Parents Baffled By Science Questions 656
Pickens writes "The BBC reports that four out of five parents living in the UK have been stumped by a science question posed by their children with the top three most-asked questions: 'Where do babies come from?', 'What makes a rainbow?' and 'Why is the sky blue?'. The survey was carried out to mark the launch of a new website by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills called Science: So what? So everything."
obvious answers (Score:5, Funny)
In the UK?!
Why, I'll bet we Americans could get stumped even easier!! take that, britian!
People definitely neglect science... (Score:5, Insightful)
But I was always amazed at how some people were so baffled by the simplest things that are very easy to learn about.
The everyday person needs to know more science. Unfortunately, many people who do know a lot of science act religious. They treat people who don't know it as inferior, and I believe that turns a lot of people away from learning about it. Not because they think science is less valid, but in a sense, because they don't want to be like the jackass that just got done making them feel worthless.
Honestly... I think people who know a lot of science are probably the biggest problem with science education.
Re:People definitely neglect science... (Score:5, Funny)
FTSummary:
Where do babies come from?
From the sixties:
Some parents asked their son, "What do you want for Christmas?"
He said, "I want a watch."
So they let him.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
How did we learn about things before google?
Re:People definitely neglect science... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:People definitely neglect science... (Score:5, Funny)
How did we learn about things before google?
My folks had an Encyclopedia set. The World Book Encyclopedia. When we learned about sperm and eggs and embryos and fetuses in school, I became curious as to how the man's sperm got into the woman. Not only was I curious, I was concerned. I certainly didn't want something like that happening: fathering a child simply by kissing a girl or holding her hand, so I figured I better find out before I got in trouble. So I pulled out the first "S" volume.
The article on "Sex" (human) starts out quite dry enough, describing relationships between the sexes and how they develop and change as children mature. It discusses dating and marriage and religious and social influences on intersexual relationships. Then finally the mechanics. As I recall, the description read like this: "A man and woman lie close together. The man places his penis inside the woman's vagina." This made a real impression on me: I figured I'd have to do quite a bit of growing before I could lie down next to a woman, take hold of my penis, and pull it over to the her vagina and plug it in like an extension cord! I was a little disappointed by how dull this sounded, but at the same time relieved that I wouldn't be accidentally spreading my genes around by casual contact.
Re:Results by Ethnic Group (Score:5, Interesting)
Citations please.
I know you're just being a racist troll, but...
From the numbers you provided, the sample groups were inadequate. Over the years, I've met many people, and had the opportunity to learn a lot about them. There are stereotypical and astereotypical people in every group. In a sampling of say 10 people, they may all be complete idiots, or rocket scientists. Looks are frequently deceiving.
The IQ scores are almost always skewed. It's not how "smart" you are, but how educated you are. For example, I've known poor farmers who were not well educated, but through what they have been educated in, it's apparent that they are smart. A good farmer can repair his own equipment, sometimes with minimal tools. He can raise crops even in adverse conditions. He can raise cattle from birth to slaughter, and take care of any problem along the way. One in particular who would score miserably on a standardized IQ test, and never completed high school could look at the symptoms of an animal, and treat it properly. He kept his 40 year old truck on the road without ever taking it to a mechanic, and could revive almost any piece of farm equipment. He could solve real world logical problems in a heart beat. He wouldn't have a prayer solving an algebraic equation, could barely spell, and had no clue what to do with a computer though. He was never taught those skills.
Then again, his neighbor would be hard pressed to repair a fence. Was he stupid? I don't know, I didn't know the neighbor well enough. Maybe he had simply never needed to repair a fence, and had never been taught. Could you?
I personally know someone, approximately 30 years old, who usually scored just over 100 on an IQ test. She had never finished high school. She recently started taking GED classes. Now that she has picked up the required skills, she retested and scored 138. She didn't get any smarter in a matter of weeks. She simply gained the skills required to score better on the IQ test. Because I knew her personally, I knew she was smart. With the new score, she now believes it. What is Pi? What is an acute triangle? What does E=MC^2 mean? If you were never taught such things, those would mean absolutely nothing to you.
