Can we fix it?

I ran into this problem when helping a student with his work last block, and over coming it absolutely stumped me: I was checking the student's worksheet that they had to finish - it was a set of questions about the first part of the story they just read: "Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allen Poe. Some of the questions were explictly from the text, others the students had to make inferences to answer. I was correcting his work, telling him he got some of the questions wrong. He got all upset and started complaining that 'I should just be glad that he tried.' (which in a sense is true because it is more than most of the students in that class do.) However, I explained to him that his answer was still wrong, doesn't matter how hard he tried.

 One of the questions was: How do the narrator's impressions of the mansion contribute to his feelings of anxiety. The student's response was: because he was ill in both his body and minds and he was not well. The student basically just copied a line out of the text. I tried to have the student re-read the questions and to identify what the question was asking (about the mansion). He was able to do that. Then I asked him to re-read his answer, and I asked if it was related to the question. He got all upset again, saying 'the story says...' then repeating what he wrote. He was so convinced because he was able to write a line down from the story that it HAD to be right. Try as I might to explain to him that his answer was off-topic, he was so adament he just wouldn't listen.

 I know the achievement gap goes so far beyond classroom behavior. I just wish that wouldn't have been an issue for me this year because I feel like I didn't even get to chip away at the root of the problem because my class was too busy being out of control. I wish I would have known from the beginning of the year the student had this problem, because two weeks from the end is not the time to start solving something that's obviously been engrained for many years. Sometimes I feel so hopeless to help, like these students really do need a superhero teacher to come in and save their education. I certainly know I wasn't that for them this year.