Reading Too Much Into It
July 30th, 2009 by matt
“Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see?”
“I see a red bird looking at me.”
“Red bird, red bird, what do you see?”
“Obviously, I see the brown bear that I’m looking at.”
“Oh. Hmm. Good point. Short book, huh?”
Filed under Parenting | Tags: books, overthinking | Comments (7)7 Responses to “Reading Too Much Into It”
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I know it’s hard, but if you apply yourself now, you will soon be able to move on to “Go, Dog, Go” and then, for graduate work, “Mice on Ice.”
This just goes to show what an unthinking automaton I am. It never even occurred to me that the premise of this book didn’t make sense. I just mindlessly spout it off to our progeny without comment, thus perpetuating my lack of critical thinking skills.
definitley do NOT read runaway bunny then. i can’t read this book without over thinking. and guess what one of eve’s favorite books are? runaway bunny. sigh.
i never thought about it either, though now i’ve decided to rationalize it by asserting that asking the animal what they see causes them to look around and notice other things. plus, you know, it rhymes with its current wording.
anyway, i was not a big fan of this book for the longest time, but avi really likes looking through it, so i’ve softened my stance. plus i think the repetition is pretty good thing. you hear the words “yellow duck” 3 times when it’s time to look at the yellow duck.
After being ratted out by brown bear, red bird quickly turns to look elsewhere out of embarrassment. Makes perfect sense to me.
ok, so we have the endangered species version of this one, which drives Jeff crazy, since as an endangered species biologist, he is always muttering that the macaroni penguin does not even live in the same hemisphere as the bald eagle, or whatever, so therefore would be entirely unlikely to see the bald eagle “soaring past me.” He felt the same way when we saw a documentary about wolves at a film festival in Missoula once and he complained the entire time that the wolves were being given human characteristics. It kind of ruined the movie for me, and, you know, the 20 people seated around us.
Michael hates that one. The purple cat and blue horse really upset him. (PS Go, Dog, Go rocks pretty hard.)