Cartoonist Phil Yeh must be drawn to Park School. Over the last quarter century, Yeh has traveled throughout the world promoting literacy, leaving behind a trail of more than 1,500 murals in 49 states and in a couple dozen countries and a legacy of countless children who are inspired to live large and to create, and yet he chose to return to Park School, where, just four years ago, he helped the school create a mural located just inside the school’s main entrance.
Many Park students remembered working on that first mural and were eager to help make another. During the two days, each student had the opportunity to make a small but memorable contribution to the creation of a permanent mural.

Yeh’s habit of working alongside the students meant they would be both entertained and enlightened well beyond what he managed to share with them during the assemblies the first day.

During those more formal presentations, Yeh told the students the secret of his success and other of his even more famous friends. They all read a lot, worked hard and did not allow themselves to be distracted by the trappings of pop culture. In other words, they did not waste their time with mindless activities such as watching television and playing video games. Yeh continued to hammer home this point over the two days, even when he was being interviewed by a reporter from a local television station.

In the midst of the process, Yeh alluded to the chapter in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer, where Tom tricked some kids into painting a fence for him, by making the chore out to be so much fun that the eager beavers would have to pay for the pleasure of whitewashing the fence.

While it may be true that Yeh did get Park students to paint the wall for him, the real trick is getting the students to participate in the very activity they were painting on the wall – to read.

Nearly every living creature depicted in the mural, be they vertebrate or invertebrate – or even animal or vegetable, a stately palm tree had its coconut pressed to the pages of a splayed book – were reading. The mural further intimated that by reading students will be better able to think, and the ideas contained in the books will help to develop their imaginations.

The lesson of the two days is more likely to stick than your run-of-the-mill reminder that reading is important because the experience is most memorable; the mural, more or less permanent; and the resolve of the teachers to follow up on the experience, absolute.

Park School principal Rachael Simidian-Nicoll sang the praises of the school’s staff who helped make the experience seamless and of the students who enthusiastically participated in the two day exercise without it devolving into a scrum. There was little in the way of spilled paint, and absolutely no blood.