komo news | Fourth Grader Suspended For Not Answering A WASL Question Do these stories ever end?
ABERDEEN – A fourth grader has been suspended for a week because he refused to answer a question on the statewide test known as the WASL. Opponents of the test say it is proof the WASL has gone too far.
Tyler Stoken is 9 years old and his mother says he’s good at taking tests. But when it came to the recent Washington Assessment of Student Learning, one question stumped him. He was asked to write a short essay about a make-believe situation and his principal.
Tyler paraphrases the question saying, “You look out one day at school and see your principal flying by a window. In several paragraphs write what happens next.” He’s asked, “So why didn’t you answer that question?” He says, “I couldn’t think of what to write the essay without making fun of the principal.”
found by D. Drews
One day while I was at school, I looked out the window– and there was my principal flying by with a SuperWoman cape. “Look,” I yelled. There is our principal! Everyone ran to the window and started laughing. The teacher saw her flying too, but said, “Look, I can do better than that!” She grabbed a broom from the corner and began flying it in the air around the classroom. She smiled so big that you could see that she had only one tooth way up front, and the rest was like a dark cavern.
She started writing problems on the board for us to solve, and we took out a sheet of paper and our pencils. We were working on our assignments really hard, and then the principal flew by the window again. She called out to our teacher, and our teacher cackled back, and each of them seemed to be trying to outfly the other.
At first it was really fun, but after a while our teacher started blocking our view of the assignment. She and the principal seemed to be in a contest to see who could outdo the other. It was like they had forgotten why we were there.
It got so bad that I finally screamed, “I can’t do my work because you two are flying so furiously!”
Suddenly, the teacher landed on the floor in front of me and yelled, “What did you say?”
“I *said*, I can’t do my work because you and the principal are making such a fuss!”
The teacher grew a big wart right on the end of her nose– right there in front of me!!– and said, “I’m going to call your mother!!!”
Mom came, and the teacher and the principal told her that I wouldn’t do my work. I was so confused that I couldn’t concentrate. “Mom,” I said, “this is hopeless. I *can’t* do it.”
Mom seemed to understand, and after a while we went home. The principal came down to earth long enough to write a letter, and it said that I was being suspended because I was being defiant and insubordinate. It also said that the principal and the teacher had been nice to me. Only it used the word “reasonable.”
But then the strangest thing of all happened. I WOKE UP!!! None of this had actually happened! And I was so happy to be back in my little bed, in the United States of America, where nothing like this could ever really happen.