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The Pineapple and the Hare

Who is the wisest?

  • The pineapple

    Votes: 3 8.6%

  • The hare

    Votes: 2 5.7%

  • The guy who got paid for writing this question

    Votes: 18 51.4%

  • On Planet X, tests are consumed with fava beans and a nice chianti

    Votes: 12 34.3%
  • Total voters
    35
Andrew Wiggin said:
Sections on the new standardized tests; Reading, Mathematics, Dadaism. Also Cuil theory.
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Q: How many Dadaists does it take to change a light bulb?

1) Two. One to hold the giraffe, and the other to fill the bathtub with building blocks.
2) Fish!
3) I like sodomy.
4) Mum ba ra bop ski wop wop wop.
 
The pineapple was the wisest, because he gave all the little woodland creatures diarrhea, and their intestines did nourish his babies and spread them wide and far from Hawaii, where his descendants got into rich people's rum drinks and the need for wood for little umbrellas razed the forest and killed all the owls and hares and moose and rutabagas and presbyterians. The end.
 
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Who is the wisest? From the OP link:

In response to revelations that the state exams had become predictable and easier to pass, the state last year awarded a new $32 million contract to testing company Pearson to overhaul the tests.
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The answer is clearly Pearson.
 
bruto said:
I think that, like so many tests of this sort, the story itself is not bad, and even the questions would not be so bad, if they called for a written response or discussion, as is happening here. What is bad, and worse than bad, is that there are presumably "right" answers to questions that can clearly be answered intelligently in more than one way if one takes the time to think, instead of attempting merely to second-guess the testers. Thus the answer, for example, to the "wisest" animal question depends on the student assuming that a bluntly clueless response to a figure of speech is wise simply because it's literally true. I'd have said the hare was the wisest, since he called the pineapple's bluff from the start, and backed it up by winning the race. What could he have done that would have been any wiser? One can expect that the animals were angry with the pineapple for tricking them, but must one assume that this is why they ate it? Would they have eaten it if they were not hungry, or just, perhaps, have rolled it into a ditch? They may have killed the pineapple because they were angry, but they ate it because it was food.

Tests like this require a kind of social cleverness, the ability to guess what other people want and not to think too hard about it. Perhaps our mistake here is assuming that this isn't what educators have been after all along.
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Excellent points. When I was at school I usually scored high on multiple choice tests because I was good at working out what the examiners wanted. In this case, the moral of the story is given at the end, so we are expected to say that the owl, who gave us this moral earlier in the story, was speaking wise words. If I had been taking the test, that's the answer I would have had given in order to get the best score. For a written answer with explanation, however, I prefer your version: the hare was the only animal that saw clearly that the pineapple was talking rubbish.

There are all sorts of other creative responses possible, as shown in some of the posts in this thread. As a standardised test the original set of questions sucks, but the story is good as fuel for discussion.
 
The whole thing is blatant imperialist propaganda! In Canada, where we have the People's Education system, everybody knows that pineapples may not come first in a footrace, but they always finish. Ecoutez et repetez:


JE SUIS UN ANANAS. UN ANANAS NE LACHE PAS! (I am a pineapple. Pineapples do not give up!)


1:30-2:00, 4:00-4:15, 4:40-5:30, 8:20-8:40, if you just want the straight dope and don't care about singing squelletes or cool bats.

JAMAIS!
 
Earthborn said:
The article linked to in the OP has changed. It now has a different text for the story and for the questions. The story is also better written, so it makes sense that it is the original story by a writer of children's books. The questions also seem a lot more sensible.
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You're right, the story text did change. The new version is much better written (though still a nonsense story). I wonder where the NY Daily News got the other version they had up before, it was really quite dreadful.
 
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