A local children’s ministry is doing ads for a special outreach on the talk radio station to which I generally listen.

From what I know of the ministry, it’s a good one that does fine, much-needed work.

But I find their promotion very odd.

They’re raising funds to get kids backpacks and supplies for school. Their ad features a kid getting his stuff together at the start of the year. He finds out his mother hasn’t bought him a new backpack, and he pitches a fit, saying all the kids will laugh at him because he’s using last year’s backpack.

Maybe I’m a heartless jerk, but there are a lot of things in the world I worry about more than kids having to use the same backpack two years in a row. I got laughed at a whole lot when I was a kid, and I’d have been pretty relieved if it’d had only been a matter of derision of my school supplies.

I keep wondering if this is some kind of head-fake. I’m sure the people who carry on this ministry have to deal with kids whose parents are neglecting them due to drug use, or sexually abusing them, or pimping them out. I wonder if they’re doing this backpack thing because they’re afraid to tell about the real needs they have to try to fill.

But if that’s true, they’re being dishonest with their donors, which I hope would not be the case.

So I just don’t get it.

Speaking of school kids, it occurred to me to wonder whether anybody’s done a folklore study of children’s traditional poetry.

I don’t mean the stuff written for children, like A Child’s Garden of Verses or the books of Dr. Seuss.

I mean the stuff composed by children, who knows how long ago, and passed down through generations from kid to kid?

Poems like “I Think I’ll Go Eat Worms,” and “________ and __________, sittin’ in a tree,” and little girls’ jump rope rhymes. And parodies like, “Glory, glory, hallelujah, teacher hit me with a ruler.”

It seems to me this is an example of a purely oral tradition, still alive in our literate culture. I’d think much could be learned by tracking those poems over the years and generations, observing how they change and stay the same.

Maybe somebody’s done that. But I can’t find anything about it on the web.