short rant

[firstfrost]

Number 2 in what I keep thinking ought to be a series: Posts that mjperson ought to have made.

Here's a very short blog post by Steven Levitt.

The punch line is cute. But... he doesn't know how his third-grade daughter is supposed to know what the colors of the rainbow are? SHE'S SUPPOSED TO KNOW BECAUSE YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE TEACHING HER THAT!

What are the Great Lakes? I might give him a pass on that not being part of the standard curriculum for your small child. I learned my states, but not my Great Lakes, as a little bitty kid. (mjperson, as a little bitty kid, did learn them, but he's from New York and I'm from California.). I learned "Thirty days has September" before I can remember, but I think davehenry told me about knuckle-counting.

But not teaching your kid *colors* is a dereliction of duty. I mean, come *on*. Isn't that like the first thing ever, when you're teaching them words?

Comments

[cfox.livejournal.com]

I spent a little while explicitly working on colors with Denton, thinking that the pediatrician would expect to test that one at his 15-month checkup.

Instead, the pediatrician marked off a missed milestone because he couldn't do "where's mommy's nose?" then suggested that we practice finding parts of our faces in front of a mirror every day at home.

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

This is an even crazier example of "teach to the test!" than the ones that come up in the No Child Left Behind discussions. (Is he going to check again at the next checkup that Denton can find your nose, or was it a one-time-only test?)

[cfox.livejournal.com]

Well, at 15 months, Denton was very short for his age, and had missed a language milestone; she was quite worried, and asked me to make all sorts of dietary changes.

By 20 months, the language milestone was still throughly missed, but he was a full 4" taller than before; she watched him to see that his motor skills were excellent, had us fill in the autism screening checklist, and then said "well, he's a doer not a talker, don't worry about it" to the language, without asking him to do things.

Now, 23 months, we've started the process of invoking Early Intervention for evaluation of the language (self-referred); our guess is that Denton is just someone who likes to really master skills before he uses them, but asking early intervention to evaluate him doesn't have much downside.

I don't think it was actually so much about teaching the test, as about giving a general impression of "normal".

[shumashi.livejournal.com]

I don't think it was actually so much about teaching the test, as about giving a general impression of "normal".
My brother was like that. He'd just suddenly use all these words no one knew he knew. My mother took to lying to the pediatrician to make life easier for all.

Also, I think it was fairly late in life (middle school?) before I knew rainbow colors. It just wasn't particularly relevant before that. Then I had the epiphany that they were the primary colors, with the secondary colors between the two primary colors that made them up, and aha! that made sense.