Professor Goose Debunks The Three Little Pigs

With this picture book, children’s author Paulette Bourgeois, best-known for the “Franklin the Turtle” series, adds a second picture book to her new series for young readers, featuring Professor Marie Curious Goose, PhD in Very Important Science. As part of her research, the conscientious Professor Goose has come to the shocking realization that her Great-Aunt Mother Goose never once fact-checked the science in her fairy tales or nursery rhymes. Unable to sit by while misinformation is spread to unsuspecting readers, the indefatigable Professor Goose is determined to debunk fairy tale faulty science. In book one, Professor Goose Debunks Goldilocks and the Three Bears , she fact-checked the Goldilocks tale; in the second book in the series, she takes on the classic tale involving the trio of house-building pigs and the huffing, puffing wolf.

Bourgeois effectively uses the well-known story of the Three Little Pigs as an opportunity to connect familiar narrative events with scientific explanations in side panels. Throughout the tale, Professor Goose is horrified to realize that the tale contains numerous examples of faulty scientific reasoning. First, for example, Professor Goose establishes pigs are not lazy, dirty, sweaty nitwits. Her fact-checking leads to a side panel describing the intelligence and behaviour of pigs: they are more intelligent than dogs, and wallowing in mud lowers their body temperature on hot days, and so it is a smart adaptive strategy, not a sign of slovenliness! Professor Goose is also eager to clarify that Mother Goose seriously misunderstood engineering mechanics when she described the house of straw as flimsy and easily demolished. In fact, straw bale structures are very strong and could easily withstand a strong wind. Furthermore, a wolf is a pack animal and would never have attacked the three little pigs by itself, and, although they may be big, wolves are certainly not bad! And so it goes, with scientific explanations of why the stick house blew down, how we can protect ourselves from windstorms, what animals actually have chinny-chin-chins, and how the repeated patterns in the fairy tale resemble systematic patterns in math and the process known as computer looping when the same action happens over and over again.

Professor Goose Debunks The Three Little Pigs is an entertaining way to introduce young children to STEM concepts, and Alex Griffiths’ cartoony illustrations are an effective complement, showing Professor Goose infiltrating the fairy tale action and reacting in dismay to the unscientific goings on.