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I use M & M's to teach radioactive decay. Maybe the history teacher and I should do a thematic unit .
This is ligit. Allowing companies to submit information about their products to textbooks companies for no other reason but to advertise to kids just showes that the time that kids give to teachers to teach them and the money that parents give them to do a decent job is wasted on crap that undermines their abilities and intelligences. As previously stated, it works or it would not be happening.
I use M & M's to teach radioactive decay. Maybe the history teacher and I should do a thematic unit once.
We could invite the math teacher too-my kids did an M/M math unit once .
Yeah....lets see...we could do something like.....We could show how Johnny ate 5 bags of M&M's a day and Suzy ate one a day, and Pat did not eat any. After one year, which student gained the most weight and with had the most radioactive, er I mean tooth decay. Which student was the healthiest, which student was the most active, which one had the most confidence, which one paid attention better in school? And the smarty science teacher could come along and explain how the M&M's broke down in the body and caused such changed. The history teacher could come back around and show how that, even though they learned from history that the M&M's made them unhealthy, they still continued with their unhealthy lifestyles. I am sure you could find a million ways to teach with M&M's but teaching kids healthy habits all day everyday is just one downfall of the school systems. The kids are feeding crap to the kids like this all day long, regardless of the fact that so many kids are obese and even have diabetes.
We couldn't count on the schools using fun counting bears or some other way for kids to learn that is fun.
But none of that gets me going as much as schools using textbooks with so much advertising from clothes companies, to McDonalds, to candy companies, to toy companies, to potato chip companies to Disney all through the year, none of which of course state the long history of products that have been pulled off the shelves, where or who puts their products together, how cheaply they are built, or the history or scienve behind their unhealthy food products.
It is like those school buses that have large advertisments on their buses for the same type of junk. And of course parents are 100% to blame for their kids problems. Not governement institutions in which they are forced to be enrolled in. No.
[quote=golfgal;10417906]Well, as a former history teacher some of that fluff makes history real for kids. It is a very difficult subject to make fun for most kids. It is also hard for kids to relate to something that happened 300 years ago. Having a fun timeline to follow keeps things real. I used to spend a lot of time relating content to ages of people around them--this happened in your lifetime, this happened when your parents were teenagers, this happened when your grandparents were teenagers. It gave them a more concrete way to put history where it belonged. If you said that your grandparents were born around the time M&M's were invented and the stock market crash happened about that same time (I have no idea when M/M's came to be, just using this as an example) kids GOT it vs saying in the late 1920's.... .
I remember one time we were talking about the Vietnam War and the kids were starting that glassy eye "this is boring look" and I asked them when were most of your born--most of the kids had been born in the early 70's. Once they put 2 and 2 together the subject became real to them.
I guess I just was able to teach my own kids what advertising was and how it was used at a very young age. I also figured out that when they said "I want that" they really meant that it was kind of cool-not that they really wanted me to buy it. I could tell their interest in something pretty easily-varying from that's cool to I REALLY, REALLY want that. The bigger deal you make out of something like that, the more they are going to push you. As for the "we don't buy anything that they sell on tv, that is just silly. Of course you buy things that they sell on tv all the time? How are you going to explain that you won't buy the ShamWow but you will buy Tide Laundry Detergent?? You are also passing up a GREAT learning experience by not buying the ShamWow and letting them learn that just because it looks cool on TV doesn't mean it is. Oh, and just an FYI-that car windshield wand that they are advertising on TV is AWESOME!![/quote]
There are lots of ways of making history more exciting. Waiting to introduce it until high school is not a good foundation for making history fun to learn. Besides that, everything in our society just makes it seem useless to know. Kind of like trying to kill off the large quantity of older people with the history and the love of sharing it.
Wrong. The sooner you address it and teach your children, the sooner they stop. My daughter now can recognise cheap crap in the stores and will say something like, "I thought this might be cool but it is crap. Do they make something like this that is good quality?"
We also do not purchase from screaming "CALL NOW!" advertisers on TV. We also do not buy Tide. We buy dye and fragrance free laundry detergent, the best one with the least amount of rash caused to my children's tender skin.