Someone else I know was convinced she was stupid. She was told so for too many years. She decided to prove them wrong, and is a better programmer than I am now, fluent in several programming languages. I don't know her IQ score, but I'm confident in seeing her ability in fields that she has the skills in that she's brilliant.
I've known people who score very low. I tried to tutor someone who was mentally retarded in reading. I was teaching him letters, which took a while. We then started on words and sounding them out. He could accomplish simple words, but it was difficult at best for him. He was told that he would never read, because he was too stupid. It was more that the extra time wasn't spent with him on it. He'll never be a rocket scientist or a surgeon, so yes, his IQ was low. And he is white of European descent.
To be on topic, if you were never told why the sky was blue, would you know the answer? What if it simply wasn't important to you at the time you were told? You'd likely forget. Grouping "parents" into one general category is insane. Almost everyone can be a parent. Well, I'd say a decent percentage of Slashdot readers won't, because of social ineptness. :) I'm a parent of 3, and father-like figure to more. Sometimes the children are afraid to ask. "Where do babies come from?" may be too mysterious a question. I was asked recently about sex by a friend's son. He was afraid to ask his mother, and his father avoided the question. I answered age appropriately, and then told him it was fine to tell his mother. His reponse? "I can't talk to mom about stuff like that. She's a girl
Re:Results by Ethnic Group (Score:5, Insightful)
I think Einstein said it best (and much shorter) with this quote: "The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination."
Re:Results by Ethnic Group (Score:5, Informative)
I am a test designer.
What you are describing is what happens to every test anyone ever writes with the best of intentions. We make a test to, say, place students into the right level of language classes, and the department starts using their gain scores for their grades in those classes, muddling placement and outcome--two different testing situations that would need different methods.
Administration wants an instrument that matches the curriculum closer; you make it; they demand to know why it doesn't have X, Y, or Z. You point out that it isn't in the curriculum. They say "It should be!"
It happens every time. Even BMI, which was basically designed to find starving people, has been repurposed to define physical fitness--something it is not designed to do and cannot accurately assess.
People always misuse measures and then blame the person(s) who made them.
Welcome to my world.
Re:People definitely neglect science... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:People definitely neglect science... (Score:5, Insightful)
Learning for the sake of learning doesn't seem to be popular anymore
Schools and universities are increasingly being measures by how well they prepare people for work - i.e. education is becoming more like vocational training.
In Britain, the government has made schools a lot more centralised. Both schools are teachers have a lot less discretion.
Re:People definitely neglect science... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:People definitely neglect science... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep. Some people have much more pressing issues, like getting by on/below the poverty line. And maybe they don't think it's even the right stuff to be filling their kids' heads with. Yes, that should probably change, but I think there's definitely an overestimation of science's significance (in terms of awareness rather than potential) to the average person going on here.
That said... I think there is one overriding factor that could sort it all out. And it's a factor that I never see discussed in terms of parenting skills or raising kids. That factor is: your kid just asked a serious question about life. If you can't answer it, go the fuck out and find the answer, and give it to him. Basically, have some respect for the child's questions... he's obviously asking because it's important to his development in some way.
Re:People definitely neglect science... (Score:4, Interesting)
Wrong. A vast majority of people have always just learned enough just to get by. There has never been a period in human history where the vast majority of people sat around reading philosophy and physics books and discussed xyz science discovery. Call it human nature, but people tend to focus on the things that are most entertaining to them, and most people just want to know enough to have a decent discussion with the rest of the people around them.
I cant recall the last time I sat down with anyone and chatted about "Cirrus clouds", but this is the crap they teach in 5th grade. Why? Because the 14th century concept of the "new man". Its a failed paradigm that we still cling to: people being smart all around.
The education system, I'd say across the world is completely outdated and is a perfect example of a government run system. Even with all the technological advances available to schools, we still use the 17th century lecture style instruction method across the globe. We cram 30 students into the room with 1 teacher, and force everyone to learn at one pace: from the smartest to the dumbest. This made sense when schools taught the basics: reading, writing and arithmetic. This system was never meant to produce "college students". No, college students came from "wealthy" families that could afford nice schools with small classes that offered more personal attention from the academic instructor.
