Am I expecting too much?

[Ravin]

Okay, we were shopping at the Book Connection (used bookstore purveyor of lots of educational wooden toys, esp. Melissa and Doug stuff), and I found this neat maze-puzzle alphabet thing. It had little wooden pictures in grooves, and you had to move them along the maze of grooves to match up with the letter of the alphabet. It looked really neat and I almost bought it.

I decided not to because to accompany the letter M there was a picture of a chimpanzee. (C for Chimpanzee would have made sense; I think there was C for cat; and A for Ape would have worked; there was an apple for A. Heck, even P for primate would have worked for me).

Chimpanzees are not monkeys and I detest children's resources that incorrectly categorize animals. This seems to be the most glaringly common case. They usually manage, for example, to refrain from calling dolphins "fish" or spiders "insects" (though that one does happen too).

Am I too anal? Or do things like this bug anyone else? It's one of the reasons I want to homeschool, so my daughter doesn't come home from first grade with a teacher whose exposure to science in college was likely a course that a chimpanzee could probably pass, with her head full of completely inaccurate science (and history) "facts".

[Lillian J]

Well, if you really like a resource other than something like that, you could simply point out that "Whoops! They think that chimpanzee is a monkey - lots of people don't realize there's a big difference," or whatever. And that just makes for a conversation about those things - an unschooling moment ...

No, I'm not one who's fussy about those kinds of things. Lillian

[flyingspaghettimama]

Ha. I don't know if you're too anal, but ya sure are funny!

I have educational "issues" as well regarding the alphabet. Like when say a chimpanzee is shown for the letter "c" when in fact the phoneme that is featured in this instance is a /ch/ sound and not a /c/ sound, which makes teaching children phonemes more challenging. A "cat" or a "catapult" or a "cadaver" might be a better example of the /c/ sound. Oh wait, ignore that last one. Not appropriate for a children's book.

Hmmm, but then again when I tell people we're probably homeschooling next year, they get a knowing look on their face and say, "yeah...I could see you homeschooling. You'd do great at it." As in, they are saying, "yeah, an overanalytical person about education like you, I can see homeschooling. "

However, I do think it's important to not get too full of myself - there are some things I wouldn't be so good at teaching her that she would want to learn (violin, or catapult design, or binomial anything), and she we can call in the experts on those subjects. But alphabet books...oh man, I can pick those out myself.

[flyingspaghettimama]

Originally Posted by Lillian J

No, I'm not one who's fussy about those kinds of things. Lillian

But Lillian, that is why you are so cool! You are an inspiration to us analytical types...perhaps there is mellow chillness to be found in homeschooling after all...

[Lillian J]

Originally Posted by flyingspaghettimama

But Lillian, that is why you are so cool! You are an inspiration to us analytical types...perhaps there is mellow chillness to be found in homeschooling after all...

Oh, but don't get me started on the use of the word "nother." Nother. As in a whole nother subject... It feels like chalk screeching on a blackboard...
Lillian

[flyingspaghettimama]

And as long as nobody ever, ever, ever teaches my daughter that "ECT" is a word. I swear. It's etc., as in short for et cetera. What is WRONG with you people?!

OK, my thread jumping is done here. Sorry. But I feel sooo much better now...

[Eris]

This afternoon, my four year old daughter was looking at a "learn the alphabet" rack I picked up at the thrift store- same old thing square wooden beads, letters (capitals and smalls) on one side, and a picture of a thing on the other with its word written out(M has a mouse, by the way), on a wire six across, five rows of them. Anyway, she's looking at them, saying them, like "A is for apple! [...] G is for grapes! MMM! I love grapes, nyumnyumnyum", and I hear "N is for basketball... O is for tomato! mmm! I love tomatoes!"... what?! So, I have to haul myself up from my computer again :-D, and go look. Why can't the pictures be (a lot) more obvious? O is for "orange"... and that's one very tomatoey looking orange (and T? Traffic lights), and the N is showing a basketball backboard, hoop, and NET. And I tell her, "basketball starts with B," and she counters, flipping the B tile over, "No! B is for Butterfly."

I had sort of thought the baby would just enjoy spinning the tile beads, when I got it.

[Ravin]

My college linguistics class made me a lot more relaxed about English grammar than I used to be. I still appreciated that I'd had to diagram sentences in middle school, though. Most of my classmates just didn't get it! Some of them didn't even know what parts of speech were (let alone what the parts of speech were).

I do see what you mean about the phoneme thing, but since the english alphabet isn't phonemic (doesn't recognize ch as a separate letter, for example), it didn't really occur to me.

Anyway, I guess my anthropology background just plays a bigger part in what bugs me. If I was a botanist I might take issue with whether they call palms trees or something like that.

And I get enough of those "unschooling" moments of distinguishing a chimpanzee from a monkey when reading to DD. Most notably, Curious George and Hand Hand, Fingers Thumb. In both, the pictures are quite obviously of chimpanzees (actually, in HHFT some of them look like they might be bonobos), but they are called monkeys. For now, I just change the words when I read. Once DD starts reading, I'll have to explain myself. (Well, sweetie, back in the 1930's when this was written, people often didn't know a chimpanzee from a monkey, and didn't think like we do that it isn't right to kidnap baby chimpanzees to put them in zoos...)

[Lillian J]

Originally Posted by Ravin

Anyway, I guess my anthropology background just plays a bigger part in what bugs me.

