Strollerderby : kiddie lit

Dinos and Dragons: On the Scientific Method for Kids

Miriam Axel-Lute — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 19:00:00 GMT

On my post about errors about the natural world in kids books, a few people piped up to say that the social biases in kids books bother them more—stupid fathers, prissy girls, everyone white, etc. I wish it were as easy to dispatch those with a simple top ten list, but they're far more insidious and numerous.

However, here's one tiny stab at the overlap: A bit of a commentary about the blinders that social biases put on scientists.

The book in question is called Boy, Were We Wrong About Dinosaurs. It was recommended to me by a commenter on my previous post, and billed as an introduction to the scientific method, a window into the process of making theories based on the evidence you have, testing them (when that’s possible), and changing them based on new evidence.

And, of course, it’s about dinosaurs, which hold a not entirely explicable fascination for a massive proportion of kids, mine included.

It is in fact, a pretty great book, full of neat stories such as people mistaking Iguanodons’ massive conical thumb bones for horns until they found a complete skeleton, or how some bone cross-sections look more like those of warm-blooded animals than of cold-blooded ones—which is part of what spurred the whole movement toward dinosaurs-as-bird-ancestors and away from dinosaurs-as-big-lizards.

But the book also is a better example of how science works than it really set out to be: It contains two glaring examples of how, for all the real power of the scientific method and (most) scientists’ genuine commitment to objectivity and open-mindedness, science is carried out (and interpreted and written about) by people who are subject, to a greater or lesser extent, to all the biases and assumptions of their day. Those blinders creep into their conclusions far more than they would like to admit.

For example, one of the points that the book makes is that we used to think of dinosaurs as having reptile-like parenting skills—i.e., none; they lay eggs and leave. But then paleontologists found evidence (such as nests with older hatchlings in them) that dinosaurs may have been more active parents.

Except the book doesn’t say parents.

It says mothers. Over and over.

I have no need to project egalitarian parenting onto other species, where it often doesn’t exist. But since it does exist among birds quite often, I would have been pretty slow to make such a massive assumption and present it as a “discovery.”

And in fact, last December a flurry of articles about active dinosaur dads came out—some researchers think in some cases they were the primary parent.

Boy, was the book wrong—not in a scientific way though, in a lazy way.

This kind of assumption can actively bog science down. In the 1990s, cultural anthropologist Emily Martin described how researchers working on new forms of contraception were incredibly slow to recognize key information about how human fertilization works because they were so wedded (unconsciously) to their culturally influenced assumptions of mighty aggressive sperm and passive eggs. (Turns out sperm are weak uncoordinated swimmers and have to be entrapped and engulfed by the egg while they try to get away.)

The other bias in Boy, Were We Wrong About Dinosaurs strikes even closer to the heart of scientists and their self image. It starts off with a description of how the ancient Chinese found dinosaur bones and, in trying to figure out what they came from, came up with the creature we now know as the Chinese dragon. It shows a picture, says that they figured they must have been magic to have been so big, and thought they might be still around. “Boy, were they wrong!” Then it says, “Now we think many of our own past guesses about dinosaurs were just as wrong as those of ancient China.”

Toward the end of the book we come back to this theme, but less diplomatically: “Perhaps today’s ideas about dinosaurs will someday seem just as silly as the magic dragons of long-ago China.”

Interestingly, instead of “Boy, were they wrong,” everyone else, starting with European scientists from hundreds of years ago gets “Boy, were we wrong!” (emphasis mine). The message is clear: real scientific inquiry began after those initial discoveries, with the “we” of the rest of the book (all white by the illustrations).

Let’s pause and consider for a second. What did the ancient Chinese think those bones belonged to? A large, long, scaly reptilian creature. What did the first Europeans to try to make a theory about the same sorts of bones—a long time later and with far more technology—come up with? A large, long, scaly reptilian creature. They gave it a different name. They came up with different wrong embellishments. They placed it into a different cosmology. But the ancient Chinese were basically doing the same thing, with fewer tools, and had remarkably similar results. They weren't right, but they were hardly silly.

I understand and support what the book’s authors were trying to do: show how early scientific hypotheses can turn out to be as off-base as something that even a child can recognize as untrue. Only in the process of doing so, they revealed their own ethnocentric biases: They feel that dragons were an obviously silly, superstitious theory, while gray, reptilian brontosauruses dragging their tails through the mud were an educated hypothesis that happened to turn out to be inaccurate.

