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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)

#101

Post by oh_sigh »

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…

"My favorite book is Moby Dick. No frou-frou symbolism. Just a story of a man who hates an animal. And that's enough."

-Ron Swanson

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

#102

Post by Bukhmanizer »

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…

Why do people here seem to think that the only form literary analysis is direct symbolism? Is it the only thing covered in the American high school curriculum?

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

#103

Post by m0zg »

legohead wrote: post #97
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 disc…

That's probably because you've read it in English. For the life of me I don't get why non-Russian people read Russian classical literature. Just don't. It is true that there aren't really any Western authors of the same stature as Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, but really, you aren't really reading what they wrote. Their work requires quite a bit of thought, and that thought requires quite a bit built-in stuff that a native wouldn't even notice.

30% of the meaning is not there because you don't have the same cultural background. Another 15-20% is lost in translation. What remains is still formidable, but nowhere near as good as the original work. I happen to also have recently re-read Crime and Punishment, but in my native Russian, after a gap of some 25 years. I've found it very vivid, engaging, and full of nuance I just wasn't even able see when I was a teenager. Likewise I have fairly recently re-read War and Peace, and it is now my favorite book of all time. When I was much younger it seemed "too long" and extremely boring, because it requires quite a bit of lived experience to fully appreciate, and not just any experience, but experience that only someone who has lived in Russia for an extended period of time (not necessarily originally Russian) would have. Really fundamental, basic things, which Americans just can't even begin to understand. I.e. how the government is perceived there (hint: Tsar-like figure is still perceived as a desirable thing), what it means to have a land war on your soil (Russia had many, some extremely devastating), Russian ideas about patriotism, yet at the same not liking how they do things over there, Russian fatalism, how women are perceived by men and the other way around, etc, etc.

Having spent 20+ years in the US and having traveled quite a bit, I've recently read The Grapes of Wrath. I liked the book, and the use of language in it (it almost reads like poetry at times), but I very strongly suspect I didn't quite "get" it to the extent that an American would, for the same reasons I alluded to above. And I have vastly more "American" lived experience than most Americans have "Russian".

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

#104

Post by munchbunny »

Bukhmanizer wrote: post #102
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…

Why do people here seem to think that the only form literary analysis is direct symbolism? Is it the only thing covered in the American high school curriculum?

No, but it's seen by many engineers/scientists as too hand wavy to be worth spending mental cycles teaching/practicing it.

Personally, I believed that until I began to think about literary analysis like math. Some people make careers out of it because there are situations where it has real impact (law, for example). For the rest of us, it's a form of intellectual play as a proxy for other mental skills.

You might come up with some wonky and possibly wrong theorem or some useless formula, but I wouldn't jump to say "you're wasting your time" because the process is the valuable part of the exercise.

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

#105

Post by RealityVoid »

oska wrote: post #79
dejaime wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good analogy. It's really hard to "measure knowledge," and in my humble opinion, as someone who once was a teacher, tests are one of the hardest ways of doing so.

> It's really hard to "measure knowledge" And the idea of doing so is a fairly recent (and I would say toxic) invention. The concept of graded tests, marks and class grades (A, B, C etc) are all only a bit more than 100 years old. They're a product of the industrialisation of schooling.

They are a product of industrialization! But here is what's the nagging thought on my mind. This industrialized schooling has allowed basic human knowledge to be disseminated at a faster pace than ever before. The need to do so caused it to roll back on quality, sometimes greatly. But without this tradeoff, would knowledge be able to reach so many? Is there some sort of balance point to be reached?

I agree that currently, education systems are terrible, but is there any way to maintain them at scale that is not?

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

#106

Post by p1esk »

legohead wrote: post #97
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 disc…

Actually... (sorry, couldn’t resist), I’m not sure why you expected something shocking or even provocative. The book is a deep dive into the mind of someone who decides to commit a murder, does it, and then has to live with it. That someone happens to be a relatively normal guy who you can understand and even relate to.

At least that was my impression of the book when I read it 25 years ago (I was 16 at the time).

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

#107

Post by _7fvc »

This article is fun to read. Incidentally, my daughter just took a test for a gifted program. She didn't study for it as recommended by our school district. She scored 95% in one subject. But the qualified cut-off rate is 98%!

My eyes just rolled looking at that number. That means they only pick 98 and 99 percentiles. For a first grader to score that high, she needs to answer the exam perfectly. If you have some statistics training, you'll see this score is like shooting yourself in the foot. You're more likely selecting prepared test takers than gifted students.

I congratulated my daughter on her score. We went out for dinner and got tasty pastries for dessert. Life is too short to waste our time on these dumb tests.

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

#108

Post by basicplus2 »

inflatableDodo wrote: post #70
ben509 wrote: post #3

This feels like the literary version of the "what in tarnation would you ever need this new-fangled multiplication for" critiques of common core math. > Holbrook wrote that asking students to guess an author's intent in writing a piece of literature is doomed to be a pointless exercise. It's pedagogy! Students aren't trying to divine the One True Meaning of the piece. They're trying to learn how to read a piece of li…

>This feels like the literary version of the "what in tarnation would you ever need this new-fangled multiplication for" critiques of common core math. Don't even get me started on the way mathematics is taught at most schools. For one thing, it isn't. If English were taught the same way, the lessons would consist only of spelling, grammar and punctuation.

Now I for, 1 wood, find that too be useful!

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

#109

Post by zelos »

Isn’t the basic problem the use of multiple choice? Being able to write a few hundred words arguing an opinion about a poem (right or wrong) has some value. Picking an arbitrarily chosen ‘right’ answer from a list has almost none. I don’t think I’ve ever had a multiple choice exam in English Lit - actually, I don’t remember multiple choice in any serious exam.

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

#110

Post by ultrarunner »

zelos wrote: post #109

Isn’t the basic problem the use of multiple choice? Being able to write a few hundred words arguing an opinion about a poem (right or wrong) has some value. Picking an arbitrarily chosen ‘right’ answer from a list has almost none. I don’t think I’ve ever had a multiple choice exam in English Lit - actually, I don’t remember multiple choice in any serious exam.

Well, yes, but actually no. I grew up with both parents teaching in public schools in subjects that cannot be tested in a multiple choice format. They both sat down every night in front of the tv and shuffled papers from inbox to outbox, quickly scribbling a score on each. Very very little thought seemed to go into the content of the work, and I always wondered if they were scanning the names in the top right corner to make their judgment. I never did ask, though. Either way, I’m not sure much could change; even without giving these kids a fair shake, it still took hours to grade these. It’s a broken system and the only palatable response seems to be to throw more money at it and hope for different results.
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