I am not particularly a scientist, but this sort of thing still bugs the heck out of me.
Unfortunately he still has to show due diligence. I like the chicken-farming story.
[Personal rant]Me, I homeschool, and write my own dang list of literary analysis questions that don’t involve getting in touch with your feelings and dissecting them for everyone to analyze, or lying about it. I actually think it’s not appropriate to the pre-teen/early teen years to try to drag feelings out of them.[/rant]
Yes, it was Bridge to Terabithia. I didn’t say at first because I knew then I’d get more reactions to the book than the question.
I think it’s a great assignment. It’s often a novel idea to a child that book can be more than a story, but can be another way to learn and grow about themselves. Children can be extremely literal and need to learn how to see underlying themes and the value literature that goes beyond just reading a book. Will every book be life altering? Of course not. But if you haven’t leanred the skill to look for those ideas, you’ll rarely see them.
I’m a total science geek and was from childhood, but found great value in examining the message in many of the books I’ve read. You’re argument against Newberry Medal winners seems odd to me-- many are classic childhood books, even if each wasn’t to everyone’s taste. Seems like a drastic conclusion from a singular experience.
If that was my child, I would encourage them to see the intent and spirit of the assignment- even if a something learned was not dramatically new, was there anything that impacted them? Made them think about something a little bit differently? Made them feel more certain about something? I would encourage my child to stretch a little bit and go past first impressions.
The answer submitted feels a bit like a gotcha- a very literal reading of an assignment with a throw off answer.
That reminds me of an assignment that a friend had when she was in school. The assignment was to draw a picture of God. She thought it was stupid and pointless, and so turned in a blank sheet of paper. The nun that taught the class was outraged, and turned it in to the principal. He thought it was brilliant and put it on display for the whole school to see.
I think it is fine to give an honest answer that is clearly not what the lesson wanted/expected, but that such an answer should still be thoughtful and well reasoned and that your kid’s answer was somewhat lazy.
As others have said, it is definitely the lazy answer and it does not display that your kid understood (or even read) the book. If he thought the book was worthless pap that’s fine, but he should be able to support his view with evidence from the book.
Out of curiosity carlotta, do you enjoy reading? Do you read often? Do you encourage your kid(s) to read beyond their homework assignments?
duplicate post. Weirdness.
That may (or may not) be the correct answer, in the same sense that the correct answer to “Can you tell me what the capital of Idaho is?” may be “No, I can’t.”
I would have hated a question like that, in 5th grade or for quite some time afterward, both because it’s so open-ended and vague, and because it’s so personal. Questions like that might work well as discussion-starters (at least for some people), but not as something to be graded or evaluated on.
Has the kid been taught what a “life lesson” is, and how they might be derived from works of literature? Has he been exposed to examples of good answers that other people have given to similar questions about other works? If not, it’s unfair to expect the kid to be able to come up with a decent answer to a question like that.
Would it have been more interesting if you had read it in a different language? 
The question is meant to encourage critical thinking and analysis of the book’s themes. “I didn’t learn anything” is not an acceptable answer, and should receive zero points. “I didn’t learn anything, but I believe one of the lessons meant to be learned is (blank)” would earn full points, as long as the answer is relevant to the story.
Terrible answer. As a few others mentioned up thread, it’s a critical thinking and writing assignment not a lesson on how it improved his life. The problem is, there’s no way for the teacher to differentiate a legitimate situation where the kid didn’t learn anything and a case where the kid was just lazy and claimed he didn’t learn anything.
So, even if he feels he didn’t learn anything, he can pick a lesson that perhaps he already knew and explain how he might have learned that lesson from the novel if he didn’t already know it. Hell, if he doesn’t feel like BSing, and he really doesn’t need to, he can even be honest and say he didn’t feel he learned anything but that he felt that the book illustrated an important lesson that he’d already learned. As long as he can demonstrate comprehension of the material, it ought not to matter whether he learned a life lesson or not, only that he can identify such a situation in the book.
Or, if he really wants to be a smart ass, he can get all meta about it and talk about how he didn’t learn anything and why but that he is learning that he needs to understand the purpose of the assignment rather than just the letter of the assignment and that while it might be an honest and technically correct answer to the question as posed that he realizes that there is intention behind the question to demonstrate his ability to understand that intention and his comprehension of the material about which the question was posed.
Yes, I adore reading. I read constantly. I am usually reading several books at a time. I belong to a book club and for a time there I belonged to three.
I do indeed encourage my kids to read outside their homework assignments and they do.
Ah, that kind of crap. While I agree that there actually are messages and themes and whatnot in a lot of literature, there are definitely times I agree with Tolkien that just because a critic claims there is something there doesn’t mean that there is. I swear that sometimes I think I could write a whole bunch of bullshit about themes of sexuality in “The Cat in the Hat” and get it published, a la Alan Sokal.
