My daughter is 10 and at this age thinking about antonyms and synonyms remains a part of each day. Tonight, as we read through the week's vocabulary, assault, strategy, villains, misleading, abandon, productive, I had to laugh. Who's behind this list of words? Karl Rove now that he has free time on his hands? My daughter had all the synonyms right, save one, I reckoned:
7. On a productive day you would
a. play outside
b. get a lot done
c. stay inside
d. get nothing done
What do you think is the correct answer? It reads like a trick question. In order to find the right response, you have to gaze into the mind of the synonym-list maker, and realize, no, it is not productive to:
d. get nothing done
c. stay inside
a. play outside
My daughter and I thought about this and decided one could argue with equal force for all of these -- and went with "play outside." This list, I might add, comes to us from a "progressive" school in San Francisco.
If words are the tools we use to build culture and our 10-year-olds learn that being productive means blandly to "get a lot done," and then we later add to this concept the idea of material gain synonymous with "get a lot done" -- as opposed to the slouch people, like writers and artists, really not getting much "done" because there is no serious "pay check," are we all doomed? Here we are on Blog Action Day, pondering "environment." What is the synonym? Landscape? Or in this case, better as, "life?"
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