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

[kirisutogomen.livejournal.com]

As pekmez has already pointed out, knowing the names of colors is different from knowing the colors of the rainbow.

And seriously, the "colors of the rainbow"? How is it useful to know how people have arbitrarily divided the spectrum of visible light? Actually, it's worse than useless, because it gives the impression that there is some natural phenomenon at work whereby there are seven colors in a rainbow, rather than five or eight or twenty-three. Understanding that it's a full spectrum, and that our partitioning of it is not a reflection of any characteristics of light, would be much more sensible than memorizing ROY G. BIV.

The Great Lakes, though....duh, they live in Chicago, they ought to know that one.

[twe.livejournal.com]

If you throw out indigo, you have the three primary and three secondary colors of the color wheel, which is kind of useful in certain visual arts, but that's not so related to the rainbow, and I certainly agree with you on the rest.

[kirisutogomen.livejournal.com]

So in this respect it would be more "correct" to forget one, even though I bet you'd lose points for doing so.

I also think it would be more useful to know why there are three primary colors, instead of two or four or six, rather than just knowing their names or what order they're in. For that matter, if you need to know what order they're in, isn't it just as important to know why red is on the outside of the rainbow and purple is on the inside, rather than the other way around?

[countertorque.livejournal.com]

It's useful to know many things that have been arbitrarily divided up by people who came before you. Even if the thing itself is not especially useful, it's an important part of understanding your culture and communicating with other people.

[kirisutogomen.livejournal.com]

Well, yeah. I was kind of hinting at that with my comment about the Great Lakes. The names of some lakes are just as arbitrary as anything else, and knowing that some lake is named Erie or Huron doesn't tell you anything about the water quality or anything else independent of human culture. It's still good to know, because, well, what you said.

The difference is that learning the "colors of the rainbow" could be misleading, because it's usually not made clear that the partition is arbitrary (or at least human-centric rather than due to a physical quality of the light). I'm not liable to be misled into false beliefs about Lake Huron by learning its name.

I'm not at all clear what the point is of a test of "general knowledge" in third grade. What do you do with the results?