I’m pretty sure I knew what a sea was when I was pre-literate. Lord, have none of you ever listened to nursery rhymes or songs? Any child who has not grasped the concept of a body of water by kindergarten must a dim little bulb indeed.
Woop. Can’t say mean, you degenerate. Offensive to ogres.
Hey, you can’t call him a degenerate! It’s offensive to Morloks!
I hear they prefer “Differently Abled Protein Sources” nowadays.
No.
F_X
And here I though ‘red’ was offensive to native americans.
“A large body of HOH visible if one (or many in the case of conjoined twins, triplets, etc ) is capable of detecting the 700 nanometer electromagnetic spectrum”.
That should make it easier for grade schoolers to do their math tests.
In a text-book, there’s no problem with sea, etc.
But in a test, as ridiculous as it sounds, it does sort of make sense. For instance, a maths question is often couched in terms of supposedly familiar objects, either to make it easier, or to make students think. For this, it’s fairly unfair if one of them happens not to be known to some child.
**Put these in descending order of size:
Earth’s diameter
Distance Earth to moon
Atom
Molecule
Rhino
House
Sea
Ocean**
The examiner assumed only ‘size’ was an isssue, but which is bigger, a sea or an ocean?
It’s just an example, but I hope you see the point.
Argh.
I wouldn’t have been able to answer the question when I was a kid BECAUSE of old fairy tales and songs. You know, the ones that used “sea” as a synonym for “ocean”? I got it when I was four, though, because they showed us all the oceans and seas on a big map, along with all the continents. We had to memorize 'em all. I remember the little singsong voices – “NORTH America, SOUTH America, AFrica, EUrope, Asia, AusTRAILia, Ant-ARC-ti-ca.” “AtLANtic, PaCIFic, INdian, ARCtic.” And the seas, I can’t remember 'em now.
I remember taking an IQ test when I was about 6. We were supposed to match the word to the picture. I had grown up in Texas, and the test was being given in Florida.
The word was “toboggan.” I’d never heard of a toboggan. I’d never seen one. I had no idea what they were. And I was supposed to identify it.
I do think that schooling is being dumbed down for the kids. I hate that fact. I also work for a children’s textbook company, and I know (only second-hand, because I don’t write or edit the things) the grief the writers/editors put themselves through trying to make the best product they can.
I work in the Permissions and Contracts department. People call me when they want to copy our materials. I remember one of the calls I got when I’d just gotten the job…a private school teacher in New York was proposing a special edition of some of our early reading books. Why? Because he and the people in his small religious community found parts of them “offensive.”
“I love your products,” he said, “but there are certain words and images that, because of our religion and beliefs, do not feel comfortable putting in children’s books.”
Out of curiosity, I asked: “So you are using our books now; how do you make use of them if they have ‘objectionable material’?”
“Well,” he said, “I take a black marker…”
:eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :mad:
I brought the matter to my supervisor. She stared at me open-mouthed for a while before telling me a little story: in one of our kids’ short story anthologies, the company was considering a story that had the word “Hades” in it. We were so afraid that we’d catch flak from some ultra-conservative that, after being denied a request to the author to replace the word with a different phrase, we just booted the story.
We had to. If we didn’t care what the customers wanted, they wouldn’t buy our books. And so far, I really doubt that there’s any school districts who won’t buy the books because they’re dumbed down. But there’s plenty who wouldn’t consider our products if they had Certain Words in them.
Enough to make a grown Ninja cry.
I have worked parttime as a freelance writer of textbooks, mainly but not exclusively math, for the last twelve years.
Every publisher is somewhat different, but each I have worked with has had a list of do’s and do not’s that ranges from the obvious to the peculiar. Here are some from my own personal experience…[disclaimer: I have not read Ravitch’s book or list]…
One, for instance, did not want any references to birthdays…no cutting up birthday cakes, no What-Month-Is-Your-Birthday surveys, nothing like that…presumably because of Jehovah’s Witnesses, but I don’t know that for sure.
Generally there are to be no references to the number 666, whether as a solution to an arithmetic problem or as a factor/addend/etc.
