why.i.hate.dc

D.C. Student Study Guides Problematic

Not a rerun, but fresh from the Unintentional Comedy Dept. (a.k.a. D.C. school system):
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Several of the mistakes in this year's study exercises are obvious. The first-grade guide, for instance, shows a poorly reproduced image of nine flowers and asks how many flowers are in the picture. The four multiple-choice answers range from 22 to 30.

On another page, a capital letter appears in the middle of a sentence: "Remember, Contractions are shortened forms of a group of words." In a reading comprehension section, a character's name is printed in lower case.

Then there is at least one question that is impossible to answer: "234 people went to the movie theater to see the first feature film and 456 people went to the movies to see the second film. How many went for both shows?"

School officials were alerted to the errors after a D.C. teacher pointed them out to a reporter. They said they are reviewing the Stanford 9 study guides issued to other grades to see whether they contain problems.

After the mistakes last year -- which included such misspellings as "pur" instead of "pour" and "rind" instead of "ride" -- school officials hired editors in the communications office and instituted a policy requiring them to check all materials being sent to students' homes. But the study guides distributed last week were not reviewed by the editors, officials said. [Slow learners. -James]

Wilma Bonner, the school official who oversaw the creation of the documents, said several employees from another department checked the materials and did not catch the errors.
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