When Did Studying Dinosaurs Get So Complicated?

Two years ago, my twin sons were doing their homework at the kitchen table. They were in second grade.

One son was writing out a report on a dinosaur called Parasaurolophus. The other was studying his “challenge words” for Friday’s spelling test; among these words were “unscrupulous” and “hospitality.”

Seeing my sons thunder away at their respective assignments triggered in me the proverbial gamut of emotions. (Emotions, you may notice, tend to travel in gamuts.) First and foremost, I was proud of the little guys, working so hard on tasks that seemed, to me, pretty advanced. So advanced, in fact, that as I reflected more and more on the assignments, I felt my attitude sink from pride to consternation to downright resentment.

“They’re in second grade!” I kept reminding myself. “Should school really be this hard? Should a seven-year-old honestly be expected to spell the word ‘unscrupulous’—especially when he doesn’t even know what a ‘scruple’ is?”

For years, I’ve heard folks bemoan the “dumbing down” of America. And most of me understands their concern. But the rest of me wonders if, in our attempts to “smarten up” our kids, we’ve vastly overcompensated—and lopped off a chunk of their childhood in the process.

My son’s report on the Parasaurolophus perfectly encapsulates this concern. See, when I was a kid, there were only five dinosaurs: Tyrannosaurus Rex, Brontosaurus, Stegosaurus, Triceratops, and Pterodactyl. At least, those were the only ones anyone ever seemed to talk about. The Big Five—kind of like the vowels (with Diplodocus playing the role of “Sometimes Y”).

Now we’ve got all these new-fangled dinosaurs to contend with-Compsognathuses and Coelophyses and Troodons and, yes, Parasaurolophuses. (And for those of you who aren’t a paleontologist or a seven-year-old boy: a Parasaurolophus is a dinosaur with a tube-shaped crest on its head, which scientists suspect it used to breathe under water. It lived 65 million years ago—”during the Cretaceous period,” explained my second-grader.)

Am I saying we shouldn’t challenge our kids? Of course not. I’m a high school teacher, after all: I’m all for setting high standards. But I also can’t help but recall a conversation I had four years ago with my son’s kindergarten teacher, during the annual Parent-Teacher conference. She was reviewing the curriculum for us, and at some point, she said something about “all the material we had to cover this year”—a remark I still find curious.

This is still kindergarten, right? What exactly is all this “material” you have to cover? Quadratic equations, perhaps? The gases on the Periodic Table? The collected works of Thomas Pynchon?

Knowledge is power, sure, but don’t forget: in many myths, gaining knowledge also marks the end of the innocence. To me, kindergarten is all about getting your ABCs down, playing with clay, and learning to work well with others. Everything else can wait.

Of course, I’m saying this in the face of overwhelming evidence that suggests I have no idea what I’m talking about. My Dinosaur Son, it turned out, chose to do his report on Parasaurolophus; he loved (and still loves) learning all the hard names. And my Spelling Test Son came home the next week with a 112% on his test. To this day, both of them seem unscathed by the experience.

And my “they didn’t have these dinosaur when I was a kid” rant is, naturally, completely unfounded. Not long after my son did his Parasaurolophus report, I went to our local library and located the oldest kiddie dinosaur book on the shelf: Bernard Most’s 1978 picture book, If the Dinosaurs Came Back. The book, filled with illustrations of bright purple and yellow dinosaurs moseying through the city, is probably targeted for four- to eight-year-olds. Sure enough, on the last page, they had a list of dinosaurs—not just the Big Five, but Parasaurolophus and Compsognathus and all those other “new” reptiles which apparently aren’t new at all.

I don’t care. I’m still going to keep thinking about that mythical Simpler Time-when kindergarten kids played with clay, and there were only five dinosaurs.

 Photo: Kevitivity/Flickr Creative Commons