Junk food is typically verboten, though the definition of junk food may vary considerably from book to book and publisher to publisher. Hot dogs are usually no, but hamburgers may be okay; a single cookie is one thing, but a plateful of brownies may not be acceptable.
Gender-neutral language is generally a requirement: Mailcarrier, chairperson, and a few that roll less trippingly off the tongue (on the other hand, firefighter once sounded strange to me); words like hero or actor are to refer to both sexes.
Guns and hunting reference are out the window for at least a couple of publishers.
No witches, no ghosts, no goblins.
Dice are six-sided only and are typically referred to as “number cubes”–no potential connections with gambling, Bill Bennett’s virtues notwithstanding, or to D+D style roleplaying games.
There are formulas for name use and photo/art specs according to genders and ethnicities. For instance, 5% of the kids pictured in one program had to be Native American. Typically the percentages tend to be somewhat topheavy with minorities so far as the US population is concerned, but perhaps are more in line with the school-aged population; I don’t know.
One math program specified that each chapter had to have at least one differently-abled [their word, I think] child pictured, preferably in a location on the page to which the child’s eye would naturally be drawn.
Not strictly textbook, but – The educational publisher which put out a children’s book I wrote a few years back had a very difficult time with my use of “black” to describe the majority population of South Africa.
There are others; this is only a sampling. I will say I have never been told to write “enslaved person” rather than “slave.” And “sea” has been a non-issue. So far!
No, no, no, you oppressive individual, you! Your suggestion is clearly biased against lifeforms that have sensory transducers which operate outside the standard human range. I have improved the sentence, thus:
“A large body of HOH visible if one (or many in the case of conjoined twins, triplets, etc ) is capable of detecting any applicable form of energy emitted by, or reflected from the aforementioned region, with the proviso that lifeforms unable to process the said energies may instead possess an internal representation of the object, no less valid that that obtained by direct (or indirect) sensory transduction”.
I think you’ll agree that this is much easier to understand.
If anyone’s interested, here’s the Onion A.V. Club review.
<mini-hijack>About the snow bit… I don’t sense political correctness with that. Tests should be reasonably fair to every student. When questions are unfair, in an unreasonable manner, they should be changed. If I came across a question as such, and had never had a snow day, then I’d object. Same as if I didn’t remember one. Now… I <can> understand that such a thing is considered normal for students. Hey, we all love snow days. They’re great. I think, if I were a teacher, and had a student who had never had a snow day, I’d have made up a question that would show similar writing ability, but involved something that child knew about. Unfortunately, having the tests state made, disallows this. Maybe if state school boards had a way to handle that sort of situation, you wouldn’t have to retest everyone.</mini-hijack>
(last post was 45 minutes ago… and it was today… same month, same year. Press Submit.)
Interacting with college texts in which “History” has eliminated any mention of Tiberius and leaves the Byzantine empire with one paragraph in favor of fleshing out more important historical events such as the rise of the feminist movement and the sins of Westward expansion; and as the parent of small children who are sent home from elementary school with notes from their teachers bitterly denouncing the ‘content’ of their free-writing exercises, I think I can fairly say that politics is well on the way to conquering education in this country.
When politicians are so damned timid that the governmental committees who oversee the mandatory educations of our children are made up almost entirely of the squeaky wheels who deem any testing unfair and all experiences and viewpoints equal, who is suprised by this sort of outcome? We stopped educating our children a dozen years ago or more in favor of forcing the schools to become political inculcation factories. The government mandated curriculum in Kindergarten includes a segment of learning about how to save the Rain Forest and the Ocean Creatures from the evils of mankind. “Education is the answer,” has long been the cry, and now that view is being demonstrated in the form of mandatory education that deliberately includes only a single point of view, demonizing all others as ‘intolerant.’
One segment of society got what they wanted by shouting down all other viewpoints and by effectively taking over the educational system to perpetuate their views at the expense of actual free thought. As with all such things, they say, we get the kind of government we deserve.
Gairloch
I would think that gender-neutral language would be required only when referring to a group of people consisting of both men and women. Saying, “May the best man win” would be out but The Old Man and the Sea would be just fine.
Gairloch–I am puzzled by parts of your post.
