jusy like with IQ tests the right answer is not the most logical or deepest, but the most naive.
Poet: I can’t answer questions on Texas standardized tests about my own poems
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Re: Poet: I can’t answer questions on Texas standardized tests about my own poems
#92If she had known the answer, would that make the question any better? I remember back when I was in high school, I always sort of assumed that the authors of the poems we were tested on wouldn't be able to answer the ridiculous questions on our assessments. But even if they did, I've never been able to figure out what skills these questions were testing. If poems are open to interpretation, isn't it reasonable to thi…
The task is to draw a thinking cat. You can complete this task in a million different ways. What you (should) get judged on is the technique used. Does it look like a cat, are the shadows properly drawn, are the proportions of the cat in order, does the cat look like it's thinking like a human would, etc. What is irrelevant is if that cat matches the image the teacher had in mind when she came up with the task.
I agree that should be the task. Unfortunately, this is a multiple-choice test, so the task is more "guess what I think the poet meant". There's no room for technique here.
Re: Poet: I can’t answer questions on Texas standardized tests about my own poems
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
>If anyone can answer what the 'correct' interpretation of a piece of writing is, it's the author. To echo the other comments questioning that premise, there's also the famous Isaac Asimov anecdote: Isaac Asimov often repeated an anecdote based on this: He once sat in on a class where the topic of discussion was one of his own works. (He did this in the back of a large lecture hall so he could remain semi-anonymous).…
Asimov being Asimov, he then went on to write a story about Shakespeare being summoned from the past to take a college course on his plays. He failed, of course.
professors teach to their opinion
i took a shakespeare course at university where we were asked to read troilus and cressida and compare it to its source troilus and criseyde by chaucer
i wrote that i disliked the piece because it just read like someone who recently got burned in love venting irrationally, noting that i liked shakespeare's version more because he gives the last word to pandarus(o) who uses it to comically complain about his health and i felt this beautifully subverted the assumed tragedy the characters felt subject to in their stories.. woe is me!
i failed the exam
frustrated i went looking for evidence to defend my claim(i).. though contrary to the linked comic i did find some interesting notes
first off chaucer was a source for shakespeare, but hardly the source of the work
chaucer's main source was boccaccio's il filastrato.. which was based off an earlier version known as le roman de troie by benoît de sainte-maure
but the interesting bit comes from boccaccio's version(ii) because the story itself is only 8 cantos long, even the wikipedia page says the work itself is only 8 cantos long!(iii), but there is an additional canto, a ninth canto, wherein the author, boccaccio, addresses the reader and apologises for writing the poem and states he's unsure where it came from but asserts that he was recently dumped
(o) http://shakespeare.mit.edu/troilus_cressida/full.html
(i) https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2012/01/06
(i/2) https://store.penny-arcade.com/products/agree-with-me-tee
(ii) http://www.yorku.ca/inpar/filostrato_griffin.pdf
(iii) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Il_Filostrato
front page of reddit right now.. https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/5mr6ws/shakespeare_i... ;P
Re: Poet: I can’t answer questions on Texas standardized tests about my own poems
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
>If anyone can answer what the 'correct' interpretation of a piece of writing is, it's the author. To echo the other comments questioning that premise, there's also the famous Isaac Asimov anecdote: Isaac Asimov often repeated an anecdote based on this: He once sat in on a class where the topic of discussion was one of his own works. (He did this in the back of a large lecture hall so he could remain semi-anonymous).…
Asimov being Asimov, he then went on to write a story about Shakespeare being summoned from the past to take a college course on his plays. He failed, of course.
It is a litte OT and not the funniest joke, but incidentally just now there is this on reddit:
"Shakespeare in school" https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/5mr6ws/shakespeare_i...
