Poet: I can’t answer questions on Texas standardized tests about my own poems

thanks, i'm happy to answer your questions

> What is your full ruleset, if you have it handy?

ha! this is a funny question.. when i first started doing this i wrote a note taking app that took in a ruleset and ensured you followed it.. i'm unable to find the code right now otherwise i could just drop in the json ;P

inevitably i'll forget something, but here are some highlights: remove negatives, remove absolutes and bias identifying markers when used unnecessarily, write timelessly, lists follow ':' and end with ';', parenthetical ideas are separated by a two dot '..' ellipsis, group ideas by comma ended groups where the last line is without punctuation.. with the exception of '?|!'.. then followed by a newline;

   hn has its own opinions about formatting,
   so this last rule is one i am unable to do on here,
   but i try to compromise as much as i can
   
   this has often gotten me in trouble on hn,
   because people get offended by all of the whitespace separating my individual lines
   
   for a while i wrote exclusively in these 'code blocks',
   but i felt the scrolling was too annoying,
   and got in the way of the messaging

> Is this just a HN thing? A social media thing? An online thing? An all the time thing?

to the best of my abilities it is an all the time thing.. it started as a writing thing: digital communications, journals, poetry; but then i decided to do it while speaking too

the extemporaneous aspect of speaking makes it more difficult but i find my ability to communicate clearly and in a way i feel i can be proud of is greatly improved

sometimes i am unable to find an alternative to a negative and will ask the person i am talking to to help me construct the sentence without the negative.. it's also funny when i let one slip and someone close to me calls me out on my shit and we try to reconstruct the sentence together

> Do you make exceptions for whatever kind of formal writing you might need to do (research papers, grant proposals, cover letters, posters, etc.)?

yes, certainly

i do what i can to always stay true, regardless of audience, to the content rules: negatives, absolutes, bias; but in regard to formatting i try to 'play to my audience'

when that audience is such that hypothetically i could be the one consuming my own creations: online, poetry, etc; then i use my writing style as an outlet for expression

> Are you in STEM, and if not, what is your field?

i also eschew limiting oneself to a single field, but i do involve myself in many different fields and stem are definitely some such fields

i do research in number theory, study physics and chemistry, program, do ee, write, produce visual media, play music, study health

my diversifying principle is that if i see someone doing something i greatly respect then i want to do so myself as well.. for instance, i am a huge fan of filippo brunelleschi so i designed my own dome.. i named it the domb, for dumb dome

i had to learn cad and architectural principles and also ended up developing an interesting result in euclidian geometry by working on this dome project

> When did you start writing like this? I'm already imagining some vivid clashes with teachers/professors if you started anywhere in undergrad or below.

it happened after an argument i had with a loved one over an instant messenger app

afterward, this person printed the entire thread and mailed it to me

it was a pretty intense experience, reading that argument.. especially considering when i wrote the words i was thinking they were ephemeral.. in so doing, i noticed some things about myself

first off, though i assumed the conversation was ephemeral the reality was that though the bytes indeed disappeared my words lived on in the relationship i was building with this person

in addition to wanting to nurture the relationships i am in now i also am a lover of literature and those that produce it, and as such have read many journals by writers and i just decided at that point that i wanted to only write things that i wanted a person like me in the future reading from me in some hypothetical collection of my writings

the other thing i noticed was that my best ideas were killed by my simply negating the other person.. an overly simple example: 'do you want to spend time together tonight?' 'no'vs'tonight i'm busy but what about tomorrow'

my intended message was being nullified, or mired in anger, by a lazy and impulsive reply

so this is when i started removing negative constructions from my language, from there i felt a freedom to restrict my language patterns in other ways to better match my thought patterns and help nurture my intended reception

I uh, apologize in advance for the wall of text. It started out shorter.

# TL;DR

- I don't think the questions are unreasonable - I'm not surprised the poet says she can't answer them - I agree with you that the point of analysis is the process, but that gets tested in writing assessments - reading assessments get bad rap because people forget reading/understanding the questions is just as important as reading/understanding the texts

# BODY

Before reading the whole article (so before reading her analysis of the questions near the end), I followed the source links from the first section to try answering the 5 questions about "A Real Case" myself.

