Kindergartners stump a professor, learn about college

How many clowns are there in the world? How do slugs pull their eyes into their bodies? What’s the meaning of life?

Those are a few of the questions a group of Kindergartners from Madison’s Glenn Stephens Elementary School used to stump political science professor Ken Mayer in one of his classes last week

“I’m getting taken to school by some kindergartners,” Mayer told the 18 young students, who wore pink name tags and packed the worn wooden chairs in the first two rows of 125 Agricultural Hall, filling in the few seats not occupied by the hundreds of UW–Madison students in Mayer’s introductory course on American politics.

It’s the fifth time that Mayer has welcomed the Glenn Stephens Elementary students into his introductory political science class. The tradition started when Mayer’s daughter was in teacher Josh Reineking’s class, and Mayer and Reineking thought a visit to a university classroom might make for a fun field trip for her 5- and 6-year-old classmates.

The school is just four miles from Bascom Hall, but Reineking says many students know the university only as a place where the Badgers play football or basketball.

“What a cool and unique experience for the kindergarten kids and college students,” says Reineking, a 2001 UW–Madison graduate. “How many kindergarten kids can say they are going to college today? And how many college students are going to have a group of kids, 5 and 6 years old, come in to ask their professor interesting questions?”

The Kindergartners learn that college students are going to school, doing reading, writing and math, just like they do in kindergarten, he says. They also learn about differences between the two types of schools — while Kindergartners can walk down the hall to the library, college students have to walk to another building to find books, he says.

“It’s about getting the kids out in the community and seeing what the university really is instead of just hearing about it,” Reineking says.

The day before the Kindergartners’ trip to Agricultural Hall, Mayer visited them at their school to talk about what he does — and how it’s different from the teaching Reineking does — and encourage the students to come up with questions to ask him the next day.

“Can they come up with a question that someone who’s so smart as a college professor won’t be able to answer?” Mayer says of their assignment. “That becomes part of the project.”

Mayer spent about 20 minutes at the beginning of his class — preceding a lecture on economic and social policy — trying to answer questions on everything from how many people there are in the world (his guess: 5.5 billion; right answer: about 6.8 billion) to what would be on Mayer’s final exam for the course.

That question got a round of applause and cheers from the college students in the room, even though Mayer didn’t deliver an answer they could use.

“I honestly don’t know yet,” Mayer said. “That’s another big-time stump.”

Chancellor Biddy Martin welcomed the Kindergartners after Mayer introduced her as the principal of the university.

The Kindergartners asked Martin whether college students get recess and whether college would involve math.

“Math is really fun once you get the hang of it,” Martin told them, “You’re going to love math later in life. Do you believe me?”

A few of the Kindergartners were holdouts, holding up their hands saying they didn’t believe her.

Mayer says he hopes the experience can be an eye opening one for the Kindergartners who otherwise might not have exposure to a college setting. That could be a catalyst for them to seek opportunities for higher education as they get older, he says.

“If we can get them to have an experience, that they’ve been to a university, it’s a way of planting a seed,” Mayer says. “There may not be a serious upside to this, but there’s no downside. It’s just a lot of fun.”

The kindergarten students finished their visit with a walk through campus and lunch at the Memorial Union. Sarah Galanter-Guziewski, principal of Glenn Stephens Elementary, says a trip like the one Reineking’s class took to UW–Madison can stay in students’ heads well through high school.

“The next time the students meet a university student, they have the background knowledge to connect with from their trip,” she says. “Every experience is valuable.”