My son is in 4th grade. Sometimes his homework is so frustrating because of how questions are worded or how things are set up. It brings me back to my school days and how frustrating it can be.
Tonight he has these pictures of analog clocks and questions that go with it.
What time is it when a clock’s hour hand is pointing basically at 3, but ever so slightly above it, and the minute hand is pointing at the 6?
It’s clearly hand drawn, so it looks like the intent was probably to point directly at the 3. So is that 3:30? But in that case the hour hand should be exactly between the 3 and 4, not a tiny bit above the 3! No clock should ever look like this! And 4 out of 8 clocks on his homework have this problem!
Then there’s about a centimeter of space vertically between questions to put your answer in. No problem. Except some dumb-ass decided to to put a little box in that space for your answer to go in. Why? Beats me. It’s next to impossible to fit something like “2 hrs 35 mins” in that box. You could avoid the box and write next to it, where there’s plenty or space. But from my memory of school, you’ve got a 50/50 chance of the teacher marking it wrong. “You didn’t put your answer in the box. Sorry, it’s wrong.”
It’s 4th grade. I doubt one tanked homework due ot technicalities will kill his chances of getting that scholarship to Harvard.
I would say 2:30, but without seeing it: it’s tough to assess.
This is where you have your kid answer, make sure he has nothing “off the wall” for his answers and that he can defend them (Little Johnny: “Well, the pointer is clearly above the three, meaning it cannot yet be 3 o’clock. I found your crudely hand drawn diagrams to be vague and confusing, which is disconcerting and somewhat undermining to the intent of this lesson. In the end, I was forced to either explain that that clock was clearly broken, for which you left me too little space in the answer key, or make a best guess at your intent displayed in these rudimentarily drawn problems.”). And write a nice letter to the teacher explaining the trouble with the assignment and paperclip it to the worksheet.
I did write a note to the teacher on the top of the worksheet. I mentioned pointed out how some of the clocks were not possible. But we went on the assumption that the number the hour hands were generally pointing to was the intended hour.
I think it all just brings back a lot of frustration I had as a kid in school. I was actually a great student in accelerated classes in elementary all the way through high school. But I still had my share of crappy teachers and assignments.
I remember this English teacher in high school that made us memorize about 15-20 word definitions for a quiz each week. The definitions were in here own words, as if the dictionary wasn’t good enough. No big deal. But they were full sentences, odd and wordy, and you had to memorize them exactly. And I mean EXACTLY, or it was wrong. So what happened? Being a good student I memorized every sentence and did well on the quizzes. The problem is, I didn’t learn anything extra for all the extra time it took. Memorizing sentences isn’t learning what they mean. Some teachers suck.
Half a century ago, answering mental arithmetic questions for homework, I hit a question that, at the time, made no sense at all to me. I was good at M.A. and it annoyed me so much as a ten year old, that I still remember the exact wording of the question today.
Once the English became clear to me the question was then trivial, but something prevented me at the time from understanding the question which was:
A brick weighs two pounds and half a brick. What is the weight of a brick and a half?
I don’t get it. What’s the “and half a brick” part mean?
Obviously, I would understand “A brick weighs two pounds. What is the weight of a brick and a half?”
I remember in 2nd grade we were learning fractions.
The teacher taught many lessons by drawing a circle on the board and dividing it up. Like a pie.
The problem was, the teacher kept saying something like… “This is a whole”.
And I kept hearing “This is a hole”. It was round and she was saying hole. She was dividing up a hole. What the hell did that mean?
I struggled for a long time. And then out of nowhere I finally figured out she was saying “whole” and everything she had been saying all the sudden clicked.
Don’t even get me started on how pointless and stupid our school system’s can be. I especially dislike it when teachers make things much more complicated then they should be and when you answer a question in a different way it is considered wrong.
Somewhere in recent years they’ve stopped teaching us where to (not) put apostrophes. It’s epidemic!
Isn’t the answer to the brick question 3?
Think of stupid questions, school assignments and paperwork as previews of things to come. The state doesn’t just run the schools, it’ll still be there after you move on. Get used to the idea. How can you give a wrong answer to a wrong question? The correct answer on all those clock questions would seem to be: “broken clock” (with explanation of why in each case). If you get it marked wrong, ask the teacher to show you the exact time from the question on a real clock.
What’s worse than badly formed questions on tests? The same badly formed question on the same test year after year.
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