Imagine if you can: You have been seated in a restaurant for nearly an hour before you notice that children are present. How can this be? You`ve heard no screaming, crying, whining, complaining. You`ve seen no running, crawling, playing peek-a-boo and hide-and-seek around and under the tables. Your quiet conversation has not been disrupted by the continual scolding and idle threats of parents.
It could happen. In fact, if Paula Person has her way, we may one day be able to sit at the very same table where children are eating, without getting any on us.
In a recent visit to James Tavern in Northbrook, where Person was conducting a review of the children`s etiquette course she teaches there, nine graduates, ages 5 to 14, actually:
— Placed their dinner napkins neatly on their laps instead of tucking them in under their chins.
— Knew which utensils to use for each course.
— Broke their bread instead of cutting it with a knife.
— Held their spoons gracefully with index finger and thumb instead of clutching them in a fist.
— Sat up straight instead of slouching or hunching over, even while eating soup.
— Placed their used soup spoons on the plates, or liners, under their bowls instead in the bowls, from which spoons are likely to fall to the floor when the table is cleared.
— Cut their food with their knives in their right hands and their forks in the left, then set the knives at the sides of their plates and switched their forks to their right hand before eating.
— Unobtrusively pulled their used napkins through a circle formed by their left index finger and thumb and laid it next to their dinner plates to signal that they were finished.
As the class broke up, the boys rose first, pushed their chairs back to the table and assisted the girls by pulling out their chairs for them.
All nine children were neatly dressed, softspoken and rather more confident and comfortable than the usual run of savages who infest family restaurants.
Before the class had taken their seats, those children who hadn`t met each other before introduced themselves with a smile, the girls extending their right hands to the boys. ”Hello,” one said. ”I`m Jill Adler.” The others introduced themselves as Caryn Gillis, Thomas Gillis, Minette Goldstein, Joseph Lentino, Kay Lee Lentino, Terri Maceda, Justin Smoot and Karen Templer.
”Very good! Very good!” Person said, repeatedly. A professional teacher, she is very high on positive reinforcement, as well as on repetition of things to be learned and on demonstrations. She even has written some songs the children learn:
Hello! Hello!
I`m glad to say hello!
I look at you
And smile at you,
And then I say hello!
Hello! Hello!
To people that I see.
It is such fun to see someone
To say hello to meeeeee.
”I use that with younger children,” Person explained after a rousing demonstration chorus. ”For the teenagers I don`t.” To inspire correctness in the delicate art of napkin unfolding and utensil holding (if not in the delicate art of matching pronoun with antecedent) she has written yet another song:
My index finger and my thumb,
It`s very important to me
I use it when I sit down to eat,
And I use it constantly.
My mum and dad are proud of me
To see me eat so perfectly.
”Now what is the first thing Mrs. Person said we do when we go into a restaurant?” she said in the sing-song cadence of the pedagogue after everyone was seated. ”Put our napkin on our lap–isn`t it? And what two fingers do we use?”
”The index finger and the thumb,” the children reply.
”Very good! The index finger and the thumb. So let`s pick up our left hand, and these are dinner napkins, so they`re going to go where? Half . . . way . . . across . . . your . . . lap! Very good!”
At the end of the class, the children duly affirmed–with a little prompting from Person–that they were happy to have learned some manners. There was but one small cavil. ”I kind of feel a little embarrassed,” said Thomas Gillis, 9, ”when you go out and it`s someplace kind of fancy and you know all this stuff and your friends don`t. It`s a little embarrassing to be right next to them or something.”
But Thomas Gillis also has learned to remain silent in the face of such adversity. It is basic to good manners, after all, that others be made to feel comfortable. Even those who eat soup with a teaspoon and peas with a knife.
His teacher learned table manners, the uncomfortable way, as a pupil at Notre Dame Academy, a private girls boarding school in Tyngsboro, Mass. ”It was very strict,” Person said. ”We had a nun sit with us at all three meals, and we were graded on our table manners. And when I went to Marymount College, in Tarrytown, N.Y., we were always served our lunch and our dinner with white tablecloths and napkins. Coming from a strict Bostonian home, we ate very formally there, too.”
Person, who now lives in Winnetka, majored in education and taught kindergarten in Europe when she and her husband, a West Point graduate, were stationed there. She became a local Miss Manners in 1980, advertising on supermarket bulletin boards and in a brochure published by the Winnetka Community House, where she taught the first classes.
”I saw that our country had broken down in discipline back in the 1960s and early `70s. So I thought if I could come up with a program that would be happy and involved with music, and not with all the role playing that I grew up with, there would be a need for it.
