Totally off topic in some ways, but my favorite story about stupid assessment/criteria is from when my son was assessed in math during the first week of 1st grade. In our parent/teacher conference, the teacher said he had failed a part of the math assessment. Needless to say we were shocked. She showed us the test and there was a section where the child was suppose to show the number 9 in 5 different ways. What they wanted was hash marks, domino, etc. My DS wrote things like 4 + 5, 20-11, 3 x 3, 3 squared, etc. The teacher said she could only give him credit for the addition one, because the others were not on the "list" of right answers!
To her credit, she was just following the rules and knew the result was phooey. She looked at what he did, joked that she was surprised he hadn't put down the square root of 81, and proceeded to try hard to differentiate for him. But you could see how another teacher might not have taken such an enlightened approach.
Last edited by Catalana; 11/30/11 08:12 AM.
