Conference quark::human_relations-v1

387.0. "Mistakes & Misconceptions" by CADSE::GLIDEWELL () Fri Sep 04 1987 20:26

Will you help me with a project?  I'm collecting misconceptions and I would 
appreciate it if you would tell me about your own childhood misconceptions 
or those of people you know.  Mostly I'm looking for the kind of mistakes 
we make as a result of trying to understand the world around us.

I plan to use these mistakes in a speech and later an article, but I will 
omit names.

To show what I'm looking for, here are some of my own mistakes and also 
some I've heard about:                 Thanks, Meigs


	At 8, I lived down the street from a US Veterans hospital and often
heard people walking by my house speaking French.  I thought this was DUMB.
 I knew they had to be THINKING in English, then translating it into
French.  The inefficiency of this greatly troubled me, but there were lots
of things I couldn't figured out.  (Footnote.  turns out, lots of kids make
this error.) 

	A friend of mine knows a woman with seven younger brothers.  For 
her entire childhood, she believed her parents really didn't like her.  
After all, they had one girl, then had seven boys.  Obviously, they didn't 
like what they got the first time.

	A boy I know looked carefully up at the sky about 20 times a day,
from age 6 to 9.  When he could not longer hold his disappointment, he went
to his mother and asked, "How come I've never seen Cloud 9?" (He also knew 
it was going to be pink, fluffy, and about two city blocks long.)

	My mother explained where babies came from by saying "when you grow
up and fall in love, God plants a seed in your stomach that grows into a
baby."  Unfortunately, I was in second grade, getting fat, and in love
with the boy who sat next to me.  I was pretty sure I was pregnant and in 
deep trouble.  (I knew God screwed up now and then because I'd heard whispers 
of unmarried girls with babies.)

	Also, since babies came "out of the mother's stomach," I looked 
very closely at photographs of movie stars in bikinis who had had children 
because I was madly curious to see the scar.

	I also wondered why god made the two sexes look different.  Finally 
determined we were different physically so God could tell us apart.  But 
I was still baffled about why he made boys anyway. (Now I know. For 
practice. Joke! Joke!)

	Fred Miller, the physicist, could tell time very accurately by the
position of the sun.  Then at eight, he went to the Indian school on the
reservation and learned to tell time by the clock.  Fred thought about this 
and decided there was only way the clock and the sun could keep in
sync: obviously, there must be a big lever between the sun and the clock.  
He spent hours looking at the sky, squinting, quickly peeking, doing all 
sorts of things to see the lever.

PS This request is also in womannotes, 452.*    Thanks, Meigs

    Please respond to Meigs by mail rather than putting responses
    in here.
    			Steve

    re .1
    
    In all due respect, I would prefer the responses put here - these
    can be very interesting for everyone to read.
    
    Elizabeth
    

    I asked that they not be posted here because there is an active
    topic in WOMANNOTES with many of these items, and I do not see
    the point in needless duplication.  If anyone does want to post
    entries here, I ask that they first read through the topic in
    RAINBO::WOMANNOTES.
    			Steve

    Re:3 Finally a moderator doing something right for a change.
    
                        REK