ABSTRACT
I start this chapter with a very simple story about tests told to me by Wen-Hsing, a former student of mine who now teaches at a secondary school back home in Taiwan. WenHsing recently sent me an e-mail about what happened when she and her colleagues were grading the English language component of an entrance exam:
One section of the English test was: “According to the picture, answer the following five questions.” It was a picture of a classroom, where there is a teacher standing and six students seated. It looked like two of the students were talking to each other and the teacher was not happy about it. One of the five questions was “Why is the teacher angry? The teacher is angry because students are__.” This blank only allowed one word and the “standard” answer, according to the test-giver, was “talking.”
