Secondhand Poetry, Firsthand Lesson

The caller introduced herself as Grace Arnold, principal of Balboa Boulevard Magnet School. She said she wanted to thank me for serving as a judge in the first stage of a literary contest sponsored by the National PTA.

My pleasure, I said.

Having disposed of the pleasantries, Arnold promptly got down to business.

Her tone suggested that it was a delicate, awkward matter. There was something she needed to tell me. Something I needed to know . . . that there was, um, a problem with a poem that a third-grader had entered in the contest.

It was titled “Colors of Peace,” by an author who, I’m happy to say, is known to me only by the code A-12. It had impressed me so much that I reprinted it in its entirety in this space Nov. 7, along with my expression of wonder that a third-grader had produced such a work. My unstated suspicion was that the work of a precocious sixth-grader had somehow been mislaid among the third-graders. But because Balboa is a magnet school for gifted students, it seemed possible that a budding Walt Whitman was hard at work.

Instead, Arnold told me that A-12 didn’t really write “Colors of Peace.” He or she had copied it. Save for a few words, it was virtually identical to another poem, “The Paint Box,” that has been widely circulated in synagogues.

Plagiarism by a third-grader. This is the kind of news that inspires a cringe of empathetic embarrassment. Instead of Whitman, it seemed that a budding Sen. Joseph Biden might be at work.

*

The most innocuous of stories often causes the most trouble. An innocent little column about a dance club for senior citizens enraged the subjects, in part because the headline identified them as “elderly.” And now this. A celebration of elementary-school verse has inadvertently uncovered yet another example of our eroding values.

I told Principal Arnold that I wouldn’t refer to this as a scandal. The question for me is how to correct this mess. It just doesn’t seem nice to rake a third-grader over the coals, even an anonymous one who produces counterfeit poetry.

Truth is, I was tempted to ignore the matter. Then the mail came. Without saying so directly, Laurie Glickman of Calabasas persuaded me that readers had a right to know.

Glickman, a member of the Stephen S. Wise Temple, provided a copy of “The Paint Box” as it appears in a book entitled “My Shalom My Peace,” a collection of artwork and poetry by Jewish and Arab children that was published in the mid-1970s. “The Paint Box” was written by 13-year-old Tali Shurek of Beer Sheva, Israel.

I had a paint-box-- Each color glowing with delight; I had a paint-box with colors Warm and cool and bright I had no red for wounds and blood, I had no black for an orphaned child, I had no white for the face of the dead I had no yellow for burning sands, I had orange for joy and life, I had green for buds and blooms, I had blue for clear bright skies, I had pink for dreams and rest I sat down and painted Peace. *

By now you may be wondering how this third-grader came to have such good taste. When a teacher questioned A-12 about the poem, Arnold said, the child matter-of-factly talked about how Mom helped with the project. The child told how they found the poem in a book and “changed a few words around.”

The child, Arnold said, seemed utterly unaware that anybody had done anything wrong.

Arnold has since spoken with Mom.

“We had a long talk. . . . She said it was all her fault. She was very apologetic. I suggested to her she write a letter to the PTA and some of the temples that have been calling me.”

Arnold said she thought the child’s mother might be “very defensive.” Instead, Arnold said, she was contrite, even “humiliated.”

Was it a case of a parent so absorbed in her child’s academic success that she felt compelled to cheat? Arnold doesn’t think so.

“She didn’t really explain what her motivation was,” the principal said. “She just used bad judgment. She’s not a bad person. . . . I felt very good about the mother’s reaction--I felt she was being very responsible.”

The experience, Arnold said, is a reminder of how parents may become overzealous and how teachers need to impress upon students the necessity for doing their own work. The youngster we know as A-12--”a very, very bright child”--probably “could have come up with something fabulous” without help, Arnold added.

So what began as a poetry exercise evolved into a morality play.

According to Arnold, Mom has promised to tell her child that what she did was wrong.

“It turned out,” the principal said, “to be a lesson for the mother.”