“Science Myths” in K-6 Textbooks and Popular culture

The complex and abstract nature of Science makes the subject difficult to understand. But complexity is not the only barrier to our understanding Science. The subject is made much more difficult by the presence of numerous misleading “Science Myths” which circulate in the popular culture, which are handed down from parents to children, and which have become so common and widespread that they appear widely in science textbooks and are taught as facts in grade school.

Some original Maian Art. Pick your favourite and use as a desktop.

Came across this website in my search for old computer games, gaming info, emulators and other resources. Truly the most complete I have seen, well laid out and very informative.

The Old Computer Dot Com is dedicated to all aspects of retro computing, collecting and gaming. You will find emulators and Roms for many weird and defunked formats as well as libraries full of material like commercials, magazines and manuals. This website is owned, designed and maintained by one person, namely, Hot Trout.  This site has 56,939 Roms, over 47 Formats, and at my last visit, on the 12th of February listed the last update as on Jan 2010, so not a dead at all.

I recently stumbled across this site – outside the (toy) box – by a mother of two. Browsing this superb site led to The Underground History of American Education. Not a very comfortable read if you have kids on their way to school…

Chapter 3 (see Name Sounds, Not Things and The Meatgrinder Classroom) led me to do a search on Google for teach kid read using phonics. Which led me to this paragraph at dyslexics.org.uk, an independent, non-commercial, no-nonsense website with the aim of providing material to assist you to school-proof your child:

Reading test scores reflected these strategies, with the phonemic decoders superior, part-word decoders next, and whole-word guessers the worst. When these children were followed to third grade, the whole-word guessers had not changed their approach and were the undisputed worst readers in the class. Some part-word decoders had graduated to phonemic decoding, but the majority of the third graders remained primarily part-word decoders. Once more, phonemic decoders were far and away the best readers. This shows that children are active learners, and when confronted with vague or misleading guidelines for how to read, they try out strategies to overcome this difficulty. The fact that these strategies are different, and that they tend to stay constant over such a long period of time, is strong evidence against a developmental explanation. (near the middle of page 2 of “The Main Methods to Teaching Reading”)

What this in effect means is, that if your child learns to read by looking a picture of an apple, see the word apple below it, and say: “apple“, they are only recognising the word in its context in relation to the picture of the apple. The next time they see the word “apple” without the picture, they may or may not remember what the word is. If they don’t remember, they can’t break it down into its components and read the word.

Jolly Phonics at Read Australia list the five basic skills for reading and writing as well as examples to get you started. Abelard.org also explains how to teach a child to read using phonics.

If you have a youngster, there is a good chance that you have to suffer through at least weekly episodes of Barney. So it is with us. And when we got invited to lunch with friends in Johannesburg, we decided to make use of the opportunity to take the child to the Barney Show running at the Coca-Cola Dome during the Baby Show.

Welcome to blatant rip-off commercialism! On the website, the show was billed as being 20 minutes long. The forgot to mention the 20 minutes of infomercial leading up to Barney’s appearance. The person introducing the performers, used words like merchandise when speaking to 2 to 4 year olds. They went to great length to emphasise the fact that Barney was brought to you by x, y and z.

And to crown it all, there was a barrier between Barney and the kids. Is he scared of being mugged by a three year old, bottle-wielding infant? The Barney show makes a big thing about “I love you blah blah blah – with a great BIG HUG etc”, but in this case the love was reserved for one lucky rugrat who brough along a birthday card for the purple monster. Makes you wonder if Barney & Co gets royalties from US military interrogators, torturing Iraqi prisoners.

So next year, when the Barney Show comes round again – rethink that sudden impulse to treat the child. You are better off showing a giving him/her a slab of chocolate, a bottle of green cooldrink and a tub of ice cream.

Every 5th of June is a day used by the United Nations to stimulate worldwide awareness of environmental issues.

Banana peel reflex

Long, long ago, when we were all monkeys swinging in the trees and hunted those elusive bananas for lunch, a reflex was fixed in the genes and are still present today: the banana peel reflex.