Intrusive government in the western world in cooperation with the unions work diligently to keep schools with a certain child to teacher ratio, in order to ensure more "jobs", not more educated children. Lets face it. You can put 100 children into a curriculum and augment it with a computer learning system and easily handle it with 1 teacher. This is being done with colleges all across the nation, right now. The teacher simply helps answer question while the computer handles the bulk of the instruction (yup, you can even complement the learning with pictures, videos, audio, etc..). Let the kids learn at their own pace and see what happens.
You wont get this though. Because we live in a world that demands "social justice" aka: forcing the smartest to be clumped in with the dumbest and the laziest.
Re:People definitely neglect science... (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, because if you learned for the sake of learning you would be an intellectual, which is considered a bad thing in modern America. You can't have a beer with an intellectual, and intellectuals are not good at bowling.
Re:People definitely neglect science... (Score:5, Interesting)
>>Please describe a point in history where it was ever popular...seriously, there will always be a distribution of intelligence, quit bitching that you're on the higher end of it.
During the space race. My mom was a literature person, but even she got interested in science and started reading a lot of Heinlein, etc., and now writes sci-fi of her own.
Re:People definitely neglect science... (Score:4, Funny)
n = 1, way to be scientifically minded (and n = "your mom" is hilarious)
Re:People definitely neglect science... (Score:5, Interesting)
Science during the Roman empire was very popular. The knowledge, inventions, progress, vast libraries etc were unparallelled.
Science only stopped when the empire fell and religion was allowed to rule.
Re:People definitely neglect science... (Score:4, Interesting)
In "The Demon Haunted World", Carl Sagan recalls a taxi driver who professed to be very interested in science ... then asked Sagan about flying saucers, Atlantis, etc.
Sagan describes his sadness at having to tell the guy that so many of his interests are "baloney" ... and his anger at an educational system that didn't equip the guy with the knowledge to distinguish science from pseudo-science.
A couple of decades later, school science teaching still seems to be less about critical thinking and more about absorbing facts handed down from on high. I imagine that most science *teachers* wish it were otherwise, but are bound by the curriculum.
Re:People definitely neglect science... (Score:5, Interesting)
I realized just how effective this was in my Freshman biology class when the student next to me, who was someone you'd probably refer to as a "typical black teen male" turned to me and said, "Man... you can't avoid learning in this class... yesterday I was makin' myself a sandwich and when I pulled the mayonase out I started thinking about what an immulsion was..."
But teaching at that level is absolutely exhausting... the trick, I've learned, is to show people that things follow a logical path. People, especially young people, just wait until someone tells them what happens next. Often they don't even attempt to figure out on their own what happens next. Really good science teachers challenge you to do that first. Everything else follows.
Re:People definitely neglect science... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nonsense. Young people are naturally curious. Only after years of exposure to a spoon-feeding "educational system" do they become mindless drones waiting to memorize the next factoid. If we can change the system to work WITH their natural curiosity, it won't be difficult to motivate them - the hard part will be trying to keep them focused on just one topic.
Re:People definitely neglect science... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:People definitely neglect science... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nonsense. Young people are naturally curious. Only after years of exposure to a spoon-feeding "educational system" do they become mindless drones waiting to memorize the next factoid. If we can change the system to work WITH their natural curiosity, it won't be difficult to motivate them - the hard part will be trying to keep them focused on just one topic.
Nonsense. Anyone with experience with young children (say 2 to 5 years old) will know that kids are curious, but incredibly lazy. So they ask, "why?" and wait for an answer. And then they ask "why?" about that. And then "why?". And then "why?". And then "why?".
If you don't teach them how to reason for themselves, then they behave exactly as the original poster describes. They just wait until someone tells them what happens next. It is work to show children that they can reason for themselves, or investigate causes on their own.
Re:People definitely neglect science... (Score:4, Insightful)
...kids are curious, but incredibly lazy. So they ask, "why?"
You have to seed the pool of reasoning... If they have no basis for "why" how can you expect them to reason out why something else happens?
