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20 July 2010
Brits Nix Simps Pix Currics
"More than 400 people have signed a petition calling for a Somerset school to stop teaching the US cartoon series The Simpsons in lessons."
We weren't allowed to watch The Simpsons when we were little.
Yeah...I was just chuckling about how, when the show was new, "eat my shorts" was a very controversial phrase, and kids were banned from school for wearing Bart T-shirts. Things have changed.
I'm interested in the story - it doesn't really go that far in describing exactly how this fit into the curriculum, and I'm certainly willing to buy that it can help teach satire, irony, and parody. Developmental appropriateness is a concern, though.
My 11th grade history teacher used an episode of the Simpsons early in the year in conjunction with the first few chapters of our text book, A People's History of the United States. It was the episode where Lisa discovers that Jebediah Springfield was really a pirate, Hans Sprungfeld, in relation to the fun, fun history of Christopher Columbus, and as an introduction to a good portion of the rest of the book.
I thought it worked well. I remember it still, ten years on.
photo by splunge
photo by TheophileEscargot
photo by Kronos_to_Earth
photo by ethylene
