672: No Fair!
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. David, so what problem was this supposed to solve? The teachers were trying to get the kids to stop taddling. And why was that so important? Because it's a pre-K classroom and it's constant there. Right. I should say, by the way, that you are David Kestenbaum, one of our producers, our managing editor right now, and this classroom is your kid's classroom, right? Yeah, both of them went there. I still don't get, it seems like kids taddling on each other is just a fact of pre-K. It is, but you've got 20-something kids. I mean, it's hard being one parent with two kids doing it. Imagine you're in a classroom with like 20 kids, and if they bring it to you as a teacher, all these little injustices, you've got to get involved in all these cases. Right. And it's just a time suck. Yeah. It's just a time suck. One of the teachers had this great idea. She took a tissue box, hung it on the wall, and then took this plastic phone receiver and hung it in it and said something like, "That's the tattle phone. Tell it to the phone." And I thought it was just brilliant. And I just want to say, this is a place that loves kids. I would go to pick up my son Max and I would have to wait because he would want to hug every single teacher. And I'd go to get Auggie, our older kid, and he'd be like, "I need five minutes. I'm in the middle of something." Like, they're just going to stay longer. I mean, I get choked up thinking about this place. And I love the idea of the tattle phone, just as like, as a vessel for all the little injustices that go on every day. And I wanted to hear what was said into it, like these little three-year-olds, four-year-olds talking into this plastic phone. Okay. And I should say, this is the part of the story. I knew very well what happens next. We asked if we could put a phone in the classroom that would record the tattle. The day care was fine with that. I reached out to the parents. I didn't know how they were going to feel about us recording their kids at like the worst moment of the day. But every single one of them said, "Yes." Some of them said, "Please, yes, do this." So we got a phone. It was this chunky, red phone, kind of like 1980s style. We had it set up to record, and we needed an outgoing message for it. And that is where I stepped in. Hey there, you've reached the tattle phone.
Transcription truncated.