I used to push my son in a stroller while I went for a run. He would ask why ad infinitum, and I kept on answering way past his ability to comprehend. But I was amazed at his memory - even years later he remembered the "why" and was able to apply that to new questions - no longer asking simply "why" but asking instead, "is it because...", or "is it like..." but referring to thing that were way outside of his comprehension level at the time he was originally "spoon fed".
I think the biggest problem is that teacher are used to being spoon fed themselves. How many teachers don't know the answer if it's not printed in the "teacher's edition" of the book?
Typical Q&A with the science teacher:
Why is the sky blue?
Because it reflects blue light.
Why does it reflect blue light?
Because it's blue.
It's a good thing they taught me to read early. That's about the only way I learned anything.
Re:People definitely neglect science... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:People definitely neglect science... (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyone else find it annoying when people explain the joke so they can show everyone else that they got it?
Re:People definitely neglect science... (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, your rant isn't all that misplaced, although this may not be the perfect audience.
People *can* be smart. They likely won't be, because they can (almost) always get someone else to do it for them. If they didn't have a microwave oven, they wouldn't be able to cook themselves dinner. If they didn't have IT tech support, they wouldn't be able to work a computer. If they couldn't have their car towed to a mechanic and repaired, they wouldn't get from point A to point B.
We're all guilty of this to some degree. If I couldn't just buy gas for my car at a convenient location, I'd be hard pressed to refine my own fuel. Unfortunately, it's rough to increasingly difficult to find places close to work where I could raise my own food or pump my own water. (and yes, I don't do these right now because of this). Finding someone who could make their own nails or prepare their own timber to build their own house is virtually impossible. These days, if you dropped most people off from the city into vast wilderness, they'd be at a loss to feed themselves, but they'd tell you about what they saw on Survivorman, or some other reality show.
We're in a spoonfed society, which isn't getting any better any time soon. Well, unless you have any belief in the 2012 prophecies. I take them as an interesting talking point for a "what if", but I give the odds of something happening right up there with Y2k. It'll be a well discussed non-event. If you took an arbitrary group of 20+ people and dropped them in the wilderness, how long would they last? I like the show "Lost", but honestly believe they wouldn't survive more than a couple weeks, even without all the other character interactions. You'd see a group of 20 who died from starvation, dehydration, exposure, or disease from poorly planned waste disposal (mental note, don't shit in your fresh water supply).
Welcome to modern society. You'll always be dependent on someone else, and pay dearly for those services. You are right, we're all minor stones in the great wall of civilization, and no one will notice of one (or thousands) don't work quite right.
Re:People definitely neglect science... (Score:5, Interesting)
To quote a wonderfully silly film, The Gods Must Be Crazy:
Civilized man refused to adapt himself to his environment. Instead he adapted his environment to suit him. So he built cities, roads, vehicles, machinery. And he put up power lines to run his labour-saving devices. But he didn't know when to stop. The more he improved his surroundings to make life easier the more complicated he made it. Now his children are sentenced to 10 to 15 years of school, to learn how to survive in this complex and hazardous habitat. And civilized man, who refused to adapt to his surroundings now finds he has to adapt and re-adapt every hour of the day to his self-created environment. For instance, if it's Monday and 7:30 comes up, you have to dis-adapt from your domestic surroundings and re-adapt yourself to an entirely different environment. 8:00 means everybody has to look busy. 10:30 means you can stop looking busy for 15 minutes. And then, you have to look busy again. Your day is chopped into pieces. In each segment of time you adapt to new circumstances. ... No wonder some people go off the rails a bit.
spoonfed = civilisation (Score:5, Insightful)
Getting other people to do things for you, and not knowing how everything works is positive, it's called civilisation. Possibly people could live on this planet as complete autonomous islands, being completely self sufficient, but working together and sharing tasks is more efficient for everybody, frees up time, and allows for redundancy.
You may be able to manage to maintain a 21st (or even 19th) century lifestyle all on your own but most people just wouldn't have the time to plant their own crops, grow cotton, weave their clothes, find metal ores, mine them, smelt them to produce metal goods, build petrol driven machines from the raw ores, learn enough medical science to undertake complex medical operations when accidents and illness occurred, raise children, find the time to teach them, still keep this going after you've had an accident and are laid up in bed for six months, etc.
Disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is not that science people are arrogant, the problem is that they come way too late in education (to properly explain the science method) at a point where all people did for the previous year was swallow factoid and regurgitate them (lower school science lesson is usually just that), and combined with the fact science is seen as nerdy/geeky and thus only for contempt. Later those same people which admire jocks and despite nerd become parents and are baffled by science question.Add to that the fact that science is sometimes seen as attacking/going against their own religious belief (in reality science as a method do not care for religion (except social science) what cannot be falsified is ignored)...
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:People definitely neglect science... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:People definitely neglect science... (Score:5, Funny)
Soylent Green?
Re:People definitely neglect science... (Score:5, Insightful)
But people that believe that perpetual motion is completely legitimate and is being covered up by big oil companies and governments as some big conspiracy are fucking worthless.
These aren't the people who should bother you. The people who should bother you are the people who don't understand why water boils, the people who think you can take antibiotics for a cold, the people who have no idea why ice floats, the people who don't know why hot air rises, the people who have no idea how an internal combustion engine works.
To scientists, this stuff is like remedial math or basic reading skills. We recognize that this type of knowledge helps you function in the world. To non-scientists, as to the innumerate and illiterate, the value of this knowledge is entirely unappreciated and often viewed with contempt.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
My great-grandparents and grandparents were educated in the 1800-1950. How do you feel now?
-dZ.
Re:Keep in mind (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Scientists baffled by parents' questions (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Not to mention, display a good amount of passion in passing on that knowledge and hope some of it rubs off.
(Dangerous mentioning rubbing and passion on /.)
Calvin's Dad (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously many parents parents need to be more like Calvin's Dad [s-anand.net]. He was never stumped by Calvin's science questions.
(More [google.com])
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You left out the absolute best one [freewebs.com].
This [nocookie.net] isn't bad either.
Re:Calvin's Dad (Score:5, Interesting)
Since my daughter was around 6, I've routinely made up answers that sound plausible at first but are clearly wrong if anyone over 5 thinks about them for a few seconds. She does the whole "thanks! ... um, wait, that's not right!" reaction, and I give her the right answers.
I work in science, so I want her to know science... but I also want her to think critically and know when someone's BS'ing her. :)
Re:Calvin's Dad (Score:5, Insightful)
Curious children come from creative and interesting parents.
I don't believe it (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I don't believe it (Score:5, Funny)
There is no way that children in Britain think blue is the colour of the sky.
You missed the point of the question. It's usually asked when the kid gets to about 5 or 6 years old, looks up at the sky one day and finds that it's a different colour to what it usually is. It's normally asked with a hint of fear (similarly, perhaps, to "why is the plane's wing on fire?"), and quite frequently during a foreign holiday.
Re:I don't believe it (Score:4, Funny)
"It's the Sun, my dear"
"But the Sun is the newspaper you don't let me read!"
"Yes, and you're not supposed to look at either, because you might go blind".
"Why is the sky blue?" - Not so easy... (Score:3, Insightful)
Clifford Stoll's astronomy PhD orals seemed to be going swimmingly.
Just as everybody was about to gather their papers, shake hands and head home, his rather sadistic PhD supervisor asked him to explain why the sky is blue.
The sharks sensed blood in the water and began circling for the kill.
Don't assume a question is easily answered just because it seems simple and innocuous at first glance.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Indeed, so far no one has posted the answer. And even though the total of the articles on wikipedia seems to be the most concise yet thorough explanation I can find, it fails to impart an actual understanding.
I doubt anyone can explain why the sky is blue in a way that doesn't involve a partial explanation. I doubt anyone here could explain it to a child in a way that the first child could explain it to another.
Just saying "Rayleigh scattering" doesn't answer it. Nor does copying the formula for it or being
Re:"Why is the sky blue?" - Not so easy... (Score:4, Informative)
My understanding is that it's density differences. Light bends when it goes from air to water, for example, because of the difference in density. Now air has small density variations. For the short-wavelength blue light, it is going through air whose density is continually changing. So it's path goes all over the place. But for the red light, with almost twice the wavelength, the density changes are lot more averaged (since it's bigger), so it doesn't see the density changes so much, so pretty much goes in a straight line.
