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Is anyone else's child being tortured by this? DD12 is working in a workbook for LA that makes me want to set things on fire.

I had to look it up to see what you're referring to, but if it's just the general method of analyzing shorter texts (rather than a specific workbook) that you're referring to, then yes. DD7 is often aggravated by the boring, short text sheets she has to answer questions about. They aren't very clear about when they're asking for verbatim facts vs inferences. When she infers, she gets them wrong and she gets frustrated.

Ooooo-- or the one that was the bane of DD's existence-- when she inferred they didn't want her to, and when she treated it LITERALLY, they wanted the inference.

She was LIVID over this in high school (when the transition to CC started this nonsense). I think she wanted to set things on fire, too.

At one point, she may well have stated petulantly that this kind of thing really only ought to be written by people who actually understood what inferring meant.

I'm so cynical about this kind of stuff. I just...believe that you can't approach something like comprehension of complex texts as a skill to be boxed up, opened, and mastered by reading a short passage and answering a bunch of questions (apparently 3rd and 4th graders read one-page texts).

There's so much more to reading than can come from going through a short passage. Short stories, novels for children, and philosophical works are so much meatier than "content rich nonfiction". Reading longer works requires so much more effort, and gives so much more in return as a reward. Honest discussions about literature --- where the kids are encouraged to think for themselves about what they've read --- can yield so much more than answering a list of canned worksheet questions.

When my two youngest were in fourth grade, they went to a school that had them reading works like The Arabian Nights and Robinson Crusoe. They read aloud in class and then talked about the story. They had to answer questions along the lines of "What did you think about...?" That kind of thing. I'm sorry to say that that school changed ownership and is now more focused on passages and multiple choice questions. But we found a new school, and last week, everyone had to pick a book about the Holocaust and read it. DS finished his in two days. DD is on her second book --- a week later. We talk about the books and the subject in general. They talk about them in school. No one hands out multiple choice worksheets asking why Anne Frank chose one particular word over another one, and no one is a "word detective." TBH, I think that sort of thing trivializes a subject.

My kids get both in their school -- they have the single page comprehension sheets, but also have book clubs of longer books based on either interest or reading group/level, which discuss by the chapter or weekly goal, so I don't feel like they're getting stuck distilling isolated passages only. But it can be frustrating when a passage is an excerpt from a longer text and the inference requires exposure to a context they might not be familiar with. A time and place that they don't know about yet, where the longer text would set the stage for it, and reading more (before and after) would clarify it. They're supposed to just guess? Just know from 2-5 paragraphs?

I was just searching the archives for some unrelated material and came across a post that made me think of this thread! Had to share, and laugh/groan.

Re: giftedness and agreeable kids


This is so like the things my DD would miss. I personally would have guessed "Because it was cold outside? Sunny?" That whole thread got me thinking, though, about something DDs teacher said in the fall about the reading group she was placed in, that even though the two girls in the group were a little higher than her, she thought DD would benefit from that group. I feel that it is the out of the box answers and her not-very-good handwriting and poor spelling that led to such an opinion, rather than actual reading comprehension on below-level, less engaging material.

Everything everyone said. DD is being slowly eaten alive by this, I swear. She writes like an angel (confirmed by testing, FWIW--scored in the top .05% statewide) and she's every good English teacher's dream. But she's not all that great at "Take this boring sentence from this boring canned reading apart word by word and dissect it." DH and I can't correctly answer many of the questions in her CC workbook, either. Why is my language-gifted 6th grader using an effing workbook anyway?

Ds6 supposedly has problems with inferential comprehension. I thinktge problem is not comprehension though. He is a oerfectionist and is not going to give an answer unless he is sure he is right. Kids here aren't allowed outside without a hat 6 months a year so he might get that.

puffin, I have to note, here, that while DD certainly had perfectionistic tendencies already, this sort of nonsense (which is the most appropriate term short of profanity, frankly) drove it to unprecedented heights.

Being asked these "inferential" questions, mixed with questions that required direct/literal reading as well-- and in all-or-nothing formats, where only a specific word or answer selection would be "correct" and everything else "wrong" (no matter her explanation) was what drove her to loathe Language Arts as a subject. Not kidding.

She liked it somewhat better after two years of AP English coursework with a teacher that clearly shared her disdain for this sort of thing. But no, she never "got used to" these questions, in large part because they ultimately require that the student get inside of the mind of whoever was WRITING the query to begin with. Now, in a person-to-person interaction, in which one knows the individual asking the question, that's not so hard. But gifted children encounter these questions, and coupled with their own lived experience, they see so many correct answers that there IS no "best" choice. There isn't. It's situational, and they don't have the information (context) that they need in order to know which is the appropriate one for the context.

I hypothesize that many gifted children probably struggle with this more than NT ones because of that increased ability to see alternative solutions, viewpoints, and perspectives. They aren't thinking about the questions the way NT children do. It's not that the gifted child is wrong-- but they can sure be made to FEEL as though their patterns of thinking need "correction" when subjected to this baloney for years on end.

It makes ME want to light things on fire, too.


The ultimate irony is that just a year or two later than workbooks and materials have them doing this sort of thing, which DD used to term "getting inside the mind of average reading," they are expected to begin appreciating and writing about the deeper symbolism and meaning of great works of literature-- at least if they're college-bound. That is flatly a skill that has been BEATEN out of them by this approach. DD had always been encouraged to think "beyond the text" and to consider this sort of thing-- and even she found it challenging to revert to her own normal way of approaching literature after she'd been treated this way.

Consider the answer to the following questions:


Think about how a high school student would be required to consider their reading in order to answer those two questions. Then ask yourself what a "right" answer looks like to the second. Because make no mistake-- there is one. The rest are WRONG.


It's harmful.