how you'd answer the two questions.

I couldn't. Not with any confidence.

In other words, it sucks all the way around as a test question.

prohibiting teachers from publicly discussing the test.

Anyone can plainly see it's chartreuse!

the question was wrong

Deep Thought was wrong with the first answer and the correct answer was 43.

Deep Thought correctly deduced the answer as 42.

Earth was created as a massive computer to discover the Ultimate Question. The process was not complete when the Vogons destroyed the earth.
It was discovered by tapping Arthur Dent's subconscious that the incomplete result of earth's computation was "What do you get when you multiply six by nine?"

Doug Adams was a master of the absurd

It did not help.

This nonsense really resonates with me. Right now, I am working my way thru 3 continuing education modules that are part of a yearly requirement for maintaining my nurse practitioner certification. The tests are take home, the questions are multiple choice, and reference articles related to each question are provided on-line. Easy, right?

Wrong. Every year there are at least half a dozen questions in each module that drive me absolutely batty as I attempt to answer them. The questions are either poorly worded or have more than one correct answer supported by the reference article. Or, the reference article does not address the question AT ALL. Last year,, one of the articles was 100 damn pages long, and the answer to the question was in the last paragraph of the last freaking page.

I often wonder if the test writers are really interested in making sure we are learning things relevant to our professional endeavors, or are they just trying to trick us? I have taken these tests for nearly 3- years, and it is the same crap every time.

And the part that's justified is likely to be incompetent and/or irrelevant.

They ate the hare first, but they were still hungry so they had seconds.

...dessert?

Just curious.

It's about what skills get taught when, and its most basic level. After that, it's about materials used (think novels, poems, journals, etc) and and the type of questioning/assignments teachers assign.

I'm a big fan of their questioning strategies: it goes beyond memorization and teaches thinking, which good teachers have been doing all along.

The reading selections they've got are unrealistic and often just silly, and while chosen precisely and mathematically, are totally without regard for children's emotional maturity (Grapes of Wrath is suggested for ninth graders).

The "when the skills get taught" part is frustrating. It's more rigorous, which is probably good, but was rolled out to all grade levels at the same time. So what was designed to be learned progressively over thirteen years was just thrust on my twelfth graders one day. You don't just say "Go run a marathon," you work up to it.

A guy is driving around the back woods and he sees a sign in front of a broken down, shanty-style house: "Talking Dog For Sale." He rings the bell and the owner appears and tells him the dog is in the backyard.
The guy goes into the backyard and sees a nice looking Labrador retriever sitting there.
"You talk?" he asks.
"Yep," the Lab replies.
After the guy recovers from the shock of hearing a dog talk, he says "So, what's your story?"
The Lab looks up and says, "Well, I discovered that I could talk when I was pretty young. I wanted to help the government, so I told the CIA. In no time at all they had me jetting from country to country, sitting in rooms with spies and world leaders, because no one figured a dog would be eavesdropping.
"I was one of their most valuable spies for eight years running. But the jetting around really tired me out, and I knew I wasn't getting any younger so I decided to settle down. I signed up for a job at the airport to do some undercover security, wandering near suspicious characters and listening in. I uncovered some incredible dealings and was awarded a batch of medals.
"I got married, had a mess of puppies, and now I'm just retired."
The guy is amazed. He goes back in and asks the owner what he wants for the dog.
"Ten dollars," the guy says.
"Ten dollars? This dog is amazing! Why on earth are you selling him so cheap??"
"Because the dog's a damn liar. He never did any of that shit."

Cite the textual evidence that most strongly supports an analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.
Analyze how particular lines of dialogue or incidents in a story or drama propel the action, reveal aspects of a character, or provoke a decision
Analyze how differences in the points of view of the characters and the audience or reader (e.g., created through the use of dramatic irony) create such effects as suspense or humor.
a. Analyze full-length novels, short stories, poems, and other genres by authors who represent diverse world cultures.

8th grade standards applicable to the text. It's not great writing, but "fine literature" is often absent from ELA instruction these days. It's not "relevant."

At some point they get exposed to a wide range of narrative genres. This is a fable. It can't be biased or privilege anybody who may have read it; it can't be more Navajo than it is Sardinian or Miao or even Brahui or Turkana. Aesop is great, but he's a dead white guy. They're not all supposed to be difficult; in fact, if you're testing inferencing and such you don't want it to be a test of syntax and vocabulary. You want it to be simple and test inferencing because inferencing is what's supposed to be taught, and that inferencing has to be based on close reading.

I've seen worse test questions. Written by teachers. (Heck, I've written worse test questions. And better ones.) At least it's aligned to the standards, so if the teachers are teaching what their boss says and what they've agreed to teach this shouldn't be a challenge to the kids.

