Beware of talking pineapples

It was one of those reading tests that we all dreaded. Eigth graders in New York were given a passage from a book by childrens’ author Daniel Pinkwater about a race between a talking pineapple and a hare.

All the animals end up betting on the pineapple, reasoning that a tropical fruit would never challenge a hare to a race unless he had something up his sleeve.

But alas, the Pineapple just sits there, the hare wins easily, and the animals eat the Pineapple.

Among the test questions — “who is the wisest animal in the forest?”

Last week, this story was racing around the web as yet another example of testing run amok, so I asked Mr Pinkwater why he’d write such a thing. And it turns out:

“Not a word, other than the two words Daniel Pinkwater are the same as anything that I might have written.”

It is SIMILAR to a paragraph from a book of his called Borgel, but the test writers re-wrote it:

“In my story, a rabbit, not a hare, challenges an eggplant, not a pineapple, to a race.”

Oh now we get it. No actually no we don’t. So is there a moral?

“The moral: Don’t bet on an eggplant.”

A valuable life lesson for all our eighth grade children. And good publicity for Borgel the book it sort of came from:

“In the end, they meet God who is an orange popsicle,” said Pinkwater.

Oh THAT part would have gone down well on a public school reading comprehension test.

Which leads us to the ultimate moral of this story:

“Anybody who uses work of mine on a test is mad,” said Pinkwater.