I just got a survey through my school mailing list (what, don’t have all elementary schools have a listserver?) and it’s all about kid’s TV watching habits. The assumption was that all kids watch TV. Mine don’t and their teachers are well aware of it. [*]
I resisted the urge to express myself plainly, but I left the conversation open. It’s hard to tell someone that kids have no more need for a minimum daily allowance of TV than they do for masturbation: I’ll save that for later.
* My 6 year old was called on to correct her teacher’s deliberate misspellings the other week, to the amazement of the 2nd and 3rd graders (she’s in a mixed grade classroom, the Montessori way). When the teacher explained that the little spark doesn’t watch TV and her language skills come for reading, another child we know called out “they have a TV, they just don’t have cable.” As if that makes a difference. Her teacher knew better, that all we watch are movies (Mulan 2 today) and occasional baseball games. An experiment that has paid off in ways we never anticipated . . .
Apropos of that, I just found this:
If You’re Not Making Television, It’s Making You. by Dirk Koning:
Over the past 25 years, hundreds of teens and adults have discovered that if you’re not making television, it’s making you. They’ve had this epiphany while volunteering at the Community Media Center’s public-access station, GRTV, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. As they learned to angle a camera for a different perspective, edit for a desired effect, or schedule a broadcast to reach a certain audience, they realized that, all their lives—for good and for ill—television has been shaping their thinking, molding their culture, and persuading their purchases
Now playing: Fight Test by The Flaming Lips (
2) from the album “Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots” | Get it (7)