Monday, July 16, 2012
Super Why! Volume 1, Ep. 1 "The Three Little Pigs"
I have a daughter that's almost 2 years old, which means I watch a lot of PBS and CBC Kids (where this show and others like it air in Canada).
I find the show hilarious. I love that the kids that make up the team never use common sense (Red has a bunch of apples, her friend Wolf is hungry and wants one, but Red keeps asserting that all the apples are hers, then there's an emergency meet, as this is a SUPER problem,...); instead they meet and research the solution to their problem in a story book (which, as others pointed out, is a familiar story that has been re-written and cleaned up to the point of it being as uninteresting and free of any sort of conflict or hint of danger as it could possibly be, 'cause we don't want our kids to think the world we live in is in any way dangerous); as they trek through the stories, super letters are picked up and inputted into a mini (but super) computer (because G-d forbid our kids would have to use pen and paper or -gasp- remember things), letters which at the end form the answer (obvious to the adult watching as soon as the problem is hinted at) to the problem, which answer is discussed in a committee, and put into the context of the problem that started the whole thing. AND EVERY EPISODE FOLLOWS THE SAME PATTERN. And then you see the credits at the end, and everything is explained by one page that contains some 5 or 6 PhDs: you see PhD's don't use common sense, they research answers, they take something obvious and beef it up with motivation, context, similar ongoing work, quotations and references, get peers to discuss and review, and then disseminate it as if it makes a difference. Awesome.
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