Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion The Ultimate Bad Homework Question Thread!

*snort*

Two this week!

Science review worksheet: "All amphibians have four legs..."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caecilian

I guess a tadpole isn't an amphibian until it's all grown up.

DD brought home a worksheet with pictures to measure. She had to round to the nearest inch, half-inch, and quarter-inch.

The first object was exactly 2 3/4 inches long. She rounded up to three for the nearest inch, up to three for the nearest half-inch, and wrote 2 3/4 for the nearest quarter-inch.

She got the half-inch part wrong. Apparently she should have rounded down to 2 1/2 inches, as the sheet meant HALF inch literally. Full inches don't count. If it had been exactly 3 inches, she should have presumably rounded to either 2 1/2 or 3 1/2 inches. (???)

AUGH!!!

Some of these you can kind of see what the teacher was trying to get at, or where they went wrong, or why they were struggling with the wording. But this . . . this is just breathtaking.

Good gracious. The 1/2 inch thing is so wrong that it might actually be useful in advocacy.

I don't see myself tolerating this, although I can't immediately think of a productive way to bring this up with the teacher.

Are you a long-lost sibling of mine? That is precisely my mother!

I still have tears in my eyes from the $60 bills. Too funny!

I'm debating this week whether to start something with DS's new teacher -- he was just accelerated to some 6th grade classes at the quarter break, and I don't know this teacher well enough to know if she would take criticism well or if she would take it out on him.

He brought home a rough draft of a paper for Veterans Day, and she had marked some things to correct for the final draft. She wants "holiday" capitalized throughout. She wants him to add something about "who served valiantly" and she spelled it "valiently". And she wants his apostrophe moved in "Veterans' Day" (how he wrote it) to "Veteran's Day". While I tend to agree with his placement myself, the official holiday (not Holiday) does not have an apostrophe in either location. So we had a talk about the merits of doing what the teacher asks in order to get a better grade while knowing in your heart that you're right, versus explaining to the teacher that what she wants is incorrect and possibly facing problems in the future. I've seen his final draft, which he hasn't turned in yet, and he spelled valiantly correctly, did not capitalize holiday, and put an apostrophe where she wanted it in the title. Two out of three ain't bad.

Exactly. I have no idea how to bring up this idea without making a big mess.