more fun with middle school

An Amazon book review:

The reason I gave this book two stars, is because we use this book in our class all of the time. Most of the stories and poems in here are hard to understand and complicated.

I know that you are supposed to use your mind, and there is no right or wrong answer, but you can not use your mind if you dont know what is going on. I keep getting zero's on my daybook assignments, because all I can put in the margins or the pages to write what you think, is that I can't write anything because it was hard to understand, so I get zero's for not understanding, and that to me isnt fair! So, I think that if to this book you tell your opinion, I think that if your opinion is that you didnt understand it, than that should still be counted as "no right or wrong answer".

Amazon review of Daybook of Critical Reading And Writing (Grade 6)

The fabulous thing here is that this student is attempting a fairly sophisticated argument. It's an argument of the jailhouse lawyer type, of course, but still. He or she is onto something. S/he just needs better writing skills to pull it off.

Unfortunately, better writing skills aren't in the offing, I predict. Daily zeros on daybook assignments are a proven time-waster even the Writing the Essay people don't go in for.

p.s: Someone needs to tell this student about the Postmodernism Generator.

p.p.s.: I was going to title this post "Why we fight" but I thought that would be over the top.