Preview of Article:
They Call This Data?
Oscar Wilde, Svab, and my students
Illustrator: Pjbf
According to the “data” collected on our fourth and final ThinkLink benchmark of the past school year, most of my 3rd graders had a hard time reading a paraphrased excerpt from Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. I was shocked. I mean, why would 8- and 9-year-olds in Milwaukee (or anywhere else for that matter) have trouble reading Oscar Wilde? The questions were so simple for a beginning reader to decode. For example:
Read this sentence from the passage. He laid particular stress on your German, as he was leaving for town yesterday. Now look at the dictionary entry:
stress noun
1 worries caused by difficulties in life
2 saying a word or part of a word more stongly than another
3 force of weight caused by something heavy
verb
4 to give importance to somethingWhich meaning of stress is used in the sentence above? (A.1, B.2, C.3, D.4)
But wait. What is the correct answer anyway? I’m confused. I guess I’m going to have to dust off my AP anthologies from high school if I’m going to teach to this test.
