Have you ever looked at your kid's homework and thought, The hell?! I'm not talking about the actual work your kid does, I'm talking about those standardized worksheets and pages torn out of books along perforated lines -- before your child even sharpens his pencil. You know, the part of your kid's homework that's supposed to be guaranteed mistake-free. Except sometimes it's not. I've seen my kids bring home everything from phonics assignments with typos (really?!) to vocabulary drills with incorrect definitions. My personal favorite? Those photocopied-to-death "learning about money" worksheets, which require your child to look at an assortment of smudgy gray "coins" and somehow magically figure out the sum. Is that a nickel? A quarter? Who knows? It's a circle!
Anyway, my point is sometimes kids are smarter than the material that's supposed to be educating them.
Like the 5-year-old boy who took it upon himself to add what he felt was a very important footnote to his homework assignment. See, the boy was supposed to choose the appropriate words to illustrate a variety of pictures: "The man can ... " (rub, run, rug); "The ... ran" (fog, fox, for).
Then, a moral conundrum. Alongside a little cartoon of a man smacking a dog with a newspaper: "The man ... the dog" (fit, hit).
Well, this little boy went out on a limb and filled in that blank with a word that wasn't on the list: "Pet." And then he added underneath: "You should not hit dogs."
Well said, kid! You tell 'em. I can't wait until he gets one of those blurry coin worksheets: "You cannot add coins together when you can't even see which president is on the front."
Have you ever noticed a mistake or something else odd about your kid's homework?
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Comments 71
The question was "how can you tell this story could really happen?" The answer they WANTED, was something along the lines of "it took place in a real city, and the problem the main character had, is one anyone could have"
The answer my daughter gave:
Because the dog didn't talk.
It was so cute, that I just let her leave it. The teacher found it funny too luckilly lol
What a smart and sweet kid.
You can blame the budget cuts for the sloppy work given to kids.
@ Tammy, wow!
Doomy234, it IS the correct answer, because these things are FAR more important than giving the answer the teacher expected:
1. ACTUALLY BEING ABLE TO READ AND WRITE. Think about it - is the goal here to help this child develop the skills to choose from two words and put on in a blank? (When was the last time you were faced with that task?) Or is the goal here to help this child develop THE ABILITY TO READ AND WRITE, as in read the words, attach meaning to them, choose a response, and write that response down such that others can read it? THAT is exactly what he did. Heck, just being able to write his own word instead of choosing from the list shows that he is above and beyond the level of work elicited by this assignment.
2. BEING A DECENT PERSON. This is not Nazi Germany, this is not the Army, this is the REAL WORLD. And out here, it is actually more valuable to think independently than it is to blindly follow directions.
I love this kid!!!! I can only hope (haven't read the linked story yet) that his teacher had the brains to see this for what it is - an example of all the right things :o)
PS Has anyone else noticed that there are two travesties occuring here? (One, of course, is that hitting dogs was even included in this kid's HW). The second one is this: A kid who can write the sentence "You should not hit dogs" is being asked, for HW, to waste his time copying three-letter words. Hello!!!
Makes me sad when school ends up holding kids back from their natural ability in the name of "education"