Simple quiz would solve problems
What should we do with students who have too many credits to take a full schedule of high school courses in their senior years? How about giving them this three-question, open-book test before we decide:
1. Correct all errors of all kinds in the following sentence and explain your corrections:
Steven A. Douglas who was later made famous by the Lincoln-Douglas debates strongly supported the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1864 that specified Nebraska could enter the union as a slave state, and Kansas could enter as a free state.
2. Solve the following problem and explain your solution.
You and your 14 classmates just received a freshly baked pie from your teacher. Five of your classmates want to save their share of the pie intact. Two others want their pieces now. You and the remaining students want to donate your intact share of the pie to the local food bank. How will you determine where to cut the pie to accomplish each of these goals?
3. Explain what's going on in the following conversation as simply as you can:
One dentist says to another dentist: "I really love working on patients who are eager to go to the dentist." The other dentist replies: "I've found anxious patients are the worst!"
Once we're sure a student can pass this test without error (answers appear on Page 3), we then can decide whether he or she is ready for taking advanced-placement classes, working as teacher aides, making money or enrolling in yet more high school classes, taught by those teachers who, of course, also should be able to pass the test without error.
— ERIC MEYER
Quiz answers
From editorial page
1. The corrected sentence is as follows:
Stephen A. Douglas, who was later made famous by the Lincoln-Douglas debates, strongly supported the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which specified that instead of Nebraska entering the union as a free state and Kansas entering the union as a slave state, referendums in each territory would determine whether the new states were slave or free.
The changes, none of which would have been suggested by any spelling or grammar checker, are:
Douglas's first name was misspelled.
A comma should precede "who" and follow "debates" because "who was later made famous by the Lincoln-Douglas debate" is a phrase functioning as a non-restrictive (or nonessential) modifier.
The act was in 1853. It could not have been in 1863. Kansas was admitted to the union in 1861. The Lincoln-Douglas debates were in 1860.
A comma should follow the year, and "that" should be changed to "which," again because the phrase in question is a non-restrictive modifier.
No comma would precede "and Kansas" in either the original sentence or the modified sentence because commas are used before conjunctions only in the case of compound sentences with multiple independent clauses, not complex sentences with multiple dependent clauses — unless, of course, more than two dependent clauses are aligned in serial.
The Missouri Compromise of 1820-'21 specified that Nebraska would enter as a free (not slave) state and that Kansas would enter as a slave (not free) state. The Kansas-Nebraska Act, proximate cause for the disintegration of the Whig Party, the formation of the Republican Party and the eventual Civil War, reversed the Compromise of 1820 and allowed for referenda in new territories to determine their status, free or slave. This, in turn, led to "Bleeding Kansas" and the popularization of the term "Jayhawker," particularly in reference to people from Lawrence, seat of the free-state movement in Kansas.
2. The solution can be computed several ways:
Essential to any solution is understanding that the class consists of you and 14 other students — 15 students total. We need to create four different pieces of the pie: one encompassing 5/15ths of the pie (those who want to save their shares intact), two each encompassing 1/15th (those who want to eat their shares) and one encompassing 8/15ths (those who wish to donate their shares intact).
You could approximate the shares by visually attempting to divide the pie into three equal slices, then visually attempting to divide each of those pieces into fifths, slightly scoring the pie to indicate 1/15ths before counting the required number and making each slice.
You could do it precisely by determining that 5/15ths is 33.33%, 1/15th is 0.67% and 8/15ths is 53.33%. A whole pie (100%) is equal to 360 degrees on a protractor. Mark the 5/15ths line at 120 degrees. Mark the first 1/15th line at 24 degrees beyond that, or 144 degrees. Mark the second at 24 degrees beyond that, or 164 degrees. To check your work, verify that remaining area of the pie encompasses 192 degrees — a full protractor's worth, plus 12 degrees.
If you don't have a protractor, you could do the same in a drawing program by drawing vertical lines and using the program's "rotate" function to rotate the lines the required number of degrees. Or you could enter the data into a spreadsheet program, have it create a pie chart. Enlarge the results to the size of the pie and print them out as a template for you to use in cutting the pie.
3. The simplest explanation for the conversation:
This is not a case of dissonance, cognitive or otherwise. The dentists are most likely expressing agreement. "Anxious" does not mean "eager." It means "fearful."
