Hmmm… new Idea for show, based on all your responses… “Are You Smarter Than a Canadian 4th Grader”
regards
FML
sorry for the double post, missed edit window…
Hmmm… new Idea for show, based on all your responses… “Are You Smarter Than a Canadian 4th Grader”
regards
FML
ps: My daughter at age 8, could identify different baroque and blues styles, estimate square roots in her head up to 199, identify most major countries on an unmarked map, mix terteriary colours from primaries, avoid dangling participles (and knew what they were), could tell you the basics about ww1 and 2, and count back change…
The school she went to was a typical Canadian Primary school…
You take a LOT of stuff in the early grades that you typically forget later on. We remember those grades as being very easy because we remember the core subjects that get built upon in later grades. But there’s lots of stuff that’s covered and then never covered again, and that’s the kind of stuff people forget.
My daughter had to do a ‘musical timeline’ in grade 4 music. It included the major classical composers such as Bach, Beethoven, Vivaldi, Tchaikovsky, etc. They didn’t have to know much about them - just roughly when they lived and to recognize a few of their major pieces.
I watched that particular episode with my daughter (who was in 4th grade), and she yelled out “Vivaldi!” instantly.
That’s really the ‘trick’ to that show - the questions are dead easy, but they range across a large base of knowledge. Ask enough of them, and you’ll find one that the contestant has forgotten - and I’m sure it’s easy to forget when studio lights are blasting you, a crowd of people are waiting for your answer, millions are watching at home, and a hundred thousand dollars are on the line. And the ‘million dollar’ questions all seem to be of the type of material that doesn’t get expanded on in later grades.
Another million-dollar question they asked was, “What was the first American satellite in orbit?” Being a space geek, I knew the answer. But my wife had no clue. I asked a few people at work the next day, and no one knew the answer. Because for most people, the American space program looks like this:
Mercury
Gemini
Apollo
Skylab
Shuttle
They remember Sputnik, because it was the first satellite. But first American satellite? It was Explorer 1. And you do learn it when you take the history of the space race - but you learn it as little more than an entry on a timeline. Exactly the kind of thing most people forget.
The contestant answered ‘Mercury’, and pretty confidently. And lost half a million bucks.
All the questions come from real textbooks for their respective grade levels. The final question is a 5[sup]th[/sup] grade question,
Keep in mind that quite often, the fifth graders themselves have wrong answers.
I knew more of that kind of stuff when I was a 5th grader than I do now. My mind was sharper, and I was always learning that sort of stuff in classes. As an adult that information is much more faded.
I read that the kids are coached or heavily study into the subjects that’ll be coming up, which seems strange to me. I know I could answer 90%+ of the questions I’ve seen on that show in fifth grade with no prior study - and I’m not a genius or anything - so I don’t know why they don’t just reward academically advanced kids by making them a bigger part of the show. Throw in a partial scholarship type reward based on how much they help the contestant or whatever.
Yes, but could she spell “tertiary?”
I’m a pretty smart guy and I don’t know for sure what the answer is. (I guessed 8, which, as it turns out, is correct, but it was just a guess.) I mean, it’s been a long time since I looked at a chart of the human teeth, and the only ones I really ever get a good look at are the incisors and canines.
I definitely agree here. I can think of a few notable things I learned when younger, that never really gets built on later. We actually didn’t learn about the space program when I was in grade school, I think I went to grade school a few years too early for that (the space program was certainly around, the textbooks just weren’t hip to it yet.)
Just as a quick example, I remember very well that in 4th grade we learned Roman numerals, and a lot of them. We learned how to express the year in Roman Numerals, for example MCMLXIII was, IIRC, the year I learned that (1963.) I think you’d be very surprised how many people can’t recognize a year in Roman numerals, or who would have trouble expressing a year in such. Of course the format isn’t exactly standardized, so it may be hard to ask a game show question based on this, but it’s just an example of something very simple that you learn in grade school and probably never think about again. Most people probably remember what I through X means all the way to their grave, but fewer can probably remember the L is fifty or XC is 90. (Of course the fact that IIII and IV are both theoretically legitimate ways to express four, and all kinds of other standards conflicts are why it’d probably be hard to implement that as a game show question.)
The Simpsons sort of commented on this in an episode where Bart doesn’t learn his Roman numerals. The episode begins with the teacher writing Roman numerals on the board, then Nelson bursts in and calls the entire class away to reveal to them that someone has stolen Springfield’s lemon tree. It ends that some people from rival town Shelbyville stole the tree, so Bart and gang infiltrate Shelbyville in an attempt to get the tree back. At one point, when the Shelbyville kids realize that Bart is an impostor, he’s running for them and ends up in a room in a zoo. He slams the door behind him to escape from his pursuers, only to find out that he’s in a room with twelve other doors–and eleven of them have “man-eating” tigers in them. There is a sign that states something like, “Exit through Door 7 only, the rest contain man-eating tigers.” Of course, the doors themselves are all labeled I through XII, and Bart having never learned Roman numerals is in quite a bind (he also humorously remarks that they never even tried to teach him Roman numerals in school.) He ends up deciphering that VII = 7 by recognizing that Rocky “V” is Rocky 5 and Rocky II is Rocky 2, and doing the addition.