The problem most have with the CC standards are that they either think they want the wrong things taught or they don't like questions that require inferencing or a strategy to get to the answer. The kids like memorization. It's easy. It's simple. They also like evaluative questions that focus on themselves but which are fairly fact free. This isn't.

You don't think it's a challenge to the kids. It's a challenge to us.

It actually appears to be condoning slavery, too - "win a ninja". How do you win a person, apart from through slavery? I think it fails the cultural neutrality test.

gets an F. The questions don't go with the story. Nobody ate the pineapple and it doesn't describe any animal as wise.

or that the text is too simple.

The problem is the point of the text is not discernible, and that the questions are not answerable.

Somebody actually got paid money to write this piece of crap?

The story from the link isn't the story from the test, as you will see if you click on the article it references. The original story makes more sense and even has an owl.

This story has been posted on DU before. I think I even used one of my 450ish posts when this was originally posted.

Last edited Mon Apr 28, 2014, 11:29 PM - Edit history (1)

story, but took it and extended it. And Pinkwater says his own version is intended to be nonsense, and that this version is even more nonsensical. Therefore, it shouldn't be used for test questions that ask for a LOGICAL, thoughtful response.

http://blogs.wsj.com/metropolis/2012/04/20/daniel-pinkwater-on-pineapple-exam-nonsense-on-top-of-
nonsense/

When kids are confronted with questions about the modified version of your passage, there seems to be no particular answer. Yet all answers can be correct. Does that actually fit your message?

That’s exactly right — and I must interject that I admire the job they did, because it makes even less sense than mine. If the test company, when you get around to them, can gather their wits together sufficiently to make a case for, “We don’t count that against the kid’s grade, we put that there as a sort of brain teaser to show them that not everything is quantifiable, and to let them have a little fun,” then I’ll retract all my aspersions about how they’re money-grubbing b——- and overcharge for this stuff and sell it over and over again and underpay the poor authors they buy it off of.

They’re referring all questions to the New York State Education Department, which also hasn’t responded to my questions.

It is pretty funny that anybody — anybody — is taking any of this seriously

The story in your link never appeared on a test. The questions at the end were not the questions on the test.

Here is the test:
http://usny.nysed.gov/docs/the-hare-and-the-pineapple.pdf

Here is the link to the daily news that IS IN YOUR LINK, which nobody else read:
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/talking-pineapple-question-state-exam-stumps-article-1.1064657#ixzz1sbJW0O3r

Here is the actual question about the animals eating the pineapple:

The animals ate the pineapple most likely because they were

A Hungry

B Excited

C Annoyed

D Amused

in which he says that he deliberately wrote his story to be nonsense, and that the adapted story is even more nonsensical?

Also, you said in your post that the answer to the question "why did the animals eat the pineapple" was in the text, and the answer was, the animals were hungry. From where in the text can this be inferred? The answers to reading questions are not supposed to come out of a reader's general knowledge, but something specific in the text.

I think the adapted story makes more sense than how he describes his story. Particularly since he says the moral of his story is "never bet on an eggplant", which is intentional nonsense.

The story on the test can be summed up by the following saying, "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." It is completely logical and all the answers can be figured out by reasoning about the story. I think the test's story is actually pretty good and it conveys an important and subtle idea that often gets lost in the shuffle of the what-does-this-really-mean boilerplate of junior high english.

that the owl was the wisest animal.

As to the question about why the animals ate the pineapple, please point to the place in the text that supports your answer "the animal was hungry." There is no such place, which is why the "correct" answer on the test is that the animals were annoyed, a fact which can be supported by the test.

What you posted:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002591012#post51

The hardest question is why the animals ate the pineapple but the answer is right in the story. No tricks! Why does anything eat anything? Because it's hungry. The question's hard precisely because we're all trained to think like the moose.

From the NYTimes:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/21/nyregion/standardized-testing-is-blamed-for-question-about-a-sleeveless-pineapple.html?pagewanted=all

The other tough question was why the animals ate the pineapple. Students were torn between two of the four choices: they were annoyed or they were hungry; either one seemed to work. . . .
A sidewalk sampling of students in the Delta program, a gifted program at Middle School 54 on the Upper West Side, reached a consensus that the owl was the wisest. (Correct.) Most thought the animals ate the pineapple because they were annoyed that it had tricked them (Also correct.), and said that there was no evidence that the animals were hungry.

My other response was a response to your unedited post (which was completely different) and was just a rehash of my original post.

