WTF?

[purpletigron]

OK, who came up with the idea that calling 'invertebrates' 'mini-beasts' in offical teaching materials was a good idea?

Comments

Dumbing down, or what?

[muninnhuginn]

I don't know, but it annoyed the hell out of me last year. Apart from anything else, it didn't leave the kids with any idea about what was a mini-beast and what wasn't. Trying to instill any understadning about classification of insects et al is now very difficult. Looby Loo's class did an assembly on the topic last year and they all had to cross the stage pretending to be a mini-beast. If I remmber correctly LL wanted to be a crab, but couldn't be because it wasn't a mini-beast, so she was a spider instead.

Re: Dumbing down, or what?

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

Luckily, I'm not going to have to use this term in my teaching ... they're old enough that I can expect them to use 'invertebrates' instead. Poor Looby Loo!

[swisstone.livejournal.com]

Morons.

[porcinea.livejournal.com]

Holy *fuck*.

[handslive.livejournal.com]

Does this mean I can be a 'mega-beast'? Sounds like an animated series on TV or something.

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

I'm sure you can, if it makes you happy. Gojira, watch out!! :-)

[hobbitblue.livejournal.com]

You're kidding? ::sigh::

Probably the same thing that suddenly decided "carnivorous" was too complex a word and switched to the American usage of meat-eating dinosaurs in all the recent documentaries from any source lately. We did dinosaurs in primary school and learnt to spell carnivorous *and* herbivorous, woo. Advanced educational skill that, clearly.

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

I had to web-search to find out wtf they were talking about!!!!

My students will be taught how to spell carnivorous :-)

[hobbitblue.livejournal.com]

*sometimes* simplifying things for kids/beginners is a good idea. Most of the time you just end up having to replace one set of knowledge with another and it wastes everyone's time and makes the kids sound like morons.

I should think so too! :)

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

Can you teach them to spell omnivorous too?

[supergee.livejournal.com]

That violates the principle of eschewing baby talk in favor of simplified real language.

[cuboid-ursinoid.livejournal.com]

So by their definition a giant squid is a mini-beast and a dormouse isn't? Huh!

[nlindq.livejournal.com]

The same people who use a stylised Noah's Ark in their logo, apparently.

[vgnwtch.livejournal.com]

People who have never seen the bumper-sticker Eschew obfuscation.

What a load of cobblers.