Your understanding is - sorry - entirely wrong. The wikipedia article actually does a more or less decent job at explaining it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_scattering [wikipedia.org]
The basic thing: Light scatters off the molecules of the air (no density variations needed). The higher the lights frequency (i.e. the bluer it is), the more it scatters.
So we see lots of scattered blue from all directions, but a lot less of scattered red, yellow, green, etc.
And because the atmosphere isn't thick enough to scatter a large amount of the colours on the red end of the spectrum, those come through more or less unscattered.
At dusk or at dawn, the light you see travels much longer distance in the atmosphere, and other colours scatter too. That's the main reason why sunrises and
sunsets are red - that's the only colour making it through.
demonizing groups (Score:5, Interesting)
Embarrassing (Score:3, Insightful)
At least the first one the parents need to be able to answer, it they halfway have a memory left. As to the technicialities of the issue, if they really cannot talk about sex, they should be aware that they are putting their children at high risk of messing it up later (unwanted pregnancy, STDs) and fix this disgrace immediately. There are books that help and that deal specifically with how to explain this to your children. Go to your local bookstore and ask! Grossing the children out is a minor and acceptable possible side effect. But they need to be told!
As to 2. and 3., I can understand that. These are actually advanced wave-physics questions.
Just some parental advice... (Score:5, Insightful)
The cool thing is, most of these basic questions have many levels beneath them. For example, most of you know why grass is green, but why is chlorophyll green? Why is green a really odd color for plants to use? Would "orange-phyll" (if it existed) work too? This leads to an exploration of chemistry and physics as well as biology.
Another good thing to teach is how people know this stuff - the idea that the natural world is knowable through discovery and testing, and that we decide as a community what "the truth" is, based on what we observe and what makes sense. Kids can certainly learn the idea of what science is at a pretty young age, even if complex logic isn't possible until, I don't know, early teens? Hmm, something to look up!
Sometimes "I don't know" is a brilliant answer (Score:5, Insightful)
After all, when asked about the color of the sky, a parent could answer like this [eskimo.com].
Let us give thanks that some people have the sense and honesty to say "I don't know," and try not to look down our noses at them. Bad parenting is darned hard to unlearn.
--
Toro
The parents need internet! (Score:5, Funny)
That's it!
Misunderstanding the level required for answers (Score:5, Insightful)
From this point of view, all that is needed is to be able to explain light from the sun is made up of all colors (no need to explain wavelengths) - which you can demonstrate with a bit of broken glass, no need for an official prism - and are then most of the way to the rainbow explanation - and that the blue light from the sun is spread out more by the atmosphere. You can demonstrate scattering simply by putting a little milk in a glass of water and shining a flashlight through it. This is a level of explanation suitable for a child under, say, 13, and already introduces a number of ideas about optics.
As for where babies come from, even quite small children are quite safe with the idea that babies grow inside their mothers. Rural children can hardly avoid knowing this by the age of 3 or so. They need reassurance that it won't happen to them, yet, and they need a gradual increase of detail until they reach puberty. But they don't need to know about DNA, cell fission, fertilisation and so on in order to understand what causes pregnancy and how to avoid it until it's actually wanted.
Personally, I blame not so much the dumbing down as the increasing formalism of science teaching. The criticism of science teaching in Brazil made by Richard Feynmann is now valid in much of the West today. We actually need to teach ideas with simpler, more familiar equipment rather than the special manufactured experiments in school labs, otherwise how can people see the relevance? The example above, of someone suddenly realising that mayonnaise is an emulsion, is a good one.
Re:Pardon? (Score:5, Funny)
Yes. Geography to be specific. Croydon to be precise.
Re:Pardon? (Score:5, Funny)
Geography to be specific. Croydon to be precise.
Alternatively:
Genealogy. The milkman to be precise.
Re:Pardon? (Score:5, Funny)
how girl get pragnent?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
how is babby formed? how girl get pragnent?
They need to do way instain mother who kill there babby!
Re:Pardon? (Score:5, Informative)
How come I don't learn English in school even though it's my country's official language ?
If you are talking about the US, it has no official language.
