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I Can’t Answer Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems (2017)

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Re: I Can’t Answer Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems (2017)

#91

Post by leggomylibro »

philips wrote: post #54

Former US poet laureate Billy Collins wrote a poem about this sort of thing: The Effort Would anyone care to join me in flicking a few pebbles in the direction of teachers who are fond of asking the question: "What is the poet trying to say?" as if Thomas Hardy and Emily Dickinson had struggled but ultimately failed in their efforts— inarticulate wretches that they were, biting their pens and staring out the window f…

I once asked a co-worker what they liked about poetry.

"It's like reading a short story, but the author has less time to make their point."

That was a fun place to work.

Re: I Can’t Answer Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems (2017)

#92

Post by stordoff »

anticensor wrote: post #87
Symbiote wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Britain manages to set questions for the exams taken at ages 16, (17) and 18 with essay-type questions, for most questions of all subjects. There's a complete paper for GCSE (at 16) English here. Choose the June 2017 one, as the November one has the source material omitted due to copyright. https://www.aqa.org.uk/subjects/english/gcse/english-languag... You can skip to the last few pages of the mark scheme to get the…

> omitted due to copyright It is actually omitted due to testcenter policy, to enable reuse. You cannot reuse an exam with its answer key published.

Are you sure about that? "Paper 1: Insert (Modified A4 18pt) November 2017" quite clearly states: "The source cannot be reproduced here due to third party copyright restrictions."

Re: I Can’t Answer Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems (2017)

#93

Post by mikekchar »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #65
mikekchar wrote: post #32

It's not the only place in the world where the work (educating students) is jeopardised by the evaluation of that work (tests). Tests in schools are even worse, though, because they conflate 2 completely separate issues: the success of the efforts of the education system and the success of the efforts of the student. On the other hand, I will say that standardised testing is good at one thing: predicting which studen…

I really hate literature as a subject, but I always thought that English as a subject was to understand how to structure things like arguments, how to be concise, to develop decent grammar. There are so many examples of things that are terrible to read because the author never edited themselves or bothered to think about what they were trying to get across to the reader.

Just to be clear, I was teaching English as a foreign language :-) But I agree with you!

Re: I Can’t Answer Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems (2017)

#94

Post by lisper »

leggomylibro wrote: post #91
philips wrote: post #54

Former US poet laureate Billy Collins wrote a poem about this sort of thing: The Effort Would anyone care to join me in flicking a few pebbles in the direction of teachers who are fond of asking the question: "What is the poet trying to say?" as if Thomas Hardy and Emily Dickinson had struggled but ultimately failed in their efforts— inarticulate wretches that they were, biting their pens and staring out the window f…

I once asked a co-worker what they liked about poetry. "It's like reading a short story, but the author has less time to make their point." That was a fun place to work.

My own effort, written when I was in high school:

    A poem is a thought that tried
    In vain, just once, before it died
    To reach the page's right-hand side

Re: I Can’t Answer Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems (2017)

#95

Post by mherdeg »

philips wrote: post #54

Former US poet laureate Billy Collins wrote a poem about this sort of thing: The Effort Would anyone care to join me in flicking a few pebbles in the direction of teachers who are fond of asking the question: "What is the poet trying to say?" as if Thomas Hardy and Emily Dickinson had struggled but ultimately failed in their efforts— inarticulate wretches that they were, biting their pens and staring out the window f…

My two reference materials on this topic are:

(1) Bruce McAllister's symbolism survey - a 16 year old high school student straight-up asked bestselling authors whether they put symbolism in their work, with various replies - https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/12/05/document-the-...

(2) Ogden Nash's "Very Like A Whale" - Nash wrote a short, rhyming essay about how frustrating it was that authors sometimes try to use rhetorical techniques to convey meaning obliquely - http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~pahk/poems/021221.html . It always makes me giggle.

Re: I Can’t Answer Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems (2017)

#96

Post by rahuldottech »

lisper wrote: post #94
leggomylibro wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once asked a co-worker what they liked about poetry. "It's like reading a short story, but the author has less time to make their point." That was a fun place to work.