”Our country has changed. We`re less formal now. But it doesn`t make any difference. Good manners builds self-confidence. It`s the self-image that I`m interested in. And communication and consideration. It doesn`t make any difference if you`re having a country meal out on the porch at home or a formal dinner in the dining room; you will feel confident if your posture is lovely, if you can look in the person`s eyes and talk with the person by opening your mouth.
”Lifestyles have changed too. People have moved so much. You have people from Texas living in Chicago, and maybe they`ve never had a formal meal, but they certainly have lovely meals that they serve in their homes, and it`s knowing what to do in any situation that lets you enjoy people and let`s you enjoy the food. So social manners is not just a bunch of rules you follow to be highfalutin; it`s something you`re doing to be considerate of other people. So that`s what I like to get across to the children.”
Person calls her course the Children`s Spoon, a name devised by her daughter (who recently started a similar course in London). ”Mother, it`s a natural,” she had said. ”You`re teaching children and you`re doing table manners.”
But the classes, which meet weekly for six consecutive Saturdays (total cost $65), have ventured beyond the breakfast nook, dining room and restaurant.
In any situation, the children are taught to sit like little ladies and gentlemen. ”Girls: Bend your knees and ease into your chair. To be beautiful, sit up straight with your back against the chair. Push up your torso! Cross your legs at the ankles and keep your feet flat on the floor. Place your hands loosely in your lap. Boys: Bend your knees and ease into your chair. To be handsome, sit with your back against the chair. Push up your torso! Cross one leg over the other with your ankle resting on your knee. Place one hand on your ankle and the other on the knee. Girls and boys: You always show interest in the other person by looking at your friend and listening during a conversation.”
”The torso is a bugaboo,” Person said. ”If I came in here and slumped, I`d lose it all, and everybody wants to look handsome or be beautiful. So we have exercises for the torso. I even have a little song called the Torso song: Torso! Torso!
I must push up on my torso.
”You look so much nicer sitting up than slouching, and it is a discipline. I tell the children to go in every room in the house and sit in chairs correctly and look at themselves in the mirror to see what a difference sitting up makes. The children really improve. And the little ones all want to be taller; so when I have them sit up straight and say, `You just grew 3 inches,` they love that.”
Person`s pupils also learn telephone manners. There is no picking up the phone and growling, ”Who is this?” Instead they are taught: ”Answer the phone with a happy `Hello!` When receiving a call for someone at home, say,
`Just one minute, please,` and lay the receiver down gently. Find the person, and tell him he has a phone call.
”If the phone call is for someone not at home, say, `May I take a message, please?` Younger children may simply say, `Just one minute, please,` and bring the person taking care of you to the phone. Older children taking a message, write down the name of the person taking a message and the telephone number. Repeat the number to the person. It is nice to include the date and time the message came in.”
The children practice introductions, which also have become less formal than in the past. Instead of, ”May I present . . .?` they say, ”I would like you to meet . . .” or ”Hello, Miss Owl. Miss Owl, this is my mother, Mrs. Bird. Mother, this is my teacher, Miss Owl.”
”Notice, you always tell something about the person you are introducing,” Person points out. ”This helps a person feel at ease and begin a conversation.”
I asked some parents whose children have not been enrolled in any such class what they thought.
Said one: ”I was happy enough when my kids finally learned not to put the glass of milk at the edge of the table where they invariably knocked it off on the floor.”
Person`s pupils do learn that, and more. They learn how to set the table
–Person says ”design” the table–with everything (plate, goblet, cup and utensils) in the proper place.
”Still,” said the skeptical parent. ”It doesn`t seem to me that parents should have to send their kids to a class to learn table manners.”
Perhaps not, but it`s hard to dispute that Person`s pupils, who have learned to say, ”Excuse me,” when they leave the table, are something of an improvement over those who announce, ”I gotta go to the bathroom,” and explain, by number, exactly what they intend to do there.
The next Children`s Spoon begins Saturday at James Tavern, 1775 Lake Cook Rd., Northbrook. Children 4 to 5 years old meet at 11 a.m., 6 to 8 years old at 1 p.m., 9 to 14 at 2:30 p.m. For reservations call 498-2020. Saturday classes begin at Marshall Field & Co.`s State Street store March 22, and after-school classes (3:30, 4:30 and 5:30 p.m.) begin March 13 at Fields`
Oakbrook store. For reservations call Fields at 781-4482. For information on future classes, write The Children`s Spoon, P.O. Box 148, Winnetka, Ill. 60093.