Boy, were they wrong. But at least they gave the parents reading it a ready phrase to critique their own book with.

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Smackdown: I Won't Read That Thing Again

Miriam Axel-Lute — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 21:31:00 GMT

"Sheep live on farms. Sheep like to eat grass. Sheep apparently have shiny, reflective, slightly pink fleece in order to captivate small children when the text of a book is too damn inane to do so."

Do you have any books whose actual rendition when read out loud starts to sound kind of like that? I sure do. Or did. They take themselves too seriously and yet are dull, completely unoriginal, have no feel for language. Their messages, if they have them, are pointless or annoying. Some of them get basic things about the world wrong.

When faced with a demand to read one of these specimens (plenty of which have entered our house as gifts or hand-me-downs) more than once a day, I find I have two options: Sarcasm or refusal. The former is probably an unwise long-term parenting technique, but the latter meets with more protest, so obnoxious commentary usually rules the day.

After bedtime though, I have another option: That book just might quietly disappear.

I realize that what I'm looking for in a book and what an under-three-year-old is looking for are pretty gosh darn different. I realize that repetition is part of their cognitive development and I'm just going to get sick of reading even the best of books. I realize that the point of reading to my child is not to entertain me or meet my exacting literary standards.

But here's the thing: If it's totally possible to have the best of both worlds, why shouldn't I? Why should I settle for the dregs that have washed up on my bookshelves? I doubt anyone would argue that parents can't dispose of books that don't match the values they want to pass along. One my values is literary merit. And it's available in plenty.

There are thousands and thousands of really awesome kids' books out there, right down to the most simple reading level. They may not be works I would curl up with on the couch on my own (though I might with Seuss or A. A. Milne), but they have some combination of rhyming and rhythm, playful cleverness, kindness, imagination, style, and beautiful illustrations that not only don't turn my stomach, but even make me smile and enjoy myself (at least for the first three readings per day or so). Oh, and my daughter also loves them. Perhaps not always more than some of the ones I can't stand, but also no less.

Besides, kids notice subtle things, and I'm quite sure mine must notice when she asks me to read something to her and I give a shudder of horror. That doesn't keep me up at night, but it worries me more than facing down a potential fit because Spot's Thanksgiving has gone missing. "Things get lost sometimes" is a lesson that's worth learning. Kids get over it. (Though it helps if you identify the bad apples early, before any deep attachments are formed.)

Will my daughter be mad at us when she finds a couple of titles we couldn't even bring ourselves to pass along to those with different tastes hammered into the bed frame to level the lopsided mattress? She might. But I figure by that time she'll be able to read to herself and have moved on. And hopefully she will have developed better taste too.

Photo by Indie Wench.

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5 Nature Facts Kids' Authors Should Tattoo on their Forearms

Miriam Axel-Lute — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 18:00:00 GMT

It's not just the creationists and global warming deniers who make us an anti-science society. It's also lazy children's book authors, editors, fact-checkers, and reviewers. The very popular Rachel Isadora can't tell a french horn from a tuba. Even the venerable Richard Scarry depicts corn growing from an already cooked seed and bread being baked before it has risen. It drives me crazy.

Now, before you call me a killjoy, I don’t mean that I have a problem with fantasy and surreality. I love it. The goofier the better. Animals talking, kids flying or shrinking, toys coming alive . . . great. I'm not complaining about Richard Scarry's five-seater pencil car.

But it's generally clear when books are striving to be basically realistic, even educational. You know the type: books about where rainbows come from, or things you see on a fall walk, or world animals. It's when most things are right that the glaring errors bug me. The least we could do, I figure, is not actively teach kids things they’ll have to unlearn later if they ever manage to study biology or ecology. (Cultural errors and biases get into a whole other can of worms.)

Here are five sets of nature facts that children’s book authors (and illustrators and editors) seem to get wrong over and over and over:

