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The French are Ignorant of Basic Astronomy
July 14th, 2009
I don’t even want to call this astronomical knowledge. It should be the birthright of every kid born into the 21st century who gets to go to school for any length of time at all. Usually I see stuff about America and lament about my own country and do my bit, but this example from the French edition of Who Wants to be a Millionaire is pretty damn scary:
I’m afraid this level of ignorance is a lot more common than I imagined. I worry about people not understanding the seasons, or phases of the moon, but this…I need to recalibrate my expectations, or something.
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July 14th, 2009 at 10:37 am
That’s exactly why I cut out the more interesting things like active galaxies from my class. I’d love to be able to cover them, but I just can’t bring myself to let them out of my class not understanding the absolute basics. 10-40 years from now when they are on a game show, I don’t want them embarassing me by not knowing things like that.
So, if I treat this like any of my think-pair-share questions, the scary thing is that the fraction that “get it right” - 56% - isn’t even high enough where you would expect the “pair-share” part to be effective. Very sad indeed.
July 14th, 2009 at 10:41 am
OMG that is HORRIBLE just.. horrible.. *headesk*
July 14th, 2009 at 10:52 am
Actually, thinking about this a little more… When you have a clearly bi-modal distribution, my first reaction as a teacher is that there may have been something confusing about the question. I have zero proficieny in French, but it may be that ~half of audience interpretted the question as “Which object orbits the Earth?” instead of “Which object does the Earth orbit?”
July 14th, 2009 at 10:55 am
I feel more sorry for the guy in the first place that he had to ask the audience. Now it makes me to want to ask another question is “Did the audience misinterpret the question as what is the object around which the earth rotates.” which I think is also very idiotic if they interpreted in that fashion.
July 14th, 2009 at 12:31 pm
No, it’s pretty clear: “Qu’est-ce qui gravite autour de la Terre” means “What revolves around the earth.” I often wonder how many people in such audiences are deliberately trying to mislead or just be silly, but on the other hand why should we expect the French to be any less ignorant of astronomy than Americans. Witness: http://cityhallblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2008/07/dallas-county-meeting-turns-ra.html
July 14th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
I thought the French was pretty clear, and I don’t even speak French (the Latin and Portuguese help a lot, though).
Sometimes when you have a bimodal distribution, it’s not a bad question but evidence that there’s a major cultural misconception.
July 14th, 2009 at 2:24 pm
And, ouch, that black hole thing from your link, Angus. Ugly.
July 15th, 2009 at 10:29 am
I agree that bimodal distributions in answers can sometimes point toward a misconception - if the distractors are set up that way. But this is more of a fact-based question. There isn’t really a _concept_ that is being tested in this question. One isn’t thinking about gravity, orbits, and barycenters to answer this question.
And yes, ouch regarding the black hole. Not everything is a racial slur people.
July 15th, 2009 at 10:43 am
this one is a classic. Saw it many times before already.
i´ve seen some moon hoax believers say that rockets shouldnt work in vacuum, because there is no air for them to PUSH behind… I can only guess they do some weird analogy to a propeller or maybe some skateboarder having to push the asphalt to move forward. Very sad.
on the other hand, it makes me glad that all moon hoax believers have such abysmally poor level of knowledge. Its further proof that men indeed went to the moon.
July 17th, 2009 at 3:32 pm
The French says “What *gravitates* around
Earth?” I suspect this is the problem; the way the question is posed is a bit odd.