Wednesday, January 19, 2011

The Milkmaid

My language classes began last week, and things are off to a good start. We're quite the mix of students - six from the U.S., four from Brazil, one from Germany, and a Dutch gal. A dozen in total, plus two alternating professors (both Madrileños, a woman and a man). January is the "intensive" section of the course, in which we spend twenty hours a week together working on our grammar.

One recent grammar exercise involved reading a certain children's fable to work on our verb tenses. However, the content of the story was far more interesting than the grammar. It's called, La Lechera - "The Milkmaid." And it goes like this...

The milkmaid walked happily to the market to sell her milk. Along the way she was making plans:

"Once I sell this milk, I'll buy some chickens that'll give lots of eggs. The eggs will hatch, the chicks will grow big and, one day, I'll sell all the big chickens. With that money I'll buy some piglets, fatten 'em up, and sell 'em. Then I'll buy calves. When they get big, I'll sell 'em for beef. Then I can buy a big house, nice clothes, jewelry..."

With these happy thoughts in her mind, the milkmaid walked faster toward the market... just fast enough not to see a tree root sticking up out of the ground. She tripped and spilled her entire bucket of milk. And along with the milk spilled all her grand plans, too.


The moral of the story: Children should not waste too much energy on their elaborate dreams for the future, because something will probably happen to interrupt them from coming to pass.

After the story, our professor, Juan, asked us how many of us knew the story from our own cultures. Nobody had known it before that, and he was quite surprised. I explained how this is not a popular sentiment in U.S. culture, where we generally tell our kids to dream big and never give up on their hopes. (I couldn't help but think of the constant stream of "your dreams will come true!" songs played at Disney World.) One of my Brazilian classmates said it's the same there - any boy or girl is told, "You could become the president one day." Juan responded, oh, that's not good, eh? It would be better to be more realistic, wouldn't it?

What do you think? Is it a good thing that we tell our kids to dream big dreams, even though the vast majority of people in the U.S. will live relatively "normal" lives and never achieve their grandest dreams?