I got them all correct and (discounting the initial time taken to read the poem) spent more time scrolling up and down in the pdf to refer back to the text than I did thinking about the questions.

This is a reading assessment for 7th graders. Perhaps all the commotion in the article and in the news and in this thread is because people are assuming that it is assessing 7th graders' abilities to read and understand poetry. I don't think this is true at all. I think it's assessing 7th graders' abilities to read and understand questions.

The question of whether the ability to read and understand poetry is of lasting value may be up in the air, but the ability to read and understand questions is an essential communication skill in modern life, imo. The material the questions are about is - not quite incidental, but honestly no more than half of the picture.

The single question that I spent more time on than all the others combined was 35. Maybe my approach to answering a question that I considered poorly worded (at first) might be of interest.

Here it is, with the stanza it concerns included and the highlighted lines marked:

  --> My mood’s as welcome as
  --> incoming dog breath,
  --> or a terminal case of split ends.
  --> I sparkle like a dust rag,
      I could attract mosquitoes -
      maybe - not friends.
    
  35) The imagery in these lines helps the reader understand-

      A) the shift in the speaker’s attitude
      B) the speaker’s unpleasantness
      C) why the speaker has no friends
      D) what the speaker thinks of others

And the issue there was that one of the two possible answers, B, implies the other, C. If the speaker is unpleasant, that is a perfectly good reason for the speaker to have no friends.

I eventually decided on B for two reasons:

1) Friends are only ever mentioned after the highlighted lines. To put it in programming terms (sorry!) a first-time reader streaming the poem (i.e., the way most people read) would lack a mental "parser" labelled "now the speakers's talking about friends" with which to process the highlighted lines. My experience is that most straightforward writers (the ones we can reasonably expect 7th graders to parse) do not expect their readers to manage their own mental "heap" of unexplained information and compare all of its contents to each new bit of information received as reading proceeds. When unexplained information does come along ("Where did my bike go? I parked it right here!") it's usually clearly labelled as such, so the reader need only maintain the heap of "information the author labelled for me as unknown". This is both less work for the reader than figuring out the labels on their own, and requires them to remember less. When this sort of labeling is not done, it's called a mystery novel.

[Aside: of course, writers who are not targeting 7th graders can and do write however they want; a favorite example of mine is Neal Stephenson, who seems to take perverse pleasure in quietly building up a narrative out of elements that he introduces so familiarly and with so little fanfare or detail that you swear he must have explained this thing a few pages back and you just missed it somehow, but after checking the previous 50 pages you can't find any mention of it so you eventually give up and continue and 150 pages later you read a paragraph that tumbles around in your head for a few seconds and then it clicks snugly into place in your heap and completely illuminates the question you had earlier. And I love him for it.]

2) Most of the rest of the poem is composed of atomic ideas expressed in one or two lines (with the exception of the first stanza that keeps the "sickness" ball bouncing for 5 lines). To match the rest of the poem, it seemed more likely the highlighted stanza expressed four nearly-independent thoughts: I smell bad, I'm irritating, I'm boring, and I'm unattractive. In that structure, the concept of friends is restricted to the "scope" of the final thought, and only used to illustrate just how unattractive the speaker is. None of the other thoughts are involved. As such, C is unrelated to the highlighted lines but B is still a good match.

Of course, most of this was unconscious when I was doing it. I wrote down B with about 70% confidence and kept going, because that's what you do on a timed test. Now that I put my reasoning it all down on paper, I'm much more confident in the result. (It helps that it turned out to be correct!)

If I recall correctly, I got a perfect score on the reading section of the SAT. I helped several of the international students at my school study for that section specifically, and my top recommendation was that they read books. I imagine that I'm to the left of the bell curve of reading speed/comprehension; I had read Ivanhoe by age seven or eight and the Lord of the Rings by age nine. (the hard part was getting started; after my mother had read the first two or three chapters to me, I got hooked and read the rest myself.)

