An old One Big Happy strip, one in a long series in which Ruthie or her brother Joe is confronted with some type of test question (rather than an information-seeking question):
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Ruthie is laboring at a workbook — a culture object that subjects a student to test questions, in this case a question requiring the student to demonstrate their understanding of the culturally appropriate grounds for publicly assessing the characteristics of other people: industriousness is an appropriate ground for assessing a farmer (because it’s relevant to his doing his job), while a conventionally attractive appearance is not
Even though she’s filling in questions in a workbook, Ruthie falls back on treating busy-or-pretty? as a question about her opinions, rather than her knowledge of cultural appropriateness. In fact, for all we can tell from the workbook picture, Farmer Brown might not be at all busy; he might be sitting upright in a stationary tractor, daydreaming about what’s for supper. But he could perfectly well be busy, while even if was drawn to look like a handsome film star, his looks would be culturally irrelevant to his job. (Subtle point: they would, however, be culturally relevant in general, since men judged to be conventionally good-looking have a social edge over other men in various contexts.)
Here, Ruthie personalizes her response by giving her opinions. In other OBH test-question strips she looks situations from her point of view or takes her own experiences as background for answering questions. But test questions demand a depersonalized stance — and then regularly plumb very fine points of sociocultural awareness. Fine points that for the most part aren’t treated in the workbooks, aren’t explicitly taught in schools. I’ll give one further example from an earlier posting of mine below.
Workbooks. From Wikipedia:
Workbooks are paperback [auxiliary] textbooks issued to students. Workbooks are usually filled with practice problems, with empty space so that the answers can be written directly in the book.
Very often, the workbook pages are scored so that they can be easily torn out and handed in as homework.
Queens. From my 2/2/19 posting “Better than ABC order”:
And then we get to nuggets of specific information that kids are tested on. These I often find deeply mystifying, for a variety of reasons.
First, there’s the difference between information-seeking questions and test questions, a tricky business that takes kids a while to cotton to; some discussion of infoseek vs. test questions in my 8/21/18 posting“Asking questions and giving commands”.
Then there are conventionally expected answers to particular test questions, which kids are expected to induce from their classroom experience; see my Language Log posting of 12/2/09, “What is this question about?”, about the range of expected answers to the test question, “What color is a banana?” (note: WHITE is a wrong answer, even though the edible part of standard bananas is white; and RED is a wrong answer, even though the standard bananas in many parts of the world have reddish skins).
Finally, there’s the raw choice of test questions, which often look they’re just pulled out of a hat; we ask this question because we can. (Kids are supposed to know things, so let’s test some stuff.) In this vein is a test question — with a really clever answer marked wrong (as a general rule, truly clever answers are wrong, from the point of view of the devisers of tests) — that’s been making the rounds of the net as an image of an actual test item. Surely invented, but a good joke, and not far from examples you can collect from real life:
Name one popular queen. Freddy Mercury ✘
A wonderful answer: Mercury was the lead singer of the rock band Queen, and his performance persona was wildly flamboyant, worthy of the label queen. But not, of course, in the ‘female monarch’ sense the test question intends to ask about. RuPaul is certainly a popular queen, but again not in the sense the test question intends to ask about (and RuPaul wouldn’t have been as clever a wrong answer as Freddy Mercury). Andrew McQueen — also a queen, in the flamboyant sense, but nowhere near as popular as Freddy Mercury and RuPaul — would have been a cute answer, if only for the contrast with butch / macho Steve McQueen. Then there’s Queen Latifah, the Queen of Hearts, the Red Queen, the Queen of Darkness, Dairy Queen, and Speed Queen, plus prom queens, welfare queens, drama queens, opera queens and rice queens (see my 12/19/15 posting “X queen” on the snowclonelet pattern).
In an English-speaking context, Queen Elizabeth I, Queen Victoria, and Queen Elizabeth II would be correct answers, and possibly the only acceptable correct answers; it all depends on what’s intended by popular. I assume Queen Juliana and Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands (and other comparable modern European female monarchs) were insufficiently popular in English-speaking lands, that Catherine the Great of Russia and Queen Isabella of Aragon were powerful but not popular, that Mary Queen of Scots was too unsympathetic to be popular, and that Queen Anne and the Queen Mary of Williamanmary were more sympathetic but still a bit short in popularity on the street. Leaving three prime answers.
Maybe the question should have asked about famous queens of England. Certainly the question seems designed to tap high cultural currency or something similar — so it really is a lot like the banana-color question, a probe about mass enculturation.
So, I ask again, why ask this particular question? What do we expect kids to know, and why?