Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?

My son participated tonight in an annual fair at his school where students involved in the Quest program show off their projects.

I was flipping through some paperwork next to one of the projects--a research project about space created by a fifth grader--when I noticed this familiar picture:


Although the photo was lo-res and black-and-white, it was still nice to see, and I thought that any parents/grandparents and students who had not yet seen that particular picture might find it to be a novel take--as I did when I first saw it--on the relative sizes of our solar system planets (with the exception now of poor Pluto, of course).

The caption beneath that picture was what you might expect--here are the planets of our solar system, different sizes, etc.

On the next page of said paperwork, I saw this picture:


I couldn't find the original site where these pictures were posted if my life depended on it, but I do remember that both pictures were part of the same "project," so I wasn't surprised to see this one following the "scale picture" of the planets above.

What did surprise/horrify me was the caption under this second picture. I don't remember exactly how it read, but I do know that something like this sentence was there:

Here are some other planets we have discovered.

Now, I can certainly tolerate a student project titled "The Conspiracy Theories of John F. Kennedy." But when a student who is (a) in fifth grade, (b) in a gifted-and-talented program, and (c) given weeks to put together a project on a topic of his/her own choosing manages to confuse stars and planets, then there is really something terribly wrong somewhere.