My degree is in anthropology - and I don't give a rat's patootie about the way people mix up that sort of thing. As long, of course, as they don't refer to it as a whole nother thing... - Lillian

[Lillian J]

Originally Posted by flyingspaghettimama

And as long as nobody ever, ever, ever teaches my daughter that "ECT" is a word. I swear. It's etc., as in short for et cetera. What is WRONG with you people?!

Funny - I've never seen it spelled that way. Although I've certainly heard it pronounced ec setra - so I guess that's where they come up with the ECT... I've never understood why that doesn't get cleared up early in life. What do they do in those classrooms all those years? - Lillian

[SJLove]

chimps aren't monkeys? Well, had I known that, I would have been anal about it as well!!

[onlyzombiecat]

I guess it wouldn't bother me much if I really liked the rest of the toy. If I didn't like one letter I would probably glue or paint a picture of a proper M creature on that piece... but then I have a background in art, not science.
Maybe you and your child could write a letter to the company about your issue with the toy. Get the word out that a chimp isn't a monkey.

[reeseccup]

Originally Posted by Lillian J

Well, if you really like a resource other than something like that, you could simply point out that "Whoops! They think that chimpanzee is a monkey - lots of people don't realize there's a big difference," or whatever. And that just makes for a conversation about those things - an unschooling moment ...

No, I'm not one who's fussy about those kinds of things. Lillian

That's pretty much what we do when we see any kind of ape depicted as a monkey. This always leads to another lesson on the differences and how not everything you read is fact and that one must educate themselves so they know the differences in fact and, well, ignorance. Our friends think we're anal.

My word peeve, ok WORDS, are: ain't and brat. The former makes me wince, the latter makes me cringe.

[Cee4]

Simple mistakes to me are okay, that is part of life, but one of the biggest things that made me mad is when I found out that most everything I learned in school was wrong. Everything was so generalized and passed off as truth...Christopher Columbus was not some perfect hero guy who discovered America. Reptiles don’t necessarily lay eggs. All those little lies that added up. It’s all about trying to pour as much info in those little heads as possible whether it’s accurate or not, that’s what ticks me off...

[Charles Baudelaire]

Originally Posted by Lillian J

Funny - I've never seen it spelled that way. Although I've certainly heard it pronounced ec setra - so I guess that's where they come up with the ECT... I've never understood why that doesn't get cleared up early in life. What do they do in those classrooms all those years? - Lillian

They practice ignorant pronunciation -- the hidden cause of many a misspelled word.

[Charles Baudelaire]

Originally Posted by Cee4

Simple mistakes to me are okay, that is part of life, but one of the biggest things that made me mad is when I found out that most everything I learned in school was wrong. Everything was so generalized and passed off as truth...Christopher Columbus was not some perfect hero guy who discovered America. Reptiles don’t necessarily lay eggs. All those little lies that added up. It’s all about trying to pour as much info in those little heads as possible whether it’s accurate or not, that’s what ticks me off...

As much as I delight in conspiracy theories, this isn't one. You know why these myths are perpetuated? Simple ignorance on the part of the generally-lower-scoring-than-the-norm elementary school teachers. Hey, one mom recently told me about her discussion with a school teacher when the mom wanted to bring in macaroons for a snack day. The teacher said, "Oh, we can't do that, because one of our kids has an allergy to nuts." Perplexed, the mom explained that the macaroons were plain -- no nuts added. "But what about the coconut. You know...coconut!" the teacher replied.

Yeah. Right. Got it.

[ShannonCC]

Yes, things like this bug me. Sure, we can point out the incorrect information if we know it's incorrect. What if we don't though? What if we know so little about a subject that we don't even realise the information is wrong? It would be a full time job (and then some) to research every little fact in every book we read. That's why it bugs me. Yes, we should realize that not everything we read is true, yes, we should point these things out to our kids, but it still bugs me when "educational" materials don't get it right.

If I was a botanist I might take issue with whether they call palms trees or something like that

Here's a good example. I had no clue that a palm tree wasn't a tree. I live in NJ, the subject of palm "trees" doesn't come up often

My biggest (current ) pet peeve is books that state that animals like Dimetredon, Mosasaurus and Pteradactyls (spelling???) were dinosaurs. I'm not overly interested in dinosaurs and I can't keep all those names straight as it is, so it would be nice if I could count on the books to tell it right so I don't have to remember but nooooooooo.

[RedWine]

As a former anthropologist and a person who really digs human evolutionary history, it would royally piss me off to see a children's book that categorized chimps as monkeys. :

[Ravin]

A palm tree can be called a "tree" or not depending on which botanist you ask. I've got several of the darn things in my yard. All I know is that they're expensive to trim and shed annoying junk all over the yard. They also don't belong in the desert and I wish they would die but my stupid neighbor waters his lawn like it's...well, not the desert. Oh, and palm branches burn really hot and fast (I know that from camping out in Florida with guys who probably consumed too much alcohol to be around an open fire).

I always thought Christopher Columbus was a con artist who crunched numbers to suit his own convenience, got a lot of people from both sides of the ocean killed in the process of achieving his goals, didn't know where he was when he got there, and died poor, of syphilis, possibly still in denial that he hadn't gotten to the Far East. This is the version I got before graduating high school.

Sam Houston, on the other hand...

[ShannonCC]

Well now I'm completely confused, So this is inbetween editing a friend's story and reading Berenstain Bears books (ie: not exactly focused ) but I can't find anything online about palms not being trees. Maybe it's something else you're thinking of?