Friday, January 07, 2011

Smartness from the Sweetness



The Sweetness is also the Smartest. Just the other day, Tina was showing me how she planned to assess the functional English language skills of her sophomores. As she was enumerating, with increasing animation, the many methods she plans to employ in "skinning the cat" I was struck by the utter villainy of one assessment tool. And by utter villainy, I mean it only in the sense used by the great Kevin Sorbo in the underrated The Middleman: it was "sheer elegance in its simplicity". What follows is my poor attempt at trying to follow Tina's glorious brainchild:


INSTRUCTIONS: Rewrite the following excerpt from your readings with the appropriate capitalizations and punctuations. You have

why then did the spaniards conquer the philippines if the instructions given to legazpi by the king of spain are to be made the basis of our answer at least four reasons stand out to introduce the catholic faith to these islands to discover a return route from the philippine islands to mexico spain’s most important colony at that time to bring honor and glory to the king of spain and to bring back to spain some of the wealth found in those places was the king of spain serious about wanting to introduce and spread the catholic faith in the philippines in the 16th century perhaps so for he assigned no less than five agustinian missionaries to accompany legazpi in his expedition some historians suspect though that as the deeds of the friars that followed in the islands bore out the catholic faith or religion was used by the spaniards for a purpose other than helping the natives of the islands attain personal sanctity they claim that the religion was used whether intentionally or accidentally as a tool of subjection thus where goons and guns failed god was made to step in

What skills would you have to use to pass that quiz?

I can't wait to unleash my newest weapon in class. This is why we teach, my friends! And why I love my Sweetness.

2 comments:

HappiHappi said...

Genius idea! What a creative way to make the assessments.

John-D Borra said...

@Tweet: She's amazing! And you should see the students who take those quizzes. The slackers feel like kicking themselves, but those who did take the time out to read get a nice but fair mental workout. :)