My own effort, written when I was in high school: A poem is a thought that tried In vain, just once, before it died To reach the page's right-hand side

I like this!

Re: I Can’t Answer Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems (2017)

#97

Post by legohead »

foxfired wrote: post #37

I was always afraid to read any classical work because no matter what you think you read, someone will tell you "Actually..." Then one day I read this beautiful quote about the old man and the sea: > “Then there is the other secret. There isn't any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that…

I read Crime and Punishment for the first time recently. found it quite boring and with limited meaning. but I am a 40 year old man and understood the concepts the book was introducing a long time ago.

I feel like with the advent of the internet, shocking concepts/ideas are hard to come by. I'm sure ideas in the book were provocative "back then," but nowadays, not so much.

I even watched some lectures on youtube discussing the book, which brought to light a thing or two, but still nothing of significance for me.

Re: I Can’t Answer Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems (2017)

#98

Post by stordoff »

cgriswald wrote: post #86
skookumchuck wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> tests are one of the hardest ways of doing so I've never understood how someone could master a subject and yet be unable to answer any questions about it. In my experience, people who did well on tests tended to understand the topic, and the people who didn't do well made excuses.

It’s because tests aren’t just testing knowledge. They are testing the ability to express the entirety of that knowledge under completely arbitrary conditions (time limits, schedules, no references, etc.) with outsized consequences for mistakes. Also good tests are hard to write. I’ve seen T/F questions that could go either way. Multiple choice questions with more than one correct answer. (Professors will tell you to…

> Also good tests are hard to write. I’ve seen T/F questions that could go either way. Multiple choice questions with more than one correct answer. (Professors will tell you to choose the “best” answer. But that’s a matter of opinion in many, if not all, cases.)

This is why I am so glad that all of my university exams (and the _vast_ majority of exams before that, at least post-Y9/age 13) were open-ended questions[1], then marked by someone who will (likely) know the subject better than you even will. Even if you couldn't get the the answer, but could understand and articulate the starting points, or made a compelling argument but misread or misunderstood part of the question, you will at least get partial credit. The physics exams would also have a standardised formulae reference sheet.

[1] A typical paper would be three hours, answering 5-6 questions, and a typical subquestion can be as open-ended as "Write brief notes about a tree representation of functional arrays, subscripted by positive integers according to their representation in binary notation. How efficient are the lookup and update operations?"

Re: I Can’t Answer Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems (2017)

#99

Post by dehrmann »

foxfired wrote: post #37

I was always afraid to read any classical work because no matter what you think you read, someone will tell you "Actually..." Then one day I read this beautiful quote about the old man and the sea: > “Then there is the other secret. There isn't any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that…

> It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

Macbeth Act 5, scene 5, 19–28

Re: I Can’t Answer Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems (2017)

#100

Post by komali2 »

mykowebhn wrote: post #82
foxfired wrote: post #37

I was always afraid to read any classical work because no matter what you think you read, someone will tell you "Actually..." Then one day I read this beautiful quote about the old man and the sea: > “Then there is the other secret. There isn't any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that…

On the one hand I feel Hemingway was being sincere when he said/wrote this quote. On the other hand, part of me feels he was saying this just to be provocative. Also, I'm not sure anyone has ever told me "Actually..." when I've explained what I thought I read. If this was a teacher/professor of yours he/she did you a huge disservice. I can think of two reasons (I'm sure there are more) for why artists say what they w…

From what I know of Hemingway, it's sincere.

The image he gives of himself (or imagines of himself) is a barrel chested beer swigging straight shooting Man's Man. He bullied "pencil necked" little Fitzgerald into alcoholism, and possibly abandoning his wife. He used a writing style that was the quintessential "no fluff" style of the period.

I don't know him but from what I know of him he would not be a fan of having untanned literary professors claiming his works were about more than literally just an old man pissing in the sea or a bull fighter fighting bulls.

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