Small Mediums at Large June 12, 2007
Bassie: (Noticing the tag on a pair of shorts I was buying in line at Target) What does “M” stand for?
Me: Medium. What do you think “S” stands for?
Bassie: Short?
Me: Good Guess. Small. What about “L”?
Bassie: Large?
Me: Good. What about “XL”?
Bassie: (Growing ever more confident) Extra Large!
Me: Good. And “XS”?
Bassie: Extra Small!
Me: Hmmm…why isn’t there an “XM”?
Bassie: (Thinking for a second, then smiling her triumphant smile) Because that would be “L”!
Lady in front of us in line: (unable to contain her feelings) That’s a very smart answer.
Wow, thanks for your validation of my child’s intelligence, Nosey Rosey.
Addendum: After Matt’s comment, I feel the need to continue the story as it actually went down, even though the way I cleaned it up for the Interwebs made a nice little package. It proceeded as follows:
Me: But then wouldn’t “XS” be “M”?
Bassie: (processing) No, no. If Small is like this (indicates about a foot between her hands), then Extra Small is like this (indicates about three inches).
Me: Bassie, you’ve just discovered a very interesting principle of the word “extra”, in that it makes whatever it modifies more like what it already is. So would “XM” really be L?
Bassie: (done with this line of questioning) I think so.
At this point, I thought the same thing Matt did, which was that “XM” would be somehow more “average” than “M”, but before I figured out how to explain that to Bassie, it was our turn in line. The curtain closes on another teachable moment.
extra-medium would be large? i don’t think i agree. the notion might be senseless, or it might mean tending even more toward the middle… but not large.
hahaha! i love the title of this post.
What beautiful fun! A joyful example of verbal mediation , that is,the use of words to narrate and act as a conduit between one’s automatic thoughts/perceptions and one’s higher level thoughts/cognition, thus facilitating one’s metacognition! The magnificence of this process is in the process itself, not necessarily a congruent “right” answer. However, it is my humble opinion that Bassie did discover the “right” answers but that the concept of XM is an impossibility and defies the linguisitic process that was taking place, thus a stumper. Average means the statistical norm or average or expected value; around the middle, or lacking special distinction(average person). Something can not be more middle than middle; if we are speaking of the average range, then anything in that range is no more average than anything else in that range. Let’s say I assess a child’s expressive language processing for any given process, i.e. defining words, and the child’s score places him within average range; then within that range there is no such thing as more average. I could point out that his score was exactly average or tending towards above average but I would be wrong to do so. The standard deviation of average and standard deviation of error takes all that into account. There is simply no reliable difference within a given range. Now, if I were to say that in general, for example, family IQ’s tend to, over time, regress toward the mean, then that would be a different discussion. So, in other words, Bassie’s processing was entirely correct (not that that is always necessary- see T.Edison’s quote on the value of inventions that do not work). The concept of XM is just a fun brain twister but has no correct answer, only another interesting topic for metacognition. Thanks for sharin!