Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Yap: ‘Sick books’
By January E. Yap
Meanwhile
MY niece, a five-year-old bundle of things incredible, is an unforgiving doughnut monster. Not a gobbler, but a neat nibbler with fine saw teeth (I told her a mysterious toad stole her front tooth, but that only made her excited.) slowly crippling the soft spine of the ovoid pastry until it becomes a puzzle for her to handle. In the end, you’d think the abstract painter Pollock had splattered the chocolate glaze on her face.
She is going to school for the first time, and my girlfriend buys her Dora stuffs. But it’s with the books that our little missy becomes a show-off. She shows us a coloring book, which has an illustration of, yes, a frog. Her art, or the lack of it, renders the lowly amphibian into the realm of surrealism—polychromatic strokes sticking out of the borders. She has this tin box filled with crayons with colors whose names she could not even pronounce. The color-wheel has since become complex with Photoshop.
She draws out another book and serendipitously flips into a page showing a mixed selection of musical instruments and other stuffs. On top of the page, an instruction says: Encircle the things that make a sound. One by one, my girlfriend points to the drawings, and the little miss is to say yes if she agrees the thing can, yes, make a sound.
She says yes to the guitar, then the piano, the trumpet. We come to the drawing of the bed, and all of a sudden, the pre-schooler shows a blank face.
That thing, pretty sure, makes a sound, with its occupants either asleep or in some ticklish engagement. But, okay, fine, ignorance is bliss. Spare the innocent, just wink a naughty eye.
On the same day, I read about Antonio Calipjo Go’s different war against terror—the terror “sick books” bring upon the minds of innocent school kids.
Go took it as a personal battle, bringing to the fore the error-filled textbooks circulating now for years in our schools. The major errors, the report says, were conceptual, factual, misleading or wrong illustrations, and insufficient discussion.
The self-styled crusader Go had pointed out errors in, among others, the 2007 reprint of “Simply Science in the Next Century,” which has versions for all grade levels. This was terrible news, and at night, when our resident Dora fanatic was asleep, I hastened an investigation.
God forbid, next century’s science will take the course of physics according to the gospel of the Power Puff Girls. I fear the day my niece will hurl the neighborhood cats and think all it does is punch cat-shaped holes on our walls. Or think a dead dog can be inflated back to life. Definitely, “Simply Science” is a gross misnomer. Thank God, she has a different science book.
Go also brings to the fore Phoenix Publishing House’s 2007 reprint of “Harnessing English Arts Today.” This one I didn’t find in my niece’s Dora bag, thank God. My street-smart niece needs all the proper English she could learn.
In a sophisticated world, syntax, they say, is non-negotiable. When we were kids, we used to ask our good old yaya what the English word for lakaw is, and she said “walk,” and we were happy. But when asked about dagan, she’d say “walking.” Our books taught us something else, and we’d roll on the floor laughing. In hindsight though, our manang, of course, knew better. She could’ve spawned all the soap suds on us.
The report said that although DepEd had passed a directive for the schools not to use the textbooks, the error-filled materials continue to circulate and is being used in some schools. If the science book errors fall in the realm of Newtonian physics, we’ll have something else coming. Your kid will actually think tadpoles are plummeting from the sky.
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (June 24, 2008 issue)
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