The background story seems to be this half-hour video "Cunk on Shakespeare": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YeCpHoy9EQ
Re: Poet: I can’t answer questions on Texas standardized tests about my own poems
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed. I don't know why that sort of thing is on a standardized test anyway. We are having enough problems ensuring that all students have basic functional literacy. If they can read a paragraph from a credit card application and understand it, that will go a long way towards increasing their overall successful functioning in society. Let them do poetry interpretation on their own time and according to their own int…
That which isn't tested, isn't taught. This is particularly the case if the test and the curriculum are sold by the same vendor. I could see a scenario where "elite" parents complain that their kids spent a year in school being drilled on reading credit card applications, at the expense of things like literature and poetry. (I'd probably be one of those parents, and in my locale, educated parents are constantly compl…
"There will always be a conflict between education and testing"
It's pretty much inevitable, if the results of the testing have consequences, for teacher/student/school system/etc. that what is taught will often excessively focus on testing outcomes.
Unfortunately, it's hard not to do this to at least some degree at scale. Without standardized testing of some sort, there isn't a lot of feedback for how well the process is working and you more or less fall back on trust the individual teachers and schools and everything will be just fine--which isn't the case in the main.
Re: Poet: I can’t answer questions on Texas standardized tests about my own poems
#96Predicted, mostly, by Isaac Asimov in 1954: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immortal_Bard (TL;DR with spoiler: Time machine brings Shakespeare back to the current age, where he takes a class on his own work and is flunked.)
I found the full text here [1] for who is interested
[1] http://www.angelfire.com/weird/ektomage/otherwriting/bard.ht...
Re: Poet: I can’t answer questions on Texas standardized tests about my own poems
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
We could talk about the same problem in terms of why they still teach HC11 assembly in engineering school instead of teaching the industry standard arm-cortex. It is because most people in higher education are out of touch.
Huh? how is ARM more "industry standard" than anything else?
Most of the microcontrollers being used in new designs today are arm-cortex. Everybody who does microcontroller work except some pic weirdos is familiar with arm-cortex.
Re: Poet: I can’t answer questions on Texas standardized tests about my own poems
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're lucky this is an engineer heavy forum. Around humanities people, your comment is like pouring gasoline in an open flame.
The quantification of learning horrifies this statistician. The belief that a standardized test is more objective than say a trained human assessor neglects the subjective nature of human makers of the test. It puts the humans behind a facade that creates the appearance of objectivity but not actual objectivity. The benefit of standardized tests is that they lower labor costs of assessment not that they increase the…
Your argument is that standardized tests are more biased than individual assessment? I find that hard to believe bordering on ridiculous. There's a great deal of evidence that standardized exams are less biased as there's a consistent standard of correct answer across the board.
With individual assessment there's far too much room for "I know what you meant" to sneak in. This has come up a lot with job interviews; if you want to interview impartialy, have a fixed bank of questions and grade answers to a rubric.
Re: Poet: I can’t answer questions on Texas standardized tests about my own poems
#99If she had known the answer, would that make the question any better? I remember back when I was in high school, I always sort of assumed that the authors of the poems we were tested on wouldn't be able to answer the ridiculous questions on our assessments. But even if they did, I've never been able to figure out what skills these questions were testing. If poems are open to interpretation, isn't it reasonable to thi…
> If she had known the answer, would that make the question any better? If anyone can answer what the 'correct' interpretation of a piece of writing is, it's the author. If they can not, well maybe the authors intent wasn't what the questions are asking. Of course this is a fundamental problem in the way we teach and test literature. No piece of work has a single meaning because meaning is found in the merging of the…
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Re: Poet: I can’t answer questions on Texas standardized tests about my own poems
#100If she had known the answer, would that make the question any better? I remember back when I was in high school, I always sort of assumed that the authors of the poems we were tested on wouldn't be able to answer the ridiculous questions on our assessments. But even if they did, I've never been able to figure out what skills these questions were testing. If poems are open to interpretation, isn't it reasonable to thi…
Where is 'abroad'?
Usually Europe in this context. Sometimes Asia.