Have you spoken to or emailed the teacher? I only ask because my kids have flaked out sometimes and utterly denied that something was covered in class that applied to the homework, only to find out that they had in fact spent 90 minutes on it, and done multiple worksheets in the classroom that were essentially the same as the homework sheet.
The “make this recipe” homework is ridiculous though. Did you make the cookies? I would have bought a bag of gingersnaps and had my daughter glue them together, then dared the teacher to say a word about it.
I fully acknowledge that she might have gotten instructions in class and totally blanked out on them. She is terrible at reporting what happened in school (which I am given to understand is pretty normal for this age).
And yeah, once I figured out what they were going for, I told her they wanted her to pick the more interesting or detailed word, and that when you’re writing, it is good to vary your word choice to keep things interesting. And she proceeded to get every question right. So it became useful with appropriate help.
As for the cookies, I made them with her, very skeptically and grudgingly, and when we baked a few test cookies and they tasted as crappy as I figured they would, we trashed the rest.
Now mnemosyne, you’ve reminded me of my awesome 10th grade English/History teachers (it was a combined, double-period honors class). The textbook had quizzes, with an answer key in the teachers’ volume. The key was horribly inaccurate. So they would grade our quizzes according to the key, and the next class session involved us challenging the incorrect key answers for the ones we got “wrong,” using evidence from the text to support our arguments. What a great way to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear!
It looks like the object of the exercise was to choose the stronger/more descriptive word out of the pair. The instructions probably could have been more clear, but as something a second grader should be working on, it sounds about right. Fang’s second grade teacher is really pushing them to use more descriptive words in their writing.
As to whether the worksheet had been given out totally cold: If Fang has told me that, I would have to take it with a grain of salt. With him, I would lay odds that he was thinking about Star Wars rather than paying attention to the instructions.
American English/American History? I had a class like this! Only it was eleventh grade, and the two teachers had conceived of/created the class themselves. I don’t even think we had a textbook.
My daughter is also in second grade and we get this all the time.
Just last week she had to alphabetize a series of words. She asked how to do it. I asked her how the teacher said to. She said they didn’t cover it in class.
Being that I am in on the game, I told her to try it and we could correct it together. Cue my daughter rattling through the alphabet and getting them in order on the first try.
However, each pair differs consistently in having one boring/ordinary word, and one more interesting/unusual word. So if one assumes that the quiz is meant to be answered in anything other than a random fashion, one should choose one type of word or the other. And one might also reason, if this is a test related to writing, one should choose the more interesting word.
See this is exactly what kids should be taught in school to my way of thinking.
Approaching a problem and then working out how to solve it - teaching the mechanical skill of alphabetisation is easy - asking the kid how to work it out themselves I think has far more educational value.
Yeah, if you told me to think up a “stronger” word meaning “good,” I might say, “great” or “excellent” or something. “Perfect,” on the other hand, means something entirely different. The worksheet sucks.
If we want to get really intellectual about it, I’ll also point out that the fancier word is not always the best choice. Nine times out of ten, someone writing the word “utilize” has no good reason to do so. “Use” is a perfectly fine word, and people who avoid it in favor of “utilize” are usually just trying to make themselves sound smarter. Parsimony is a major principle of good writing.
This, I didn’t understand the point of the hand-out based on the instructions. I’m assuming the teacher pulled this out of some huge educational stack of crap. Obviously it’s suppose to come with verbal instructions of some kind. We use to get assignments in school that were given verbally for the express purpose of teaching verbal comprehension but it was done overtly as in “listen up, these are your only instructions”.