That said, it’s a lousy answer. Even if he didn’t learn anything (and I remember being there or at least feeling like it), he can use it to learn to come up with an answer supported by the text even if he doesn’t believe in it.
Yeah, the kid should get no credit for it. I got full credit for giving smartassed answers throughout high school and college, but they were complete answers that indicated that I’d both read and thought about the assigned material. Usually they were more effort than making some up some “expected answer” bullshit would be, but if you want to have fun with the assignment and still get credit, you have to put in the work. 
I didn’t start that until high school, though. I wasn’t that jaded in 5th grade.
I also have a really hard time believing that a 5th grader read something new, no matter what it was, and learned nothing from it. I read voraciously at that age, and there were damned few books I didn’t get anything out of, even if it was just that the book was ridiculous for X reasons. And I read everything I could get my hands on, from classics to babysitter’s club books.
Could you clarify:
Were the kids being directly graded on their answers to questions like these? Or was this an exercise to prepare them for a class discussion?
And, what were the other questions? And did the kid write serious, thoughtful answers to them?
Makes sense. I think the real point of the question is not to verify that your child actually “learned” something new that they didn’t already know before, but that they are able to figure out what type of message the author may have been intending to portray.
E.g. the kid could put down “The book “My Gay Friend” is about someone who discovers that a close friend is a homosexual, and comes to an understanding that such things don’t matter in terms of having a friendship with that person. I actually had encountered this before when I found out that Suzie next door is a lesbian.”
That isn’t so hard.
I agree that the teacher’s INTENT may have been to get him to describe a lesson that the book was trying to teach… but that isn’t what the question asked.
As a former teacher and pedogogical nitpicker, I would give full credit to a student who could justify using text from the book on WHY he/she did not learn anything. But again, I was a physics teacher, not a lit teacher, so I am not 100% qualified.
This makes his answer even odder in my opinion. There isn’t one book that I have read that I haven’t walked away with something. Perhaps you should have explained the assignment better and asked Junior about specifics in the story and what he thought of them.
Personally, if my 7th grader would have given such an answer, I’d make her reread the book because she obviously didn’t give it enough attention.
While I don’t think the question was worded that well, I do think it was able to be interpreted and answered by a ten year old.
On the one hand, I think it’s great that he didn’t fall into the glurge trap. Fair play.
On the other hand, the point of the assignment, and presumably of the class, is for him to learn to analyse his own responses to reading, and articulate that analysis. Which he didn’t do. In those terms, this is no better than ‘I learned a lot of lessons from this book,’ end of assignment.
Even sven’s example would have been great. So would something along the lines of ‘I think the book was supposed to show me that X, Y and Z. That wasn’t what I took from it, because A and B. It did make me think about some things, but the things I learn from books are private. I like to think about them for a while and see how they fit into my life, but they’re not the kind of thing I want to share with the world.’
carlotta, you have a fantastic teachable moment here. I agree with several other posters and your kid that the question as written is lame. It’s trite, it makes assumptions, and worst of all it’s both condescending and age-inappropriate. If this were my kid, I’d tell him I was glad he realized the question has problems, and try to get him to articulate them. BUT THEN . . . I’d try to get him to think of what a better question would have been. What kind of writing questions aren’t a pain in the butt to answer? And then we’d talk about why someone writes a dumb question like that: the teacher wants to help him learn to understand what he reads, and to write about it clearly. He or she has to think of hundreds of little questions like this in the average week to do that job, and some questions will be better than others. When the teacher comes up with a stinker, the polite and kind thing to do (because teachers are people, and we should be polite and kind to them) is not to say “What a stinker!” but to try to figure out how to give the teacher what he or she really wants – which is some thoughtful writing from the students. I’d tell the story of the queen, who, when one of her guests spilled the soup, promptly spilled a little of her own to make the guest feel better, or however that goes. And I’d bring up farts, because how can that go wrong with a fifth-grader?
I say all this partly because years ago, I used to have to come up with essay prompts for schoolkids as part of my job with an educational publisher and damn, you have no idea how hard it is to come up with non-stinkers after you’ve thrown out the first few dozen. But, really, any chance you have to remind a kid that teachers are not the enemy is golden.
GAWD, after all these years, I still hate literature.
Don’t get me wrong, I love to READ. I even love to read stuff that gives me an opportunity to learn something.
But the whole connotation-denotation, what did blah-blah represent for the writer, how was this indicative of the emotions the writer was trying to convey…
wild, frantic screaming
Don’t make me DECODE the damned books. Give me a story that pulls me in, makes me part of it, allows me to experience the situation with the characters.
I remember TRYING to read Dante’s “Divine Comedy” in high school. And Faulkner in college.
I’d grab the fifth grader by the hand and say, “C’mon Son, let’s go out for ice cream.”
~VOW