By: Julie Fortenberry,
on 9/11/2013
By: David Elzey,
on 11/22/2011
by Jean de Brunhoff translated from the French by Merle S. Haas Random House 1937 Babar's little monkey friend goes home for summer vacation. All hell breaks loose. It is the end of the school year and time for Babar the elephant to bid his monkey friend Zephir farewell for the summer. As his friends wave goodbye to him as his train passes them by the river it is impossible to wonder if
By: Lauren,
on 12/10/2010
Everybody knows that a noun is the name of a person, place, or thing. It’s one of those undeniable facts of daily life, a fact we seldom question until we meet up with a case that doesn’t quite fit the way we’re used to viewing things.
That’s exactly what happened to a student in Ohio when his English teacher decided to play the noun game. To the teacher, the noun game seemed a fun way to take the drudgery out of grammar. To the student it forced a metaphysical crisis. To me it shows what happens when cultures clash and children get lost in the tyranny of school. That’s a lot to get from a grammar game.
Anyway, here’s how you play. Every student gets a set of cards with nouns written on them. At the front of the classroom are three buckets, labeled “person,” “place,” and “thing.” The students take turns sorting their cards into the appropriate buckets. “Book” goes in the thing bucket. “city” goes in the place bucket. “Gandhi” goes in the person bucket.
Ganesh had a card with “horse” on it. Ganesh isn’t his real name, by the way. It’s actually my cousin’s name, so I’m going to use it here.
You might guess from his name that Ganesh is South Asian. In India, where he had been in school before coming to Ohio, Ganesh was taught that a noun named a person, place, thing, or animal. If he played the noun game in India he’d have four buckets and there would be no problem deciding what to do with “horse.” But in Ohio Ganesh had only three buckets, and it wasn’t clear to him which one he should put “horse” in.
In India, Ganesh’s religion taught him that all forms of life are continuous, interrelated parts of the universal plan. So when he surveyed the three buckets it never occurred to him that a horse, a living creature, could be a thing. He knew that horses weren’t people, but they had more in common with people than with places or things. Forced to choose, Ganesh put the horse card in the person bucket.
Blapp! Wrong! You lose. The teacher shook her head, and Ganesh sat down, mortified, with a C for his efforts. This was a game where you got a grade, and a C for a child from a South Asian family of overachievers is a disgrace. So his parents went to talk to the teacher.
It so happens that I’ve been in a similar situation. We spent a year in France some time back, and my oldest daughter did sixth grade in a French school. The teacher asked her, “How many continents are there?” and she replied, as she had been taught in the good old U.S. of A., “seven.” Blaap! Wrong! It turns out that in France there are only five.
So old dad goes to talk to the teacher about this. I may not be able to remember the seven dwarfs, but I rattled off Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, Antarctica, North America, and South America. The teacher calmly walked me over to the map of the world. Couldn’t I see that Antarctica was an uninhabited island? And couldn’t I see that North and South America were connected? Any fool could see as much.
At that point I decided not to press the observation that Europe and Asia were also connected. Some things are not worth fighting for when you’re fighting your child’s teacher.
0 Comments on The Noun Game – A Simple Grammar Lesson Leads to a Clash of Civilizations as of 12/10/2010 1:07:00 PM
By: Betsy Bird,
on 8/9/2010
That’s what Neil Gaiman writes on Twitter whenever he links to one of his blog posts. “Warning: Contains Me.” Well, today’s a nice me-centric post, but let’s start off by looking at a “them” instead. Specifically, a “them” of awesome.
Beats Pac-Man. Or Centipede, for that matter. Go to this site to see more videos.
Who says there are no second chances on Broadway? Or, in the case of Mr. Frank Wildhorn, third, fourth, and fifth chances. From the man who brought you Jekyll & Hyde (which I admit to liking in college) and Dracula: The Musical (not so much) comes Wonderland: A New Alice. A New Musical Adventure. I’m not hep enough to my Broadway history to know how many Alice musicals have trod the Great White Way before, but I suspect that this is not the first. Interesting. Thanks to @PWKidsBookshelf for the link.
By: Julie Fortenberry,
on 7/27/2009
(click on the corner of the page to turn)
By: Kelly Herold,
on 9/16/2008
Nadine of Kiddos and Books sent me a link to Adam Gopnik's article on Babar in The New Yorker. The problem with Babar, as Gopnik explains, is the following: "Babar, such interpreters have insisted, is an allegory of French colonization, as seen by the complacent colonizers: the naked African natives, represented by the “good” elephants, are brought to the imperial capital, acculturated, and then sent back to their homeland on a civilizing mission." Gopnik disagrees with this interpretation, finding instead that the Babar books are "are a fable of the difficulties of a bourgeois life."
Check out these five facts about Dr. Seuss at the Mental Floss blog. Did you know he worked for Big Oil? Me neither. But...I did score 100% on the Dr. Seuss quiz available at the end of the page. Why? Most of the characters come from Dr. Seuss's ABC: An Amazing Alphabet Book--"Big A little a, what begins with a?"
…I still cannot believe that I didn’t even see you at the New/Cal dinner. And I was SITTING WITH JIM AVERBECK. ::SIGH::
That Frogger song at the end of your ALA video is rockin’!
I’m voting for Westerfield #1 (mostly on account of its not looking like a movie poster (very backwards of me, I know, but I hate – have always hated, always will hate – photography on fiction covers, even when heavily Photoshopped). And I wouldn’t get your hopes up about “Wonderland” on Broadway… my inside-scoop theater people are mostly thumbs-down.
Loved the Tammy Pierce link. She is one of the daughters favorite authors. And I can testify that Pierce is a total hoot as a speaker- get her in a room with Bruce Coville and it is non-stop laughs.
Thanks Betsy. You did a fine job of author herding this year. We have interviews with Holly Black, Ellen Hopkins, Grace Lin, Jon Scieszka, Linda Sue Park and many other luminaries of the children’s book world. And we got most of them to play a game of $20,000 Pyramid in honor of the Newbery winner, WHEN YOU REACH ME.
All the interviews are now up, grouped by subject, and we have a bunch of things for folks to do over at the site.
Hope your ankle is all healed.—J
PS- Hi Tanita!
Love your FuseNews posts — and this is a nice long, juicy one.