ETA, after reading the Times piece.
There's certainly a justification for annoyed, with the "no tricks" moral applying due to the animals actually being annoyed. I still think it's a poorer answer than hungry for the reasons I've outlined (plus nobody eats things they're annoyed at) and I'm quite satisfied with a 99%. Nobody's perfect. Nevertheless, neither the stories nor the questions are nonsense. These aren't apples. One ambiguous question doesn't spoil the bunch.

said that the correct answer was that the animals were hungry. But the correct answer, according to the NYtimes article, was that the animals were annoyed -- the only fact that could be deduced directly from the text.

But your incorrect answer confirms my point -- the pineapple story and its questions do not serve as a good test of anyone's reading comprehension.

(By the way, I read that different variations of this story are used in different tests by various test makers. That could explain why there were multiple versions. Neither is suitable for a test, however.)

not "hungry," so you got the answer wrong, even though your reasoning makes some sense.

That is why this test is such a poor test of reading comprehension, and why all these tests should be open for inspection and not subject to a gag order.

On the mini- test of 2 questions, you didn't get a 99%. You got a 50%.

The owl does just one thing - says pineapples don't have sleeves. Perhaps that is meant to mean 'pineapples are never sneaky' (though, in a fantasy world in which pineapples can think and talk, there's no reason to assume it's true), or perhaps it's an irrelevant bit of nitpicking about a metaphor (which would show that the owl doesn't understand what a metaphor is) (and the appearance of the owl's words as the 'moral' at the end are irrelevant - it's not a moral, because it's completely meaningless in our world; that's just another indication that the story is nonsense). The hare, on the other hand, decided to take on a bet it (correctly) thought it was bound to win. Though the sudden ending of "they ate the pineapple" means we don't get to find out if pineapples can give out ninjas or toothpaste in the fantasy world. The hare also points out the pineapple is a tropical fruit, which is perhaps the one useful thing we can take away from the story.

the forest and back first wins a ninja! And a lifetime’s supply of toothpaste!”

OK, whoever the person is who wrote this test must've been smoking some crack here.

The test piece was a preachy story about a little boy who lived in a tropical rain forest. There was no action or conflict in the story, and the little boy had no personality or purpose other than listening to a talking tree, who told him how important tropical rain forests are.

It was preachy and boring, just the kind of thing that would turn a kid off to reading.

Maybe that's the purpose, to make reading a merely mechanical exercise that doesn't stretch the imagination or give any pleasure.

I wrote a note telling the publisher exactly what I thought of the story, and no, I did not get the job.

1. Why did the animals eat the pineapple? -to hide the evidence for thinking the pineapple could talk- only the animals were magical and able to talk

2. Who was the wisest?
owl- for not appearing in this story.

Also acceptable- the snake oil seller that conned NY out of $32 million for this tripe

a. they were annoyed
b. they were amused
c. they were hungry
d. they wanted to

It is the "all of the above" answer (they were annoyed and they wanted to. they were amused and they wanted to, they were hungry and they wanted to...)

2. Who was the wisest?
a. the hare
b. moose
c. crow
d. owl

I mean...duh



The owl has a retail outlet and a marketing team. He's not just wise, he's savvy.

Here is the original text: http://amzn.com/0689834888 (look inside on pp 17-18)

Here is an interview with Pinkwater about the use of the passage (changed considerably from original) on the test:
http://blogs.wsj.com/metropolis/2012/04/20/daniel-pinkwater-on-pineapple-exam-nonsense-on-top-of-nonsense/
(WSJ, unfortunately)

This is an awful question. All this is from two years ago. Hope the test designers have learned something since then.

I am also familiar with Pinkwater and his writings for children.

This passage does not really illustrate his writing.

Maybe as a poison pill to really show how crummy the process is, or maybe the process of designing the tests was driving them mad. I know the math multiplication test stuff is madness (like how 5x5 is not 25 but 5+5+5+5+5; unless it was using sets, but unfortunate sets aren't taught until much later).

lobster tail is to lobster as

a) augusta is to boston
b) florida is to the united states
c) south africa is to maine
d) europe is to berlin

what's your guess?
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i got this one wrong, thinking the answer was b. a lobster tail is part of a lobster, and florida is part of the united states.
but that answer was deemed incorrect! can you guess what the correct answer is, and why?

c) as south africa is to maine!

why?

because the best lobster tails come from south africa and the best lobsters come from maine.

terrible, terrible question!

can hinge on one "wrong" question.

That's disgusting.

lobster tail is to lobster as

a) dr. who is to the daleks
b) captain kirk is to the enterprise
c) newtonian physics is to minkowski timespace
d) palinurus gilchristi is to homarus americanus

But they must be smart, because they sure know how to make money!