Innocence Lost

I was working with my students on choral reading and brought out "Old Mother Hubbard" as a practice text; it has lots of rhyme, a sing-song meter, and silly subject matter, so I figured it was an easy one to start out with. 

My last class of the day had finished reading the poem together, and I decided to have one of those cool-enough-to-mock-the-text moments and encourage the kids point out some of the odd, borderline-inappropriate for pre-schoolers things that were mentioned in this dusty, old nursery rhyme. 

They pointed out that Old Mother Hubbard had bought the dog a beer at the alehouse, that she'd come home to find him smoking a pipe, etc. One girl raised her hand and chimed in about the part when OMH "...went to the hosier's to get him some hose". I figured it was just an odd answer, so I replied with something about dogs not really needing socks. 

She'd just gotten out, "Oh, I thought it meant ..." when one of the boys jumped out of his seat and yelled, "NO! Stop!" 

I quickly realized that she had mistaken hose (as in stockings) for ho's (as in, yanno, ho's). I thanked the boy for his quick save and moved on to the next thing.

Later, as I thought about it, I remembered that in several of my other classes, kids had mentioned the hose line too. Only now I understood WHY they'd brought it up.

Wow. 

I don't know what bugs me more: that my students are so worldly beyond their years that they immediately think of whores when they hear that word or that they're such bad readers that they don't recognize the word hose when they see it. 

Now, of course, I have to live with the mental image of Old Mother Hubbard going out to get hookers for her dog.  And wonder whether the hookers were dog hookers or human ones. I'm choosing to believe they're dogs, mostly because it gives me an excuse to say things like, "She didn't have much money to spend, so she just got him a paw job."