Still, I have no aspirations as a poet or author. Likewise, I'm sure there are many superb poets who are quite terrible at analytical thinking. If poet was truly unable to answer the test questions confidently, I'm not surprised. On the other hand, if the poet could actually answer the questions just fine but was being hyperbolical to frame a strong point about how test writers are ignoring author intent and the result is bad test questions, that would not surprise me either. (After all, it makes sense that an author would take the conservative position in the "death of the author" discussion!)

You [my parent commenter, if you're still here!] stressed that the the problem with the test is that it has 1 correct answer for each question, and so cannot accurately test the test-taker's ability to perform a process for which the point is not the result, but the ability to justify the validity one's process.

I agree with you!

But testing someone's ability to justify their analysis is called a writing assessment. What we are dealing with is a reading assessment.

This assessment measures the test-taker's ability to internalize the analysis process performed by the test-writer, apply that process to the text themselves, and demonstrate that they were successful by accurately predicting which conclusion the test-writer arrived at.

In other words, this is testing the test-taker's ability to accurately and productively process thoughts that originated outside of themselves. This is something that 7th graders are not very good at without practice. (This is one contributor, I think, to why bullying is common at those ages - kids have not yet learned to empathize.) This is a good skill to learn, and a good skill to test.

That is so true. Frustrated me so much as a student, and even an adult taking interview tests as a software developer. If you happen to know more about the subject than the person who wrote the test question, frequently (or at least from time to time) you will see questions with multiple correct answers, and end up having to guess.

Bullshit artistry is an important skill that children should learn early in life.

Teacher's demands that I should be able to infer the subjective interpretation of an author's intended emotional effect for a passage of text, made me the person I am today.

I know how to get banned on HN instantaneously, rather than the minutes it takes some of my peers. I credit my capacity to induce the stifled frustration that my telltale bans express to the forward thinking of the educators that crafted the curriculums I successfully completed during my upbringing.

One of the trust destroying parts of my K-12 was poetry interpretation. It became clear very quickly that we were being "given" the desired interpretation during class and not really taught to actually interpret the works.

I once challenged the head of my high school English department over the interpretation of a particular poem. They had weighed it down with layer upon layers of symbolism and interpretation but never able to answer the fundamental question of whether or not we were inventing meaning and attaching symbols and thus creating interpretation or the author intended this in his work.

I wasn't saying that our analysis wasn't important, but I still feel it's an important distinction that the pedagogy wasn't making and I got the feeling that compliance to the accepted interpretation was more desired than being able to interpret the work yourself.

Eventually I got so upset, I went and did some research and hunted down some interviews with the author which discussed the interpretation and in those interviews he explicitly called out the specific line of interpretation we were being taught as both nonsense and not at all what he meant in that particular piece and not how he generally writes.

I printed out these interviews, including revelation that the title had been added by an editor years later, made copies, highlighted the relevant sections and turned them in instead of my analysis paper and took the F. It broke all of the trust I had in the education system after that and I very much turned "off" as a student after that.

Later in college, when I felt my grades were more important to my future, I killed that little bit inside myself that fought the status quo and just regurgitated the accepted interpretation. I even became so good at it I found myself into various honors lit courses as a CS student. But I knew it was mostly nonsense and I honestly feel kind of ashamed at having learned to excel in the subject by become such a bullshit artist.

The experience was so poor that it's left a lifelong bad taste in my mouth for poetry and various other artforms that lend themselves to deep analysis and interpretation. It's largely ruined modern art for me and I find myself veering away from "intellectually challenging" works because I'm not sure if the meaning I'm getting is real, or if I'm supposed to give in to some popular interpretation -- which inevitably makes me feel like I'm being snookered.

Interestingly, modern analysis of that same poem now seem to agree with my young take on it and not the hard-line we were being force fed in high school (an invented anti-communism attachment) - but it seems only after the author made a particular point at becoming very vocal against the status quo. So small victories?

   so much depends
   upon

   a red wheel
   barrow

   glazed with rain
   water

   beside the white
   chickens

   ~William Carlos Williams