Folks, it’s that time again: join me once more for the continuing adventure of Why The Florida Virtual Curriculum Sucks. Today’s bowlderised story is The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse.pic.twitter.com/kiEMDDo2aq
Author, fanwriter, trash bandit, queer geek feminist, dork. Jack of all pronouns, mxtress of none. Yells about hockey. Aussie in the US.
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Folks, it’s that time again: join me once more for the continuing adventure of Why The Florida Virtual Curriculum Sucks. Today’s bowlderised story is The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse.pic.twitter.com/kiEMDDo2aq
The original, as you may recall, comes from Aesop. You can find it here, and I would've thought it was pretty unobjectionable: http://read.gov/aesop/004.html
In the FVC version, however, the country mouse... has a farm? And is apparently looking after animals that are bigger than her?? Look at the size of that food! My 8yo, instantly: this is so weird! How can she look after big animals? Me: you’re right and you should say it.pic.twitter.com/OKih8ajHs5
Also note the tiny mouse taxi! And the fact that the city mouse is now a jerk for some reason, because hard work is bad?
So country mouse goes to the city where there is lots of food, only she nearly gets squished by a giant foot! So she goes home again, not because of the foot, but because she randomly misses the country. The apparent moral: to be happy with her life as is.pic.twitter.com/jAjStbyEBP
And I just. The point of the original fable is that security is better than uncertainty; and it also makes internal narrative sense, because the mice are still mice in a human world, just sentient. But in the FVC version we have an inconsistent narrative structure.
Suddenly the mice have taxis and can run farms by themselves, looking after other animals (???) but are also threatened by people! THIS MAKES NO SENSE. And as is par for the course with FVC, the stated "moral" makes no sense in the context of what we've just read.
The story draws no connection between why the country mouse goes to the city in the first place and why she leaves: it's just "she was tired of working hard, then she nearly got squished; unrelatedly she missed the country and went home." There is no moral here! It's disjointed!
It shouldn't be possible to bowlderise such a benign story as the town mouse and country mouse, but once more the FVC has managed it: they don't want to show the country mouse being scared for her life or threatened by bigger animals, so they rework the whole thing -
- and that reworking makes the story both inconsistent and devoid of meaning. But still, they expect second graders to "analyse" this nonsense as though it's got enough depth for that to be managed.
These questions are pointless: country mouse doesn’t “learn a lesson” - she misses the quiet and goes home. Nor does the story make the stated point about good things and hard things in everyone’s life making it bad to wish for different circumstances - there’s no catharsis.pic.twitter.com/L6NuASkChw
It's just. So maddening! You cannot teach kids to enjoy OR analyse stories when the stories are so cataclysmically bad that none of the stated analytic lessons can be inferred from them!! THAT IS NOT HOW ANY OF THIS WORKS.
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