Thursday, November 10, 2005

Lady Jan says "Darn that Schoolhouse Rock!"

Darn School House Rock!

My daughter has to memorize the preamble of the United States Consitution, as an eighth grade preliminary thing for graduation from the eighth grade.

The Schoolhouse Rock that ran in the 1973 through 1984, had one cartoon segment that had a song of the preamble in it. That Preamble song helped my sister Deanna breeze right through the reciting of the Preamble back in 1975. It hadn’t been on the TV as yet when I had to do it, so I had to memorized it the ‘old school’ way by route(I passed).

And now it has been released in VHS and CD as Schoolhouse Rock American Rock, so I smugly bought it for my daughter thinking that what a good mom am I.
http://www.school-house-rock.com/Prea.html

Guess what? There is a whole missing line in it!

The Preamble goes like this:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.preamble.html

We the people of the United States of America in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United states of America.

The highlighted words are the word missing from the song, on School House Rock. The missing words caused my daughter to get an “F” on reciting the preamble.

So I ran off the preamble off the internet, and the song off the School House Rock web sight, and found that my daughter was right about the missing words.

So we--my husband and I worked with my daughter, so she could try it again at school the next day.

The next day my daughter actually sang the Preamble song to the teacher the next day! She said the missing words from the song in a sotto voice as she sang. Her teacher even bounced along with the beat as my daughter sang her song, and then told her that she had a nice singing voice.

Then he gave her an “A”!

Yay!

1 comment:

David said...

The missing phrase is actually "of the United States", not "of the United States of America", but your point is well taken. This has bugged me for years. As your daughter showed, it wouldn't have been so tough for them to do the preamble verbatim. Why they felt the need to omit four words is beyond me.