I believe you dropped a leading '<' or had the update widget doing auto-formatting for you. At any rate, you link's not looking right.
That said, I adore the story. My high school biology instructor pulled exactly the same trick on us. Though I believe ours was simply a homework assignment, so it wasn't quite as painful to get a 0 on it as it would have been had it been a quiz.
On the one hand, it's an excellent lesson. Vital, really. On the other hand, (and it's unfortunate that this is the case) it's changing the rules without warning.
I think I'm prejudiced against it because of an exercise in middle school where we were given a sheet of paper and told to "read the entire page, then follow the directions in order", with a long list of things to do, all of them very "public" and loud, and then at the end it says "now that you're done reading the list, don't do any of the things, and instead sit quietly." While likely well-intentioned, it essentially teaches that failure is humiliating, and arbitrary directions are to be obeyed without question.
"cattywampus" gets lots of points for the lesson taught, so I guess I "forgive" it. *grin*
But, intentionally playing games like that when so much time is spent building up the self esteem of "good students" based on performance is dangerous stuff.
I was thinking about this, puzzling over why the Instructions exercise bothered me so much while the Cattywumpus one held a lot of appeal for me, and I realized that there's a tremendous difference between the two: the Instructions one conveys, "You suffered because you didn't follow directions," while the Cattywumpus one conveys, "You suffered because you didn't think for yourself."
On the other hand, the instructions exercise at least announced all the information you needed beforehand. I think it's fair. I think the cattywampus exercise is not fair, but is valuable. I don't think the zero score should stand as if everyone failed a regular test--I think it should be considered as a pretest of critical thinking skills, and improvement counted from there.
For the sake of argument, the instructions exercise said to "read the entire page, then follow the directions in order." Worded like that, one can make a strong argument that the correct thing to do would, in fact, have been to read through the sheet completely first and then do each of the things instructed. Since "in order" conventionally means "starting with the first and ending with the last," it is at best ambiguous as to whether the last instruction should override the first one since if a student were following the first instruction properly, then following the last instruction would literally be the last thing that they should do
( ... )
Comments 7
That said, I adore the story. My high school biology instructor pulled exactly the same trick on us. Though I believe ours was simply a homework assignment, so it wasn't quite as painful to get a 0 on it as it would have been had it been a quiz.
Reply
On the one hand, it's an excellent lesson. Vital, really. On the other hand, (and it's unfortunate that this is the case) it's changing the rules without warning.
I think I'm prejudiced against it because of an exercise in middle school where we were given a sheet of paper and told to "read the entire page, then follow the directions in order", with a long list of things to do, all of them very "public" and loud, and then at the end it says "now that you're done reading the list, don't do any of the things, and instead sit quietly." While likely well-intentioned, it essentially teaches that failure is humiliating, and arbitrary directions are to be obeyed without question.
"cattywampus" gets lots of points for the lesson taught, so I guess I "forgive" it. *grin*
But, intentionally playing games like that when so much time is spent building up the self esteem of "good students" based on performance is dangerous stuff.
Reply
They're not teaching the same lesson at all...
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
Leave a comment