The overall purpose
of tweaking

is to read the modified data
as great,

to look and read until the
overall purpose

is image and error correction
and great.

Great. It looks exactly like
the same before

just with the error correction
tweaked.

Change it through the
decoder again

and it works great –
tweaking

your settings in the decoder
to look and read and

test out until the overall purpose
is error.

Clean

The idea of using electricity
is not new

but scientists study human motion
to produce hand cranks,

hand cranks to power radio and
produce ‘clean’ energy,

sources of ubiquitous ‘clean’ facts
and new news.

Not that you would need to, but if you have been following my English KS2 GPS thread on this blog over recent days, can you work out in a nano-second the connection between the following two images:

The final three: it is time to finish with this. I have presented a similar exposé before on this blog, more than once, and the tests keep coming back. It isn’t that I think what I have to say/satirise will have an impact and thus am disappointed when it doesn’t. I do this essentially as a catharsis for my deep and genuine anger. So I will, no doubt, do again. The only way these tests will be ended is when teachers themselves refuse to mark them. It is this simple. We should not collude.

I simply disagree with the premise of this question. It is ‘easy’ to deduce that one should have a question mark. So what? It is the notion that the other three require an exclamation mark which annoys me. Lest anyone thinks I am not concerned with ‘accuracy’, or appropriate, sensible and meaningful punctuation use from students, that’s adamantly not the case. In my experience, students over-rely and therefore over-use exclamation marks in an attempt to declare exclamation! [You see, my use is apt]. I think we should encourage students, probably as they continue maturing as writers so not necessarily aged 11, to explore vocabulary further, but the words ‘hilarious’, ‘loved’ and ‘laughed [so much]’ carry enough weight of meaning here to not need a superfluous addition to that. Does this seem pernickety here? Perhaps, but it is the repetition of such inane premises in so much of the questioning that matters – this is one example.

My last spoof answer this year. But really – what matters more: knowing a ‘word class’ or appreciating the purpose and effect of word usage?

I don’t know the answer to this. Does this bother me? Yes and no. As an English teacher and writer I feel I should know. But it really doesn’t matter if a student, or anyone, can’t name the grammatical term.

I can imagine/understand [though ultimately not care] if a teacher would be disappointed that a student couldn’t name this having been taught explicitly, and probably relentlessly to the test and such feature-spotting exercises. I once read a teacher writing proudly about how her KS2 students could knowingly use such technical features – and quite complex ones – as if this was a significant achievement. No, it’s a dog, a clever one, doing tricks. I think it is sad [I’m being polite] when a teacher foregrounds this over students being writers. And enjoying writing.