March 17th, 2005

Sun or Earth

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From Peter Payne:

My son just finished with his final tests, his last of the third grade. He did really well in his science final, only missing one question, which was about the
shadow cast by a stick in the ground. Over the course of several hours, the position of the shadow moves — why? My son, who is no fool, wrote that the Earth is moving, but he was disappointed to find this marked wrong, however — “the sun moves in the sky” was what was in the textbook, and that’s what he was expected to write. We took the teacher to task on this, which surprised him, since questioning educators is seldom done in Japan. In the end, I think we taught our son an important lesson about not automatically accepting what he hears.

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