What is the worst way to combine these horrible sentences?

The more I think about it, the more I am angered by the state of writing instruction in this country.

In TX, in fourth and seventh grades, students are tested on their ability to proofread "sample student essays" that contain errors. They are asked to identify and correct the errors. Some questions are spelling, some are grammar, and some are style/inferences ("what is the best way to combine sentences 12 and 13?").

Because this is The Test, and because The Test is very important to a child's opportunity to pass the grade (and, incidentally, the teacher's bonus pay), we spend a lot of time on sample tests. This means, a great deal of instructional time is spent asking students to read BAD WRITING and to "fix it."

In my class, we talked about revising. It took me many months to convince them that sometimes revising means getting rid of entire paragraphs and sentences; that sometimes you have to write a lot of crap to get to the heart of the matter. The challenge in teaching revising is teaching kids NOT to proofread, not to pay attention to the mechanics until they are happy with the story, the message. Otherwise you get a kid who changes "their" to "they're" on the first draft and proclaims a story "done."

To accomplish this, we read good writing. We read "House on Mango Street" and "The Falling Girl" and personal essays and poems and short fiction. We read brilliant sentence construction and "showing" details and stories and words that make the story come right off the page and into your head.

We only read "Suddenly, we heard a raspy voice say, 'Hello people.' When we looked around, there was no one their. Then we heard the same words again." when it was abso-effing-lutely necessary to teach them how to take a multiple choice test.

I worry that limited English students in our country are spending too much time reading bad fiction. I worry that teachers are sacrificing authentic writing experiences in favor of exercises that would make any reasonable person hate the English language. I remember trying to explain why "it's" and "its" don't follow standard grammatical patterns and feeling guilty, terribly guilty, because I read a truckload of books when I was a child and I just *recognize* how they work without even trying.

I'd like to tell Wordsmith Publishing Company to shove it.

A. "Sliding into the hole anyway and being scared, Edward went down."
B. "Change second to secund"
C. "Change 'James Long' to 'james long'
D. We are too smart for this test; we haven't the time. We're reading the Canon and Shakespeare and you and your multiple choice ridiculousness can take a hike. Do you really want to know about a time in my life when something changed? It changes today. It changed when my grandparents sacrificed everything to move me to this country and give me a decent shot at a decent education. I'm learning all the right lessons in all the wrong ways. I'm going to take these lessons and violate your schemas and blow the lid off of public education. One day, I might be a teacher. One day, I might teach this differently.
E. Make no change.