SO instead of teaching my children wise shopping habits and how to recognize junk before they buy, I should teach them to buy the crap and try it first rather than research their options and make a wise decision. but like they say "A million..." wait, wait, "A MILLION CUSTOMERS CAN'T BE WRONG!" Like a million customers are a lot in a world with so many active shoppers.
I know because finding a way to doing the exact same thing without spending the money to do so is such an invalueable skill. Besides, how often do you really need to wash the inside of your windows and how often do you think to yourself "I sure need some way of doing this easier." There was no need to fill but they made SEEM like there was.
When dd was 5, she asked me to buy her hooked on phonics. Since her sister was a struggling reader I did but I ordered it just before Christmas and we didn't have time to start working on it. One day, we we're in the car and dd asks "Has it been six weeks?". I said, "Six weeks since what?". She answered "Since we bought Hooked on Phonics" and I said yes. She got a puzzled look in her face and asked "How come I can't read better?". I swear she believed everything they said on TV. We had such fun with her. Her brother was the same way when he was little. You could tell him anything and he'd just get awestruck. Kids are so entertaining. Dd#1 wasn't nearly as much fun. She figured out rather quickly that everything isn't true.
I love how dd#2 concluded there's no Santa. One day she just announced there was no Santa. I asked her how she knew. She said "Because if there was a Santa dd#1 and I would have gotten coal by now. And that was the end of Santa Clause at our house.
Most (all?) students are exposed to history well before high school. Details vary by state, but a strong foundation of history is built up year after year. It's also integrated into various other lessons, when reading a historic novel, for example. My background is in history (with a heavy emphasis on public history, including facilitating and leading student-oriented visits to historic sites and museums); elementary school students are definitely learning about history.
I don't like advertising in schools, and I'd be uncomfortable if one specific produce kept appearing in a textbook, but the "fluff" really does make history come alive. Things that on the surface seem insignificant can hold deep meaning, and teaching kids to look at the world around them and evaluate it for themselves is important.
Take a carton of ice cream from the 1950s, for example. What does it look like? What does the package design look like? What larger events impact the art on the box? Why is it shaped the way it is? How was it made? Who made it? Who produced the ice cream itself? Where did people buy it? You can go many, many different directions: a box of ice cream purchased at the supermarket was rectangular to fit into the freezers that people now had in their homes. Maybe the packaging design reflected fascination with the atomic age. Someone had to design and manufacture that box, someone else had the dairy that housed the cows that produced the milk that was made into the ice cream; each step was increasingly done by different people, and it was all packaged into one high-tech container that was transported by truck to a supermarket - a major shift in the way Americans consumed things - very possibly a supermarket in the new suburbs that housed young post-war families who were now living the new American dream of their own house in the suburbs, complete with car and picket fence. It was probably a woman who drove to the store to buy that ice cream; what does that say about gender roles? Changes in transportation? Change in lifestyle, in landcape, in business, demographics, consumer demands? How was it different from earlier years? Soda fountains were still around, but things were starting to change. You could talk about eating habits, the history of ice cream, what that shows about society. You could go into the science of making ice cream. What it meant to have a freezer in the house. You could talk about advertising. Health. In short, a box of ice cream might on the surface seem like pure fluff, but you can use it to connect the little things that make up the daily life of regular people to the larger issues facing society as a whole.
And, as an even greater aside, I just did a quick search for M&Ms and see that their history has connections to the Spanish Civil War (invented after observing soldiers eating similar candies to avoid melting)and WWII (rationing, plus only available to soldiers). I think stuff like that is interesting, although I would make an effort to make sure that the candy (or any product) was not itself the focus of the lesson, but rather a fun accessory to launch a more substantial discussion. If a brand actually appears in a textbook it also doesn't hurt to point that fact out, and to ask the kids if they think it's appropriate. Kids are smart; advertising can be a learning lesson in itself, one in not letting oneself be manipulated by large corporations.
At the same time, product placement in textbooks or in school isn't appropriate, and I do support efforts to get that sort of advertising out of schools.
Most (all?) students are exposed to history well before high school. Details vary by state, but a strong foundation of history is built up year after year.
I liked your post, in general, but I have to say I think you are very mistaken about a strong foundation having been built up before high school.
"Exposed to history" I can buy.
