How Does Aspirin Find a Headache? (7 page)

But not all peanut shells contain two seeds. We are most familiar with Virginia peanuts, which usually contain two but occasionally sprout mutants that feature one, three, or four. Valencia and Spanish peanuts boast three to five seeds per shell.

Traditionally, breeders have chosen to develop two-seeded pods for a practical reason: Two-seeders are much easier to shell. According to Charles Simpson, of Texas A & M’s Texas Agricultural Experiment Station, there is little taste difference among the varieties of peanuts, but the three-seed peanuts are quite difficult to shell, requiring tremendous pressure to open without damaging the legume. We do know that patrons of baseball games wouldn’t abide the lack of immediate gratification. They’d much rather plop two peanuts than three into their mouths, at least if it means less toil and more beer consumption.

Why
Are Children Taught How to Print Before They Learn Cursive Handwriting?

While most of us were taught how to print in kindergarten and learned how to write in late second or third grade, this wasn’t always the case. Until the early 1920s, children were taught only cursive handwriting in school. Margaret Wise imported the idea of starting kids with manuscript writing (or printing) from England in 1921, and her method has become nearly universal in North America ever since.

Wise used two arguments to promote the radical change: With limited motor skills, it was easier for small children to make print legible; and print, looking more like typeset letters than cursive writing, would enable children to learn to read faster and more easily. Subsequent experimental research has confirmed that Wise’s suppositions were correct.

In the seventy years since Wise revolutionized kindergarten penmanship, other reasons for teaching children printing have been advanced: Print is easier for teachers and students to read; students learn print more quickly and easily than cursive writing; and despite protestations from some, children can print as fast as they can write. While adults tend to write faster than they can print, experiments have indicated that this is only true because most adults rarely print; those who print as a matter of course are just as fast as cursive writers.

We have pored over many academic discussions about children’s writing and haven’t found anyone strenuously objecting to teaching children how to print first. What surprised us, though, is the lack of reasoned justification for weaning children from printing and, just after they have mastered the technique, teaching them cursive writing. After reviewing the literature on the subject, Walter Koenke, in an article in
The Reading Teacher
, boiled the rationales down to two—tradition and parental pressure:

A litany of justifications for cursive writing has been advanced, but none of them holds up. If print is easier to read and write, why do we need to learn cursive script? Why do we need to teach children duplicate letter forms when there is hard evidence that the transitionary period temporarily retards students’ reading and compositional ability? (One study indicated that for each semester’s delay in introducing cursive handwriting, students’ compositional skill improved.)

In a wonderful article, “Curse You, Cursive Writing,” the University of Northern Iowa’s Professor Sharon Arthur Moore argues passionately that there is no need to teach children cursive writing and rebuts most of the arguments that its proponents claim. It is not true, as conventional wisdom might have it, that cursive writing is harder to forge than manuscript print, nor is it true that only cursive writing can be a valid signature on legal documents (X can still mark the spot).

Moore feels that parental pressure and a belief that cursive is somehow more “grown up” or prestigious than print permeates our society and leads to an unnecessary emphasis on cursive style:

Why, she argues persuasively, do business and legal forms ask us to “please print carefully”? The answer, of course, is that even adults print more legibly than they write cursively. If cursive is superior, why aren’t cursive typefaces for typewriters and computer printers more popular? Why aren’t books published in cursive?

Moore, like us, can’t understand the justification for teaching kids how to write, and then changing that method in two years for no pedagogical purpose. She endorses the notion of teaching cursive writing as an elective in eighth or ninth grade.

Several handwriting styles have been advanced to try to bridge the gap between manuscript and cursive styles—most prominently, the “D’Nealian Manuscript,” which teaches children to slant letters from the very beginning and involves much less lifting of the pencil than standard printing. Proponents of the D’Nealian method claim that their style requires fewer jerky movements that may prove difficult and time-consuming for five-and six-year-olds and eases the transition from manuscript to cursive by teaching kids how to “slant” right away. And the D’Nealian method also cuts down the reversal of letters that typifies children’s printing. It is far less likely that a child, using D’Nealian, will misspell “dad” as “bab,”, because the “b” and “d” look considerably different. In standard manuscript, the child is taught to create a “b” by making a straight vertical line and then drawing a circle next to it. But in D’Nealian, the pencil is never picked up: the straight but slanted vertical line is drawn, but the “circle” starts at the bottom of the line, and the pencil is brought around and up to form what they call the “tummy” of the “b.”

We’ll leave it to the theorists to debate whether the D’Nealian, or more obscure methods, are superior to the standard “circle stick” style of manuscript. But we wish we could have found a clearer reason why it’s necessary to change from that style into cursive writing—ever. We couldn’t argue the cause more eloquently than Janice-Carol Yasgur, an urban elementary schoolteacher:

Why
Do Most Women’s Hairbrushes Have Long Handles When Men’s Hairbrushes Have Short Handles or No Handles at All?

Why are men deprived of the graceful, long handles on women’s hairbrushes? According to the experts we contacted, the answer seems to be that the longer the hair of the user is, the longer the handle of the brush should be. Carmen Miller, product manager of Vidal Sassoon brushes and combs division, explains:

This response, of course, begs the question of whether Annie Lennox and Sinead O’Connor use long-or short-handled brushes. Or imagine the plight of Daniel Day Lewis, in
Last of the Mohicans
, ferreting the burrs out of his hair with a handless brush. Fabio could use a long handle too.

Miller indicates that the shape of the man’s hand, as well as the shortness of his hair, is a consideration in handle length:

The Fuller Brush Company’s laboratory manager, Bill Dayton, suggests another theory that explains why men’s hairbrushes have gotten shorter and shorter over the centuries (many older men’s brushes were indistinguishable from women’s): “Men’s brushes were designed to conserve space in military duffel bags and dop kits.”

Why
Do Some Ladybugs Have Spots and Others Have None?

Ladybugs, beloved by children and politically correct animal lovers, have a great public relations person. In reality, they are just a type of beetle. There are somewhere between three thousand and four thousand species of ladybugs in the world.

Their colorings and markings vary so much that most entomologists have concluded that nothing in particular separates a ladybug with spots from a spotless individual. You can’t tell the sex or gender of a ladybug from its markings. One individual ladybug from a given species might have spots; others of the same species, from the same region, might not.

The variations of coloring are almost endless. Ladybugs’ bodies might be red with black markings, or orange with blue markings. Some have only two spots, while the Thirteen Spotted Lady Beetle, appropriately enough, sports thirteen. Why has nature provided them with such a seemingly random succession of markings?

Most entomologists believe that spots are there for defensive purposes. Robin Roche, keeper and entomologist at the Insect Zoo in San Francisco, told
Imponderables
that in nature, red and black (two of the most common colors for ladybugs’ spots) are warning colorations. Other creatures, especially birds and rodents, learn that animals with certain colors sting or taste less than delectable. Even animals that don’t emit toxins might mimic the appearance of spotted animals that do. Many ladybugs actually do make a lurking predator’s life most unpleasant: Some spray blood, while others spray a poisonous fluid.

Although no one can be sure, most entomologists lend credence to the theory that regional spotting variations occur because the lady-bugs’ spots simulate the appearance of a more venomous animal. But others aren’t so sure and wonder why, if the markings are so important to their defense, other individual ladybugs in the same region aren’t born with a similar defense mechanism. Lynn S. Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology at the University of California, Davis, suggests that some variations in spotting might be due to temperature differences, “or it may be a genetic component of a population, much like the coloration of domestic dogs (e.g., dalmatians versus Labrador retrievers).