Sometimes simple is better

Today during my visit at my middle school classroom, the students were working on an exercise in identifying antonyms, and degrees of meaning. By degrees of meaning, my teacher explained to the students, one would say that the antonym for hot would be cold, not cool, as cool isn't the extreme polar of hot. She gave a few other examples, and then had the students complete the page exercises and at the end reviewed each of the answers after correcting their work to clarify any confusion some of the students may had. On this particular assignment, I must commend my teacher I'm working with for giving some of the best instruction I've ever witnessed in a middle school, as I believe it was her instruction of the lesson that made it work rather than the curriculum itself, and this is why: the answers to some of the antonym questions asked were sketchy at best. For example, one of the questions asked for the antonym for "disapprove." The answer provided by the workbook in the word bank was "recommend." My teacher said to the students that although recommend was the best answer available as an antonym to disapprove, that the word disapprove holds a judgmental connotation to it. Well, maybe she didn't use the exact word connotation, but that was the general overall meaning of what she explained to the students. After the class, I made a point to mention that I agree with that it wasn't the best antonym and I proposed that a better, and perhaps the best antonym to disapprove is to drop the prefix dis, and just leave the word approve. I don't know who writes the curriculum up, but someone should explain to them that sometimes the simplest answer is the better answer. As a writer, whom thoroughly enjoys Ernest Hemingway's works, I realize even in writing, that sometimes less is more.