Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Elementary School Wrong on so many levels!

Hanni came home with a food-chain drawing that went Sun -> Plant -> Small Dinosaur -> T Rex (so far so good) . . . -> Caveman.

I've decided not to say anything, since I'm so new, but . . . new afterschooling activity! Hanni and I are going to make a timeline of dinosaur, mammal, primate, and hominin evolution.

The activity was led by a volunteer parent. And given the amount of mis-information about science that is out there in the general public, I honestly would be expecting these kinds of inaccuracies to be popping up no matter where I send her to school.

I know I've said it before, but it just makes it so clear to me: I am really a homeschooler who does heavy outsourcing. And like any homeschooler, I have to teach my kid to be a critical consumer of what she hears from various sources. Including school.

Oh, and see, this is where political incorrectness comes into things at our house.

We took it upon ourselves at such junctures to investigate the origins of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. (Kansas school board, "teaching the controversy" etc... and most critically from your perspective, the nifty sketches of the "Museum of natural Science" showing cavemen riding dinos.)

It depends on your kid; mine always goes for snark. But she's also always had the ability to rein it in when needed, too-- she understands that her friends who are Evangelical Bible literalism Creationists won't appreciate it no matter how she points it out, so she doesn't. She just grins on the inside.

We met DS's religious studies teacher (UK, lots of religion in schools...we'd prefer far less or none, but that's not an option here unless you homeschool) teacher the other day. She was fine, and in particular, went out of her way to say that she finds DS's expression of his atheist perspective helpful and that she's teaching about religion, not teaching religion. All well and good. But she went on to say how much she likes the distinctive style of the people he draws when they do cartoon strips of Bible stories. She showed us an example. They all have noodly appendages! And she looked completely blank when DH said as much :-)

oooops!

We've collected so many examples like this. You're right it goes into the pot of teaching to discriminate information she hears "out there". The fruits of our labors are really starting to show in DD9 - it makes good dinner conversation and we all have a good laugh, though sometimes it makes me cringe.

Ha! Love the noodly appendage story!

Fortunately, it's not a creationist thing, I think it's just the staggering ignorance most people have about the time scale of evolution. (I have to explain to my undergrads that people who speak different languages didn't "evolve" to speak those languages!)

I guess I'm surprised none of the kids tried to correct her! Even way back in preschool a lot of the kids I knew were so into dinosaurs they would've outed her on it - and not just HG kids.....

polarbear

Well, it *is* cultural evolution, which works on extremely fast time frames when compared to biological evolution.

Yeah, that's definitely a contender for this month's winner in the Ultimate Bad Homework Question Thread.

In that situation, my ten-year-old would definitely have been correcting teacher when he was four. He would have given a lecture on the subject if he could have, even ("No, that's wong! Sedimentawy wock pwoves that dimos lived a long time befowe people!")

Is there any point in asking the school about this?

I told my DD about the example and it gave her a good belly laugh, but initially she was confused about the order, and she thought it was in the wrong direction...(maybe this is just the way she thinks so take it with a grain of salt)

(no cavemen didn't live at the same time as T-rex) - > T-Rex eats smaller dino -> smaller dino eats plant -> plant uses energy from sun to grow

but she's very exact with patterns, sometimes literal (not always, depends upon the subject.)

No, my students literally think that Chinese people are genetically predisposed to speak Chinese, etc. Of course the minute I point out international adoption, the entire history of emigration to the U.S., etc., they see that it can't be true, but that's how unexamined people's ideas about evolution are.