" was a series of three-minute educational vignettes that aired between Saturday morning cartoons during the 1970s and early 1980s. They combined animation, fun melodies and catchy lyrics designed to teach kids lessons about history, science, grammar and math. They worked, too. To this day, I can't recite the Constitution's Preamble without putting it to the "Schoolhouse Rock" melody, but the point is that I can, to this day, recite the Preamble.

A year or so ago, the entire "Schoolhouse Rock" series came out on DVD, and I snatched it up quicker than you can count to 100 by five. I thought my kids, particularly my then-2-year-old daughter, would love it, plus I'd enjoy watching them and taking a trip down cartoon memory lane to a time when the toughest choice in life was deciding which cereal to nosh on between episodes of "Scooby-Doo" and "Superfriends." It took my daughter nearly a year to warm up to it, but now that's she's 3 going on 15, she can't get enough "Schoolhouse Rock."

My nearly-2-year-old son enjoys it too, despite the fact that he doesn't know an interjection from a circulatory system. He just likes the tunes and the animation.

And for me, there's nothing more fun than visiting with an old friend, but after a while, even with the best of friends, you want them to just go home. Just leave. Too much of a good thing is exactly that -- too much.

Our family's typical evening includes 45 minutes or so of watching a kid's movie before Anna and Phil go to bed. It settles them down after a long day, and it serves as a signal that bedtime is approaching. When the movie's over, it's time to hit the sack.

Phil speaks a few words, but he's not old enough to pick pre-bed movie titles, so by default Anna gets to make the call. If I were a bookie laying odds, I'd say 5-7 she'll go with "Schoolhouse Rock" on any given night. That translates into preposition overload for yours truly.

"Nine or ten of them do most all of the work. (Of, on, to, with, in, from, by, far, at, over, across) and many others do their job, which is simply to connect their noun or pronoun object to some other word in the sentence."

By themselves, those lyrics aren't too catchy, but when you add an infectious jingle and a toe-tapping rhythm, you've got a recipe for parental sleeplessness. It's no surprise the tunes hook listeners they way they do. "Schoolhouse Rock" was created by, get this, an advertising executive. Is it any wonder those little ditties bounce around in my head until 3 a.m.? The same industry that inflicted America with "hold the pickles, hold the lettuce, special orders don't upset us" also gave us "Lovely Lady Liberty, with her book of recipes, and the finest one she's got is the great American melting pot." While my body's trying to get a little shuteye, my brain is running an infinite repeat of lyrics that describe how a magnet is used to create electricity.

Don't get me wrong. I want my kids to learn as much as they can about as wide a range of topics as possible. Knowing a little about a lot of things is a good quality -- just ask Ken Jennings. It's working pretty well for him. It's just that sometimes the tools of education are also the tools of insomnia.

Maybe I should try counting sheep. By fives. Or sevens. Or fours. Or maybe I should sing a song about gravity.

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David Spates is a Knoxville resident and Crossville Chronicle contributor whose column is published each Tuesday. He can be reached at davespates@chartertn.net.