Saturday, March 1, 2008

It's Official: J Lo and Marc Anthony love Dragon Tales!

For those of you that don't know, Jennifer Lopez (J-Lo) and Marc Anthony (that creepy guy she's married to) had twins the other day.

For those of you that don't know, Dragon Tales is a preschool show on PBS.

J-Lo and Marc Anthony named their twins Max and Emme. Cute names, nice and modern, a little too popular for my tastes, to name my own kids, but better than a lot of the other popular names out there.

Dragon Tales is about two kids that "wish upon a dragon scale" to go have fantasy adventures in Dragon Land, where of course, they escape the confines of their playroom and learn all sorts of PBS things like work hard, play nice, and all that kind of stuff. The two kids are named Max and Emmy.

Now J-Lo doesn't have any other kids, but Marc Anthony does. Shouldn't he know about this show? Maybe he doesn't care? At the same time, Dragon Tales does have a few Spanish-speaking bilingual characters, in what seems to me to be a weak attempt at pandering to the huge Hispanic-American market. But maybe J-Lo and Marc Anthony like Quetzal and Enrique.

Anyway, this was just too funny to not share, and shed some light on this "coincidence". Thanks Aimée for pointing this out to me.

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Book Review: "Tom" by Tomie dePaola

Tomie dePaola makes a lot of books for kids. I must admit that we got a lot of his books coming through the house before I really started to get into him. His books are generally of high quality, but occasionally there are outstanding books that he makes. "Tom" is one of my all-time favorites!

I believe that many of Tomie dePaola's books are at least semi-autobiographical. This is one of those. Tommy is the main character in the book, a young boy. Tom is Tommy's grandfather. Since Tommy is named after Tom, they share a special bond. Tom likes to act childish and play around with Tommy. Tom is clearly a cool grandfather.

But the coolest thing is "garunge-arunge-a"! Tom is a butcher. He gets chickens whole and then has to cut them down to sellable things. He starts by cutting off the chicken's head and feet. He has Tommy plant the chicken head to try to grow a chicken bush. That was funny! But then he gives Tommy the chicken feet, and shows him that if you pull the tendons, the claws open and close.

Tommy is a bright kid, and washes the feet and brings them to school. Now I normally don't like school showing up in books, but I like it here. Tommy hides his hands, and operates the claws, using them to scare all the girls at school. As he jumps out from behind a bush, making the claws open and close, he yells "Garunge-arunge-a" at his victims. This had me rolling on the floor for days, and is a regular attack Boden pulls on me, now. Eventually Tommy garunge-arunge-a's a teacher and is sent to the principal's office, where his claws are cruelly confiscated. But the awesomeness has already been done.

That combines with dePaola's unique drawings and great story telling to make this book a keeper. We check it out over and over again from the library, and really ought to buy it! I also like the way that this book, like most of dePaola's is just the right readability - not too long, and not too short. You aren't wishing it was done halfway through, and at the same time, you're fully satisfied at the end of the book.

I rate this book "highly recommended".

Monday, February 18, 2008

Preschool TV

I know I don't post here that often. I don't really seek out things to complain about if I can avoid it. But this morning watching PBS Kids, I can't help but shake my head in disbelief at some of the themes and messages they're putting out there.

First, there's the interlude sections. The preschool-like setting with a woman (Miss Laurie?) and a little rat (Hooper? - actually a hamster or something) and a bunch of little actor kids now and then. They do learning-esque things, all compressed into two minutes of in-between time. Today they filled in the blank at the end of every line of the little rhyme with the monsters jumping on the bed. You know, mama called the doctor and the doctor said no more monsters jumping on the bed. It was pointless to say the least. I would almost rather just see a lowercase and uppercase 'A' side by side for the time it took to do that.