You're excused (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
According to this article [bbc.co.uk] she is 31 years old now. Can you congratulate her from me? ;)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Sometimes you people just creep me out :)
Re:You're excused (Score:5, Funny)
Her dad is not a turkey baster. Her dad is a wanker.
Re:Pardon? (Score:4, Insightful)
Regardless of how you categorize it, if a parent can't answer to a child where babies come from it's not for lack of knowledge.
Re:Pardon? (Score:5, Insightful)
So no, "where do babies come from" is NOT a science question when asked by a child.
The question that the child would ask if he wanted to know the biology would be something like "how do babies grow in mommy's tummy?"
Re:Pardon? (Score:5, Insightful)
However, surely parents should have a certain amount of... familiarity with the answer to, "where do babies come from?"
Re:Pardon? (Score:5, Funny)
However, surely parents should have a certain amount of... familiarity with the answer to, "where do babies come from?"
Huh? Why would they? Its not like they get to chat with the stork when the baby is dropped off.
Re:Pardon? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem with this line of thinking is that parents not caring to discuss this topic with a child *are* acting irresponsibly. Consider it as a precursor of sexual education. So, yes, I think marking them up as idiots is 100% correct to do.
You do know that there are books for preschoolers regarding this topic if parents don't want to discuss it with their own words.
Re:Pardon? (Score:4, Insightful)
They may be idiots in your opinion, but that hardly means that they are UNABLE to answer the question.
Please also consider that there are those that do not subscribe to your method of child rearing.
Care to elaborate? I'm having a hard time coming up with a valid reason why a parent wouldn't want to answer that question from their children. There could be explanations like, for instance, the parents had an unwanted pregnancy, or a scarring sexual experience. But that is not a reason. So I can't see why a parent wouldn't want to give an answer tailored for the child's age yet still true.
Re:Pardon? (Score:5, Insightful)
You do realize that you actually accuse us for being close minded, but you laud the people close minded enough not to be able to talk about sexuality. How wonderful...
I tip my hat to you for the greatest hypocrisy I have seen in years.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Just take it on faith that in some cultures a child of 5 asking where they came from is likely to be told they were found under a cabbage plant.
(Yes, that is a literal example).
[What culture? Some places in the USA?]
Most young children will be quite happy with "the baby comes out of mummy's tummy" (that's the answer I got when I was very young). Even better if you can follow it up within the next few days with "do you see that woman? Her tummy is big because a baby is growing inside".
("How did the baby get inside mummy's tummy?" "Daddy put it there.")
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Really? I didn't see any accusations being made.
But now that you mention it, it sees you are pretty insistent that everyone simply MUST agree with your methods, where as I was suggesting there are other viewpoints.
Now who is open minded?
Re:Pardon? (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet, you can give a scientifically correct answer omitting unnecessary details:
The trick is to explain things on a level kids can understand.
I can also warmly recommend the TV-series Once Upon a Time... Life [wikipedia.org], which is biologically very correct yet entertaining to watch.
What a show! (Score:4, Informative)
Crikey, what a good show that was. Every single thing was personified in the cartoon - from corpuscles to neuro-electric transmissions to individual nucleotides producing proteins - and I learned more about human biology from that show than I did from 5 years of GCSE Biology (and the show was only on at about 6.30am every Sunday in the UK, about 20 years ago).
Unfortunately I don't think it's been on TV for some time now, and I can't find it on DVD anywhere. If any of you out there are parents who want your kids to understand a little bit of biology, you can't do better than to show them this.
Correction (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
GP may be commenting on "growed". It's an irregular verb: the past tense is "grew". I presume this is a case of English being your second language, since you have a Finnish e-mail address. However, my best guess is that GP thought you were deliberately using an incorrect form with your children to simplify things for them.
Re:Pardon? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Pardon? (Score:4, Informative)
My mum just left a copy of the book Where Did I Come From? [amazon.com] on the bottom shelf in the living room. I used to love that book (and the sequel "What's Happening to Me", about puberty) when I was a little kid - the pictures are adorable and it's pitched at a good level.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Pardon? (Score:4, Funny)
Is the question "Where do babies come from?" really a science question?