(1) Lions, tigers, bears, and kangaroos don’t live side by side anywhere other than a zoo. Neither do polar bears and penguins. This one is at least as old as Dorothy chanting “Lions, and tigers, and bears, oh my!” and as pervasive as the Wicked Witch’s all-seeing eye. It's so common that plenty of well-educated adults would have to pause and ask themselves where exactly tigers do live and whether Africa has bears.
(2) Bluebirds are not blue from head to toe (and similar confusions). The only bird on this continent that’s blue all over is an indigo bunting. Bluebirds have chestnut chests and white rumps. (Or, for you West Coasters, they're just white underneath.) Also, no adult duck is yellow with an orange beak and seals don’t bark or have ~~whiskers~~ ears (that's sea lions). Field guides, anyone? Or even Google images?
(3) Birds make nests for laying eggs, not for sleeping in. And they don’t build them in the fall.
(4) Bulls never have udders. Several people have told me it drives them round the bend to see an animal with a prominent set of mammary glands going by the pronoun “he.”
(5) The moon is not always/only out at night. I realize that the phases of the moon get a little esoteric, and I can never myself keep straight how to tell at a glance whether that’s a waxing halfmoon or a waning one. But I find it to be strangely symbolic of our penchant for simplifying the facts out of everything that we take a heavenly body that appears during the day half the time and during the night half the time (often then not rising until well after sunset) and persist in pairing them as opposites. (Illustrators also manage to never make the sun or moon rise or set, but just hang in the same part of the sky as a day or night progresses, and the moon stays in the same phase as weeks go by.)

I'm sure there are dozens more, many of which I don't even know enough to catch. (Bruce McMillan, author of nonfiction kids books, says there are tons, and it makes him at least as cranky as it makes me.)

What bloopers get under your skin?

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Will Libraries Go the Way of Video Stores?

Miriam Axel-Lute — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 19:15:00 GMT

Anyone who has both used Netflix and had an overdue library book knew it was only a matter of time until the same model was used for books. And in fact, there are a few companies out there who have been sailing in those waters, like Booksfree and Book Swim. Book Swim is now specifically promoting itself to pregnant women ("It costs a lot to buy all those pregnancy books only to discover that most of them are useless and mostly designed to scare the crap out of you." Ahem, my words, not theirs) and also parents of the voracious read-to-me set ("save money spent on buying lots of children's books that can be rented instead." Their words, not mine).

While it appeals on some level, I have quibbles with the execution: They have not yet gotten the one of the main keys to Netflix's success, which is having everything, not just the most popular stuff. I looked up several of my daughter's favorites on Book Swim, and they weren't there. Not only that, but her not-all-that-obscure beloved tales don't come anywhere near meeting the fine-print criteria for the cheery "just tell us what you want and we'll buy it for you!" option, which include "an Amazon sales rank of at least 20,000." That's pretty narrow folks. I think there must be 20,000 best-selling unofficial political biographies alone.

If you're going to charge $20 to 40/month for 3 to 11 books at a time (Book Swim. Don't get fooled by their low intro rate—it's one month only) or $10 to $50/month for 2 to 15 books at time (Booksfree), you need super-duper-special selection and service. Remember folks, you are competing against free. I suppose if I had to drive to the library, or had a work schedule that conflicted with its hours, the delivery aspect would be more of a draw and feel like less of an environmental faux pas, but from my home office it just looks like one more lost excuse to get out of the house for 15 minutes. (And it's worth noting that many libraries apparently will deliver too under some circumstances.)

I'm sure the right person with sufficient capital could iron out these issues, add a recommendation engine, and be really in business. (Unless the higher cost of shipping books compared to DVDs just makes it an idea whose time hasn't come after all. It's possible.)

But what really troubles me, of course, is the idea of abandoning the library. Libraries still serve as one of the rare public meeting spaces not devoted to commerce. They help kids with research and adults with job hunts and starting businesses and their own formal and informal educations. Libraries buy books based on both popularity and serving their public. They tend to fight the good fight to make sure controversial material is available. You know, good qualifty-of-life, bastion of democracy stuff.

We recently had a budget vote on a large plan to expand and upgrade the branch libraries up here in Albany, so I've seen the research about the social and economic benefits of a good library. But I've also heard from the kooks who say that with the Internet and big-box bookstores, we don't need libraries anymore, and I hate the idea of giving them more ammunition. I know book renters would still pay their library taxes, but usage rates and general familiarity are crucial to keep libraries' budgets away from the ax.

I think with the right savvy, libraries are up to the task of competing with even an improved book rental service. Already, through inter-library loans you can get almost anything, and with my countywide system's online reservation system, it's almost as easy as Netflix to request something. A little slow to get it, but that should be fixable. Make renewing easier, with a warning system when something's coming due, and you're most of the way there for me.

Besides, for picture books, the library already wins hands down: My daughter gets the tactile adventure of browsing the shelves and discovering hidden gems, and we get the excuse of "Oh, that has to go back to the library now!" when a not-quite-gem has worn out its welcome.

Photo by Sugar Pond.

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