Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Scholastic News

Ah, remember the good ole days of sitting in elementary school reading the latest edition of Scholastic News. Well, the privilage of being married to a 3rd grade teacher is you get to grade a lot of papers. One of them being the monthly addition of Scholastic News. You remember how it works. You read the stories and then on the back page answer a few questions to see if you remembered what you read. Here are three of the four questions on the back page with the multiple choice answers:

1. The Iditarod race is about _______ miles long.
a. 32
b. 45 million
c. 1,150
d. 10,000

The answer was C. I know, how could it not be 45 million miles long. Well, actually some students seemed to think so and answered B.


2. You can guess that ______.
a. the Junior Iditarod is easier than the regular Iditarod
b. Conway Seavey is afraid of dogs
c. there is no time to rest during the Iditarod
d. cats can also run in the Iditarod

I have to be honest. I graded every paper with the highest hopes that someone would choose D. Finally, I got my wish. Some idiot girl picked D. Come on. Can you really see cats doing ANYTHING? Can you picture a bunch of cats all roped together? Running? In snow? Outside? In the cold? Cats doing work? Hilarious.


Now for the best one:
3. The main idea of this story is that _______.
a. monkeys like bananas
b. monkeys are causing problems in India
c. monkeys are very clever
d. it's fun to live with monkeys

Again, I was waiting with the highest anticipation someone would choose D. How is that not the right answer? You're telling me it's not fun to live with monkeys? I died laughing when I finally got to a paper when someone picked D. In fact, I gave them partial credit just for thinking it would be fun to live with monkeys.

1 comment:

Stack said...

Just for reference, the distance from the Earth to the Sun is 93 million miles. So unless the Iditarod is to Venus and back, answer b is very wrong.

Obviously I didn't read the story, but I'm pretty sure all answers to #3 are true.