Then the next show came on. SuperWhy. This show is pretty annoying in the first place. Most especially because the faces of the main characters are pretty much devoid of emotion, except for minor eyebrow movements. But the hollow blank stares of their computer-animated eyes leaves you feeling like they are some kind of cute kid zombies. Then they're always preaching a lot of moralistic hard working puritan stuff that I am not a big fan of. You know, like the main point of the three little pigs, that you gotta make a fortress of bricks to survive.

But the kids love the show. They do a lot of words and letters stuff, and Iris seems to actually follow along and maybe even learn a tiny bit of reading-type-stuff each show. But at the same time she learns a lot of silly worthless or even possibly damaging ideas. Boden loves the superhero theme of the show, and the super computer (which is another annoying part - this so-called supercomputer is just like the most primitive handheld device - it doesn't really do anything. Actually the handheld device does all the work and the "super computer" is just a big display monitor). Boden doesn't pay enough attention to learn anything, which is fine. And at least SuperWhy isn't a monster or mean animal or anything else that might inspire him to hit something or someone.

Today the princess character was nervous because she had to pass a test before she could become a junior princess. This makes me sick in several ways.

First of all, tests are the worst. They don't prove anything. They mainly just make most test-takers unduly nervous and stressed out. Scoring well on a test doesn't indicate actual learning of the subject matter, and choking on a test doesn't mean you didn't learn anything. Tests are an artifice made by teachers to "objectively" measure the progress of their students.

Second, what is a junior princess anyway? It is like a meaningless step towards true princess-hood that must be achieved for some reason right at the specific ascribed time. Sort of like a test for a belt upgrade in martial arts. It is just a symbol of progress, but not really indicative of real progress necessarily.

Third, the princess character is nervous. Being nervous for a test doesn't help anything. She was all "what if I fail?" That's the worst type of thinking to have around anything, especially something like a test. This goes deeper. The reason they portray it this way is to make kids that feel nervous about tests feel like they're not alone. That seems like a noble goal, but it really says that its acceptable, or even normal to be afraid of tests; afraid to try new things or step up to challenges. Furthermore, it can also make kids that aren't scared of tests feel like they should be scared of them. Even if you don't detest tests, it still isn't that great to make harmful behavior like fear of failure seem normal.

Fourth, the test she's scared of is trivial. It is a six-piece puzzle. This character can read and spell and things, and she's scared of a six-piece puzzle? Maybe she isn't ready to be a junior princess, after all.

Since I was writing this, I missed the end of the show. They come up with a super duper computer secret word or phrase that solves the problem. Iris said that this word was "Smart" so I can only assume that they told the princess she was smart enough to solve the problem, so she gained confidence to try the trivial puzzle, then achieved her junior princess milestone goal.

This leads me to another issue. The underlying theme of the show is that nobody can solve their own problems. While there's a benefit to asking for help when you're stuck, constantly leaning on others for confidence and answers to some of the extremely simple problems they highlight on the show is no good. The takeaway that I get from today's show is that you should be unsure of your own abilities, especially when the stakes are high and you really want something. Then you need to get confidence from others in order to even try to achieve your goals. This is not a belief that I want my kids to have in any way.

Maybe I'm just being cynical, but I think that these messages are part of what our public schools are all about. They have to make every kid feel welcome, and can't make anyone seem less smart than the others. But at the same time they push a uniform cirriculum on the kids every day, enforcing the message that you have to be like everyone else, and you have to learn all at the same time. When they force knowledge at an unenthusiastic crowd, the learners need to be extrinisically motivated by fear, e.g. fear of bad grades. The whole preschool TV agenda is aimes to teach kids that you have to learn what they're being told when its being told, on a schedule out of the kids' control. It's self-un-confidence and lack of control messages like this that are one of the big parts we're keeping our kids away from publicly funded child prisons known as schools. We want our kids to believe thay can achieve whatever they want to, and that they don't have to endure any forced learning just for the sake of compliance.

I just hope that the small doses they're getting on TV is not too much already. I better go turn off the TV. Because now Dragon Tales is on, and don't get me started on that show...