A decade ago, my niece went in for pre-K testing, and the teacher showed her a list of animals, asking her to name them. Picture of a dog, spot. Picture of a cat, whiskers. Picture of a rabbit, hoppy, etc. The teacher tells her parents that she failed that section and needs to work on being able to identify animals. They point out to the teacher that she had asked her to name them, not identify them, and that's exactly what she did. Even now, she's a very smart, but very literal thinker, and it's fair to say it has caused her some conflict in school.
My brother was asked in kindergarten, "What do you put in the barn?" The expected answer was, of course, animals: cows, horses, et cetera. However, we grew up on a grain farm (no livestock). My brother answered, "trucks," as that was literally what was stored in our barn. He was told that was the wrong answer.
This reminds me of another math lesson failure of my own, we were asked to count "the dots in the boxes", our book used (as I learnt later) offset print, CMY (no K), and there were clusters of 4 dots.. One magenta, one yellow, and one cyan and one black.. I found this task difficult, because it was many dots and it was boring to count so many.. I did them all, 4 dots, 8 dots, 16 dots, 40 dots.. I failed them all. I was supposed to only count the black dots, how was I supposed to know that I was supposed to ignore the colored ones?
