Christine Ventura is an honor student at the University of Asia and the Pacific. She is currently ranked No. 8 on the university’s dean’s list. She is a fourth-year student taking up Child Development Education, and she hopes to someday follow in her grandmother’s footsteps as a kindergarten teacher. In her spare time she reads, writes book reviews and volunteers for different foundations.
Guess How Much I Love You by Sam McBratney and illustrated by Anita Jeram has won countless awards since it was published 10 years ago and has been translated into 37 languages. It is doubtful that anyone would counter the pronouncement that Guess How Much I Love You is truly one of the most well-loved children’s books of our time.
It is a short but truly heartwarming story where the sweet and young baby, Little Nut Brown Hare, tries his hardest to demonstrate how he feels for his parent, Big Nut Brown Hare.
He does so by attempting to use physical descriptions – raising his arms or jumping as high as he can. What he doesn’t realize is that love is immeasurable – for it is a quality, not a quantity. That is why he finds it hard to explain the depth of his emotions.
The wonder of the book lies not just in its ability to show us the immeasurability of love, it also lies in its ability to show children what love is and how very powerful it is.
As an aspiring teacher, I have to say that this book is very helpful in successfully evoking love and empathy in children. I have read much research that shows it is just as important to raise children with high emotional quotients (EQs) as it is to raise children to have high intelligence quotients (IQs). It is because teaching children to have a heart is just as important as teaching them to have a mind, for their hearts are inextricably intertwined with their minds.
I had once read a letter written by a Holocaust survivor, in which he offers a powerful reminder about the relationship of education and the Holocaust:
Dear Teacher:
I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no man should witness: gas chambers built by learned engineers; children poisoned by educated physicians; infants killed by trained nurses; women and babies shot and burned by high school and college graduates. So I am suspicious of education.
My request is: help your students become more human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmanns.
Reading, writing, and arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more humane. –Haim Ginott in Teacher and Child
What people forget to realize is that teaching is so much more complex. For to teach is not simply to pass on information, it is to pass on what it is to be human. And empathy, I believe, is one of the most important humanizing emotions there is. It is the ability to feel for others. This ability should be fostered in children more. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean that children cannot empathize. On the contrary, as young as they are, they already feel very strongly and in physical ways – which is why they are apt to hit and bite others because they have difficulty controlling their emotions – it is only that we should try to make sure that the ability to empathize does not die out to become nothing but sheer selfishness and self-interest. In many progressive schools, teachers are more quick to give EQ as much importance as IQ for they know teaching children to value others and to care about them is just as important, maybe even more so, especially now in this world, than teaching them to add and subtract properly.
Guess How Much I Love You is my favorite book because it is a book that teachers can use to help foster empathy in children. It is also a book that I love simply because of its modest and uncomplicated message of love and how that emotion can be so profound that there are no words to describe it. In its 20 pages and less than 200 words, it is able to tell us more about the magic and power of love than thousands of books that have tried to explain its mystery.
I guess it is true what Doris Lessing said, "That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you’ve understood all your life, but in a new way."