Ever heard of biology? You fuck!
Fixed that for ya!
Re:Where do babies come from !? (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, intercourse is considered uncouth by Britons. Hence, they all adopt, but rarely stop to question where the babies come from in the first place. Curious, isn't it?
Re:Wow, just wow (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:More science questions (Score:5, Funny)
Re:More science questions (Score:5, Informative)
Re:More science questions (Score:5, Insightful)
And if you don't explain the Rayleigh effect properly (as you did) you actually don't explain why the sky is blue. In other words, your answer isn't explanatory/informative much because you "explained" the explanandum by introducing another one.
Re:More science questions (Score:4, Funny)
Silly! The sky is blue because it is daytime. If it were night time, the sky would be black.
Babies come from the hospital and rainbows from the ground (they arch up into the sky, and then come back down to the ground - rainbows, that is, not babies).
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:More science questions (Score:5, Informative)
Rayleigh scattering preferentially scatters shorter (bluer) wavelengths more strongly. When the sun is directly overhead, as in midday, light nearer to the reddish end of the spectrum will reach you directly while only the bluer wavelengths will have been scattered. The blue that you see is light from the sun that has been scattered towards you by the air molecules in the atmosphere. The opposite happens at sunrise and sunset to make it appear red; the light reaching you has a much longer optical path to go through so nearly all of the the blue wavelengths have been scattered away leaving only the reddish light to reach you.
There's also a minor effect due to Mie's scattering off the dust and other particulates in the atmosphere. Mie's scattering deals with scattering by slightly larger particles than Rayleigh scattering.
Re:And my recent trip to the zoo... (Score:4, Funny)
I swear, if I hear ANYONE say, "LOOK, A MONKEY!" again and point to an orangutan or gorilla I'm going to kill someone.
I've also heard penguins being called fish, Bats called birds and just about anything small and furry, mice.
Some people don't need any animal classification beyond "fish - meat - not food".
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It's worse than that. They say 4 out of 5 parents have at *some* time been stomped by some science-question of their child. And also that the top questions are those mentioned.
That doesn't imply that 4 out of 5 parents are stomped by any of *those* questions. I've got a 5 year old, and sure I've had -many- questions I don't know the answer to. I generally respond by some variant of "I don't know, but let's find out together".
Why -does- starch work as a lubricant ? What -is- that insect named ? How much can
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:hurr (Score:4, Funny)
I was stumped by a question by my daughter (Score:5, Interesting)
I said (remembering my chemistry) "percentage hydrogen"
"OK", she said, "why does it go from 0 to 14, and what hydrogen? like hydrogen in water?"
Uhm... lets ring Grandad (my dad was a research chemist).
A bit later...
"He says its the inverse natural logarithm or "cologarithm" of the number of active hydrogen ions"
Me "Uh.... that's great".
Later that week
"Did you get a good mark for your homework?"
"Yes. Only the teacher said that for GCSE If I am asked what PH is just to put 'a measure of acidity and alkalinity', or the marker might not know and mark it incorrect'".
Re:I was stumped by a question by my daughter (Score:4, Interesting)
I had high level chemistry in high school as an elected subject. Our teacher was quite adamant about drilling us with critical thinking to our own answers - i.e. does this answer make sense.
The reason being that sometimes your formulas give you an answer that just doesn't make sense, allowing you to give the correct answer.
Then at the final exam, one of the 3% questions (very easy) was something like this:
"Give the pH level for a 10^(-8) molar solution of HCl"
Just using the formula -log(10^(-8) gives you 8, so that's obviously the answer, and according to our teacher that was the answer given by 85% of students country wide.
Of course, this question is a trick question, because HCl is an acid, and acids have a pH value of less than 7. In this case, the HCl will be overpowered by the natural buffering effect of water, and water has a pH value of 7, making that the correct answer.
There was only one school in the country, where all the students got that particular answer right. Made our teacher proud, but also rather disappointed in the other schools.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I suspect there is never such a point, if you're raising your child properly.
Two things here: people shouldn't be having kids if they're uncomfortable with their motivations for sex or uncomfortable teaching a child basic things about life. Secondly, I think most of that discomfort