You say that the “governmental committees” in charge of education are made up of people who “deem any testing unfair.” If so, and if you’re talking about the US, they are doing a remarkably poor job of carrying out their agenda. The number of tests given is going up, not down, on both the elementary and secondary levels. The importance of those tests, likewise, is increasing.
The number and importance may not be quite what you would like, and the methods of testing may not be entirely what you’d want, either, but most states are much more serious about testing than they were a dozen years ago, or probably even twenty. There just isn’t any basis for the notion that people in power consider testing unfair.
Also, the political abuses have scarcely all been on the part of the left. As my post above indicates, along with many others in this thread, there is also a great deal of concern about offending the right, especially the Christian right, in the publication of textbooks. (And it’s not just textbooks; one fiction book I wrote included a character, a seventh grade girl, saying “Omigod!”–a common enough expression around here among people of that age and gender; the editor changed it to “Omigosh!,” which she knew didn’t sound right but which she said would keep the Bible Belt happy.) As someone earlier pointed out, textbook publishers are trying to placate the California liberals and the Texas conservatives, all at the same time.
Finally, one other question. You don’t specify what kind of history is being covered by the college texts you mention, the ons that throw out Tiberius in favor of feminism. We’ll assume that this is a general history of the world, or something along those lines, published by Americans for Americans. Do you think there is ANY argument to be made that the rise of feminism is more important, at the very least in this context, than Tiberius? It seems to me that reasonable people could easily come to this conclusion without being part of some sort of conspiracy or brainwashing. I’d be curious to know if, and why, you think it is not a reasonable stance.
Yes, I am the Evil one.
(Oh wait!..Can I say ‘Yes’? That may be too assertive? It might offend people who can’t make decisions. ‘I am’, people with multiple personalities could be offended, or amnesia. ‘Evil’, Identity theft from “Her that must be obeyed” (if God can be a she then the Devil can be a she, too!). ‘One’, either offends the multiple personality types, conjoined twins et al, or those who have transcended earthly bounds…Ugh, my head hurts (those people without heads like the Headless Equine Humanoid life form with the ‘y’ chromosome, please don’t take offense.))
Seriously, as long as what the schools teach has some bearing on the truth, does it matter if it is about Tiberius or the Feminist movement? The only thing I worry about are kids who come out of school with their ability to think objectively compromised. So, when someone says, “Save the Rainforest”, they must also think of the people who would be put out of work if all logging stopped tomorrow.
Yeah, but having difficuty writing about “a snow day I remember” when I don’t remember (or haven’t had ) any isn’t the same as not knowing what snow is. I know what a tornado is, but since I’ve never experienced one, I couldn’t write about my memories.
How about, “I’ve never had a snow day because where I come from it never snows. But if I ever had the chance to experience a snow day this is what I’d do…” or this, “I’ve never had a snow day because where I come from it never snows. But in my country we have hurricane days where we hide in the cellar and pray to the freakin’ heathen gods we pray to that we won’t drown like rats in a barrel…”
Geez people, when I didn’t understand a question in school I either stuck up my hand and asked for guidence, or I improvised. I usually ended up with getting higher marks for my originality, or just because they pitied me (You poor dear. Don’t know what a snow day is <sniffle>). I didn’t care what the reason was.
That might have worked for some kids- but back in the dark ages, when I went to school we weren’t allowed to ask for guidance on standardized tests (and the teachers weren’t allowed to give it to us) and we generally didn’t get credit for writing an essay if it wasn’t on the assigned topic. (and I suspect that this is still true at least as far as state mandated testing) Being told to write an essay about my memories of a tornado wouldn’t have given an accurate depiction of my writing skills, because I wouldn’t have had any idea of what to write after “I’ve never seen a tornado”.It would have given an accurate depiction of my ability to write fiction- I have none. That’s the issue regarding this test- whether the question measured what it was supposed to measure. I am sure someone, somewhere is using this incident as an example of " You can’t use the word “snow” on a test because someone might not know what it means" as if the question was " Define snow"
For those interested in the author’s iown comments about the book, here is a rather lengthy except from the book about how she came about writing it.