Talking to Americans Just Went National
Ok so Geneva introduced me to this new show, "Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader". The premise is pretty obvious. It's like who wants to be a millionaire only they are being asked grade school questions and their life lines are children. I was amazed watching this show for 2 reasons. #1 was how little people seem to know once they grow up and #2 was how hard some of these questions are. They take the most obscure things from the curriculum. Question kids probably only can answer up until they as tested and them promptly forget.
Some questions are hard.....But not this one!
Some questions are hard.....But not this one!
posted by Shawn Penson at
2:40 p.m.
3 Comments:
It's not that she doesn't remember how to convert from yards to feet, both are units of the stupid system and as such should be locked away and forgotten in a dusty corner of the basement of humanity. But her lack of common scene is disturbing ... but entertaining.
By
frank, at 12:13 a.m.
Ya that's what really freaks me out. Conversion right or wrong how can 2 children be 72 feet high. As soon as she saw that she should have said thats ridiculous, it's obviously wrong. This is why it's important to teach order of magnitude approximations in school. People tend to plug numbers into formulas and blindly accept the answer without asking where it comes from. As a teacher I would be much happier if someone understood how or where an answer comes from rather than blindly plugging in formula.
By
Shawn Penson, at 11:46 a.m.
Nevermind the strange effect from when you put a person on the spot in front of an audience or a camera, their common sense goes out the window until they leave the building and are already half-way home.
There was an episode where the guy had the right answer, but wasn't sure he was right. He decided to cheat with his partner's answer, but his partner was wrong so he lost. (What is the capital of the United Kingdom? Apparently it's Georgia.)
As per the show's rules, he had to say "I am not smarter than a 5th grader" but... he was smarter... he guessed London. He should have said something like "I should have known better than to copy from a 5th grader" or something like that.
By
Anonymous, at 4:28 p.m.
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