Originally Posted by Dude
Originally Posted by LNEsMom
Thanks val and mithawk, honestly I would prefer NOT to bring it up to the teacher because the last time I said something she did not react well (see my earlier posts about the categorization of the word stranger as something someone does).

My concern is that, although no grade was put on the test, he is a perfectionist and internalizes these grades as his own failure ("I'm bad at science"). We are working on this separately, but incidents like this don't help at all.

I think I have been avoiding undermining the teacher's authority by telling him that the questions are poorly written and that he is in fact correct. But I guess I am going to have to do that, though, in order for him to feel secure in his own abilities, which is ultimately more important.

The way I see it, there's more to it than just confidence in his abilities. There's also the ability to think critically, which is vital. As our kids encounter these situations, if they're taught not to question the content because it comes from an authority, the problem is with them, then critical thinking goes right out the window.

These bad questions are paddle creatures, slapping kids in the face whenever they start thinking, and the result is we're raising a nation of vogons.

This is also something that separates the good teachers from the bad, because I had a number of teachers who openly recognized when the material had something wrong with it. It was not uncommon, for instance, for a teacher to announce the answers to a couple of bad test questions.


We are raising a nation of Vogons. smirk Ugh.

Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.