Oh, you guys, I gave ANOTHER exam -- that's two of them inside a week -- that was much more difficult for my students than I expected. I think I've gotten better at writing sneaky multiple-choice questions in which the wrong answers sound plausible. Either that or I am a dreadful teacher and I should go work at Wendy's. Sigh. Today's exam was double-plus-stinkified by some avoidable hassles: the person in the office who copied the exams didn't notice that the copier wasn't working right, so that about 20% of the students had an unreadable page or two. I forgot until after they'd started that I'd included three questions with more than five answer choices, and needed to interrupt them (twice!) to tell them how to handle those questions. And despite the fact that I'd told them clearly to prepare for a particular short-answer question, it flummoxed a number of them and I expect to get blowback about it.
SO. Instead of telling you even more about the stuff that is filling my brain at the moment I am going to tell you about my funny oldest son. He's on the Scholastic Bowl team this year, where (to hear him tell it, at least -- keep your saltshaker at the ready) he takes no prisoners. They had a meet tonight and it reminded me of the story I meant to blog after their last meet. For every European history toss-up question, Alex would smack the buzzer and answer coolly, "Otto von Bismarck." He did this four times in a row, and four times in a row he was wrong. His teammates ribbed him about this, but he is pretty much immune to ribbing. As the last match was racing toward its heated conclusion, there was another European history toss-up. "Otto von Bismarck," he announced in his I-may-be-wrong-but-I'm-not-uncertain voice. "Correct!" said the judge. His teammates, and his mother, thought this was a riot.
Maybe I'll tell my students they should guess Otto von Bismarck next time.
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