It's delightful.
A Pineapple races an animal.
Or does it?
This article caught my eye because several Facebook friends are now sprouting pineapples on their profiles.
Officials pull puzzling pineapple question from state tests - NY Daily News
Before you read my link let me note a few things. I'm soon to be testing in a CA Public school. I sign an affidavit saying that even IF a question this absurd, or WORSE, was on the test I would not be ALLOWED to speak to it. So I am sure I'll see equal baloney-I have in the past, altho I will give over that this one I believe to be a Zen like Koan. At best.
I've been working on a Koan for a long time about a fox. But that's off the topic.
(if you ask me as a koan it might be talking about the fact that we each are bound within the nature of our form-pineapples as well as hares)
So if you give a company 32 million dollars to improve a test, and then you end up with a question about a tortoise and a hare, strike that, pineapple and a hare in which now the HARE WINS, and the pineapple standing in for the turtle is eaten, aren't we really looking at underlying value system shifts.
Aren't we really looking at teaching children that the one left behind gets devoured.
Just like the pineapple. It would seem so.
32 million to a test company to improve a test so that underneath it all we can be understanding that the winners get annoyed and take all. Something like that.
You know why the tests aren't public, do you know WHY there is no transparency at ALL? Why your child on the state test can't review their mistakes, why parents can't review the tests and answers?
It's really complicated.
They might demand explanations for why it boils down to pineapples and hares.
If NOTHING else needs to change, one thing does, the tests should be OPEN to QUESTION.
The story and the questions are here.
( Please read Pinkwater on all of this.)
See my Mrs. Puglisi's 100 National Standards
One of the things that I think is unfortunate, in all this pineapple business, is that Daniel Pinkwater's perfectly nice (albeit characteristically bizarre and absurd) story is now being turned to all sorts of metaphors for how broken the high-stakes testing system is (as if we didn't already know how broken it is-- though, I certainly recognize from my time spent as an environmental activist-- when your story starts to stick, you don't ask why: you milk the publicity and hope to do some actual good).
ReplyDeletePerhaps he gave permission-but I doubt ANY author would be too thrilled to turn up in a state test. Perhaps I'm wrong, I'd be horrified. For me the issue isn't milking it for publicity but rather that the question WAS Koan like and found it's way into a one size fits all, one answer is "right" format. Good fiction leads not to one "right" answer-but to personal meaning. It's sad to see our educational system so far from understanding that the format of these exams is having such profound effects to stifle thinking, questioning.
ReplyDeleteI love the idea of a bossy pineapple.