Science: Facts or Not?

I cleaned out (yet another) box from my parents house today. All of the crap stuff that sis and I brought home from school, K-6, appeared to be in there. Pretty boring, until I found a school project that I put together in 5th Grade. It was 1969 and the US Space Program was deep into the Apollo missions. My teacher thought we could learn something about what was going on and making history in our lifetime.

So, along with reading, writing and math, we studied Space. Miss Curtis had us keep notebooks to keep track of the different Apollo missions: The launch date, their mission, which astronauts were assigned, etc.,

The sort of information that NASA now classifies.

Creating classified documents was merely a fraction of Miss Curtis’s 5th grade classwork. We had space terminology to learn and study for spelling tests on that terminology. We had to keep an alphabetical index of all the words, their pronunciation, as well as definition. I didn’t really remember keeping the notebook, but I do remember sitting in front of the TV, watching Saturn V launches. Anxiously watching the clock at NASA when the astronauts were out of radio contact. We didn’t know we were holding our breath, until we heard a crackling “Houston this is Apollo, do you read?”

I was reading this notebook and I made a thrilling discovery. There it was, all this time, sitting in a dusty box in the garage. I can prove the truth about Pluto! According to the definition  “planet”, along with diagrams of Earth’s Sun and the planets that orbit it – Pluto IS a Planet.  SO, all you erudite scientists – stop saying it isn’t!  Are you calling Miss Curtis a liar!?

Children learn scientific “facts” in school. You can’t come forth decades later and declare a “fact do-over”. It isn’t right to decide Pluto is not worthy of being a planet. You can’t just rip him out of our solar system. We love Pluto.

I feel like I wasted those years in grade-school, learning temporary facts.

Oh, and while we are on the subject of temporary facts…
IT’S A BRONTOSAURUS, DAMMIT!!

TTFN,
Jodi