When the School Book is Wrong


Increasingly, I’ve begun to encounter those awkward moments when the school book says something wrong, the kid detects it and asks if that’s really true. I am stuck between a rock and a hard place. Do I lie, “Yes, the book’s right”? Or do I tell the truth and risk the kid:
-          Ask why she needs to learn something that’s wrong?
-          Abuse the one instance as grounds to not believe/learn everything else?

Take these two recent examples. In the word meanings section, the word “wagged” was defined as “waved from side to side”. “That’s correct for a dog wagging its tail”, my daughter countered, “but if I wave my hand to say bye,  that’s not called wagging my hand, is it?”. Fortunately, that one got resolved easily because she seems to have a feel that English is a crazy language.

The other instance involved poetry where the answer to the question as to how a butterfly gets its colors was that it “takes” them from the flowers. “Really?”, she asked. See, I wanted to say, this is exactly why they should not teach poetry in schools. Instead I said, “No, that’s not correct”. I so wish she was old enough for me to point her to Richard Feynman’s response as to who can better appreciate the beauty of a flower: artists or scientists. You can read it here. Or just see the visual depiction of his answer below:


To this day, no artist has rebutted Feynman’s closing lines, kiddo:
“All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.”

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