Reply to Benchmark questions for 3rd grader have me questioning my sanity

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP you are extremely pedantic.

I would not say Benchmark is an awesome or perfect curriculum. However, you, as a parent, have an incomplete picture of what is being taught day to day in the classroom. The curriculum does make more sense than you think it does, in that skills and concepts are being taught sequentially and systematically within and across the units.

You are a bit outside your lane (in that you aren't trained in pedagogy, don't have classroom experience teaching 3rd graders, and aren't aware of the scope and sequence of all the lessons). DCUM is full of parents thinking they are experts. Go write an ELA curriculum please, and grace us all with your genius. [/quote]

I am pedantic, thanks for noticing.

However, you seem not to have noticed that I have not really complained about the curriculum. (Ah, more "pedantry" from me, making this distinction!) Actually, I said I like the idea behind it, and I'm not even complaining about most of the writing prompts. But I have complained about the way some of them are phrased. The skills and concepts Benchmark is supposed to teach are great, as far as I can tell.

I do understand, and have absolutely considered, that the teacher may have better explained the concepts in class, and perhaps even cleared up the specific, very murky questions. So, for example, defining "story events" in a specific way. That would clear up the question... about 15%.

In fact, my greatest complaint is about certain questions that very clearly have added textual filler. This filler may have been intended as merely instructional or even clarifying (!), but it actually changes the question's very meaning. A confusing mess! I do believe I might be able to help my kid figure out what the question [i]means[/i] to be asking in the future-- so that's good. But that shouldn't be her job as an 8-year-old, or even mine as a parent. Not to this degree. "Figure out what a question is asking" = good life skill. "Be forced to piece together clues to take a stab at what is almost universally recognized to be an illogically-worded/ungrammatical question and what that question may have meant to ask" = probably also a good life skill! But just an unnecessary obstacle that has nothing to do with what should be the main focus here: literacy.

"Why are analogies useful in a story?" (or "How do birds lay eggs?" for that matter) are different questions from "[i]Why is it important to know[/i] why analogies are useful in a story?" or "[i]Why is it important to know[/i] how birds lay eggs?"

You can, and probably will, say, derp derp, it's obvious that the OP question meant to ask "How do characters' actions affect the plot?" I'm not sure that's a super illuminating question anyway (that might be a minor curriculum complaint), but, no, it wasn't obvious to us that's what they were asking. Not because I take pride in being pedantic and pointing out that's not technically what they actually asked. But because my kid and I were both truly and sincerely confused by a question worded so poorly that it no longer held the meaning it was "obviously" supposed to. I genuinely did not know what they were getting at until I talked it out here on this board.

And please do not gaslight me and tell me this is actually perfectly clear wording, and that the questions are all worded correctly. Many of them, in my experience, are very clearly sloppily cobbled together.

Because they don't even necessarily write:

"Why is it important to know why analogies are useful in a story?"

They'll often write:

"Why is it important to know [i]why are[/i] analogies useful in a story?"

There are a number of examples like that where someone has added a phrase to a prompt, without even bothering to reword it so it reads properly. I'm not sure what they thought they were accomplishing. But that the way things shake out, it seems someone somewhere felt these prompts needed some boilerplate to be clearer (or something?) and they actually ended up asking a different question or misdirecting the reader.

I see this with "Why do you think" and "How would you describe" as well as "Why is it important." And there are adjacent issues with adding, "Write a paragraph explaining" and "show examples from the text," when those aren't always applicable or useful.

In the end, I can see this is not that serious in the scheme of things-- after all, my kid hasn't missed something critical, as I was concerned she had. She really does understand what is being [i]taught[/i]. And now I have some strategy for helping my kid attack this problem, and maybe people searching DCUM in the future will as well. But it is an actual problem, whatever the degree. I'd wager this is not the fault of the writers, but rather of having too many editors.

Though I am a genius, I can't write a curriculum with which to grace you. But I am a good enough copywriter that I could at least rewrite some of the prompts for grammar and readability. Given that a smooth 20% of them seem to have escaped being proofread, maybe they [i]should[/i] hire me, PP!   :lol:  :roll: [/quote]

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