Hi everyone, and welcome back to Peter’s Super Fun Quarantine Hour! I’m your host, Peter, and…yeah, that’s all I got.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Like millions of other people, my lovely wife and I are helping our kids with their coursework while trying to keep our normal jobs and our sanity. (Quick tangent: I just used a figure of speech called a zeugma, where one word is applied to two different ones. For example, in the spoken word poetry read by Mike Myer’s character in “So I Married an Axe Murderer,” he says, “She stole my heart and my cat.” A definition I found online used this as an example: “John and his license expired last week.” Online it also said that it’s pronounced “zoog-ma,” when I was definitely taught it as “zoig-ma,” so we’re all learning things today. Ok, maybe not so quick of a tangent after all.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Back to the fun of distance learning. Two things stood out from this past week. The first involved some Social Studies homework and a quiz. I think it’s a tad ironic to be studying society when we’re forced to be apart from it, but that’s neither here nor there. This homework was about Spanish explorers finding our home state of California and the Native Americans inhabiting the land. My daughter and I read through the chapter together, and then started her online, open-book quiz. I suddenly recalled the joy of the open-book quiz – the answers are all right there! They were so few and far between that I actually enjoyed not having to guess or search my memory banks for too long. So we read the first question, and I remembered where that part was in the chapter. “See, it says right here that one of Spain’s main goals of exploration was to claim new land, so let’s click on that answer.” And so it went for about a dozen questions until my daughter submitted the quiz. I was surprised to see that we could check the score right away, since all of her other quizzes had some kind of short answer sections and needed to be actually graded. But I was even more surprised when we clicked and it said that she\/we got 50% on it. That’s right, I failed a 4th grade open-book test. I still don’t know how, honestly. When my son took the same one with my lovely wife’s help (they’re fraternal twins but have nearly identical homework), they did almost as poorly as I had. We think it’s just a bad test or something since we looked up what should be the answers, but it still wasn’t a huge ego boost to “help” her to a shitty grade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Speaking of my son, he had a very different task in both subject matter and level of challenge. It was a test for spelling and vocabulary, and it asked him to identify the correct spelling of this week’s list of words. The online page showed three words, one correct and two misspelled. Here’s the problem with the assignment that our son gleefully pointed out right away: there was a red squiggly line under two of the three words, thereby telling him at a glance which ones were right. Oops. Someone didn’t quite think that through. We found it hilarious though, and we didn’t mind a gimme after the Social Studies debacle. (Seriously, it said that Cabrillo liked San Diego because the cove was calm – it says it right in the fucking book!)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That’s all for today, folks\u00a0 Stay healthy, and have fun with your Anti-Social Studies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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