I asked one recent 7 Sister grad, one recent prep grad heading off to Bennington, and one rising public high school junior - all pretty sharp kids.
From the high school student:
Quote:
[08/24-01:42:43] s4: i disagree with the words 'strong foundation'
[08/24-01:42:53] s4: the first sentence is fine
and the college graduate:
Quote:
are students exposed to history before high school? sure, absolutely. however, nothing in my experience suggests that they are exposed to it in such a way as to consistently build a strong foundation.
including during high school, btw, not just pre-high school
And the rising college freshman:
Quote:
[08/24-01:44:35] warrior: I didn't have the education most students get. People in my school were exposed to history in some form as early as first grade... I still remember volunteering to be "Merriweather Lewis" in the school play thinking that with a name like Merriweather the character must be a girl.
[08/24-01:47:07] warrior: But most people... I'm continually astonished by most people's lack of knowledge of history. I'm not sure if that's because I read it for fun, though.
[08/24-01:48:08] warrior: (A friend) told me, at Pennsic, that most people think Mary Queen of Scots and Mary Tudor are the same person. I don't know much about Mary Tudor except that she was very Catholic and burned people to death, but how can anyone think they're the same person?
They happened to be the three I was talking with, but I am sure I could have chosen a different three and not found any who felt otherwise.
Yes, I agree, and did overstate it a bit. "Strong foundation" is probably not the norm, but they've at least been exposed consistently to history over the years, with the quality of history education depending on the classroom. In other words, they're not starting fresh in 9th grade, although the level of historical knowledge is probably going to vary dramatically from student to student depending on individual circumstances.
It's been my experience that elementary age kids tend to be pretty fascinated by history (or maybe it was just me and my friends; I became a historian, so my experience and those of my historian friends are all rather biased, and the kids I work with tend to interested when they came to my sites for field trips); those are the peak years for reading Little House on the Prairie, Anne Frank, American Girl dolls (the historical dolls, anyway), books about Egypt, Greece, etc. Ideally the kids are getting a chance to build on that interest, both in and out of the classroom. That doesn't always happen, but those are definitely prime years to lay down a foundation for an interest in history and the encouragement of curiousity about the world in general. That's the responsibility of both teachers and parents, and there are lots of resources out there to help.
I've seen the studies showing the dramatic differences in exposure to vocabulary at an early age between children of different economic backgrounds; I would think that exposure to history or the past also varies drastically by family background. I don't know of any similar (or even vaguely similar) studies, but given that history is so integrated with things like reading, visiting museums (both history and art), travel, and even simply talking about family history (grandpa's experiences during the war, mom's former days as a flower child, etc.) this is another subject where kids enter the higher grades with enormous variation of knowledge and understanding (or appreciation), even among kids who have attended the same classes and schools and have studied the same textbooks.
Well, I will support the strong foundation statement, at least in our schools. Our kids have been studying history since kindergarten. It might not all be American History because you know there is a big world out there but our youngest are going into 9th grade and they have a very strong knowledge of American and World history already.
Some people just like to complain. The so called "fluff" in text books does not keep popping up over and over. There will be a 2"x2" blerb every once in a while in a text book pointing out a FUN fact. Big deal. Overstatements and generalizations really do no one any good. Fine, you have a big hang up with public education, your prerogative but perhaps if you lived somewhere that does have good schools and does do a good job teaching kids you might open your mind a bit.
Well, I will support the strong foundation statement, at least in our schools. Our kids have been studying history since kindergarten. It might not all be American History because you know there is a big world out there but our youngest are going into 9th grade and they have a very strong knowledge of American and World history already.
Some people just like to complain. The so called "fluff" in text books does not keep popping up over and over. There will be a 2"x2" blerb every once in a while in a text book pointing out a FUN fact. Big deal. Overstatements and generalizations really do no one any good. Fine, you have a big hang up with public education, your prerogative but perhaps if you lived somewhere that does have good schools and does do a good job teaching kids you might open your mind a bit.
Ours too. Each classroom picks a country to study each year. At the end of the year, each class does a presentation on their country. They go into history as well as current events.
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Dd#1 wasn't nearly as much fun. She figured out rather quickly that everything isn't true.
