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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)

#171

Post by vidarh »

colechristensen wrote: post #89
gatherhunterer wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literary analysis is overly criticized due to poor teaching of humanities. I disagree with some of the interpretations that I have heard of major literary works but no one has ever forced those ideas on me, I have never been censured for proposing an interpretation that differs from another. Bad teaching is a shame but dismissing an entire academic field because you had a poor experience as a child is self-aggrandize…

The people producing art and the people talking about what it means are so very often are mutually exclusive that it is very hard to take the people talking about it seriously. My experience with literary analysis is being forced to analyze pieces which I often believed didn't have any abstract meaning to speak of and then inventing some nonsense I thought would appeal to the teacher. The criticism is apt because my…

I just refused. I had good enough grades that I could afford to actively sabotage those lessons with passive aggressive responses that let my teacher know very well by the end of it what I thought of the whole thing.

I found it quite interesting that I was the only person in that class who regularly both read and wrote poems, and at the same time the one who had the sharpest reaction to being forced to analyse them in ways I felt actively destroyed my enjoyment of those poems.

One of the highlights of my school years was during this torture, when I got a chance to read a poem I'd written during one of those lessons aloud, with the intent that we would analyse it.

The teacher walked right into it, not yet aware how much I detested it.

My poem was a scathing criticism of tearing poems apart to invent meanings, unsupported by facts, that the author likely never intended, just barely civil enough to be read out in school.

My teacher got red and mumbled something I think nobody in class heard over the cheering and clapping.

I don't think I ever want to perform any of my poems again - it's a hard reaction to beat.

My teacher and I reached a cautious detente - he didn't punish my grade as much as he could have for that and other demonstrations, and I contained it and mostly played along. But the following year we did have to do a major report that included a literary analysis of a novel, and I told him flat out that I knew I could afford to come out a full grade lower and still not drop a grade for my final grade of the year, and that I just would ignore substantial parts of the requirements.

I did all of the 'mechanical' analysis of vocabulary and identifying allegories and the like, but then flat out refused to speculate on what the text meant. That was purely demonstrative - I certainly could have talked about my subjective interpretation, but the exercise in pretending there was an objective interpretation just made me upset.

It did not just affect my enjoyment of reading, but also my enjoyment of writing - the thought of my writing even potentially being treated like that was profoundly depressing.

To this day I think these kinds of lessons are destructive and do massive damage to students enjoyment of literature.

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

#172

Post by TeMPOraL »

gatherhunterer wrote: post #78
smt88 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, it makes all works of art more personal and interesting when you read into them. Even if it's not what the author intended, it may be what makes the work enjoyable to you. But I agree that forcing your interpretation on everyone else is pointless and often irritating.

Literary analysis is overly criticized due to poor teaching of humanities. I disagree with some of the interpretations that I have heard of major literary works but no one has ever forced those ideas on me, I have never been censured for proposing an interpretation that differs from another. Bad teaching is a shame but dismissing an entire academic field because you had a poor experience as a child is self-aggrandize…

Let's call spade a spade: if a literary critic is creating an interpretation that goes beyond what the author intended to convey, they're pulling meaning out of their ass. It's completely arbitrary and has no validity; at best it boils down to psychoanalyzing the author (and the critic is not qualified for that), trying to guess what the author "truly wanted" to say without realizing they want it to say. A simple experiment: imagine a blind test in which the critic doesn't know whether the work was produced by a human or a GAN. If they can give similar statements about "what the author meant", then they're talking garbage.

Trying to put the work in context of other works from the same genre or historical period? Sure, that's useful. Telling you what the author "truly meant", even though the author never said that? That's just entertainment. Let's label it as such explicitly, instead of trying to tell people it's a form of "deeper truth".

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

#173

Post by Stratoscope »

gatherhunterer wrote: post #78
smt88 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, it makes all works of art more personal and interesting when you read into them. Even if it's not what the author intended, it may be what makes the work enjoyable to you. But I agree that forcing your interpretation on everyone else is pointless and often irritating.

Literary analysis is overly criticized due to poor teaching of humanities. I disagree with some of the interpretations that I have heard of major literary works but no one has ever forced those ideas on me, I have never been censured for proposing an interpretation that differs from another. Bad teaching is a shame but dismissing an entire academic field because you had a poor experience as a child is self-aggrandize…

> ...dismissing an entire academic field because you had a poor experience as a child is self-aggrandizement.

Can we please try to be more polite than this? Accusing someone of self-aggrandizement doesn't usually lead to a friendly and interesting conversation.

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

#174

Post by nmca »

_7fvc wrote: post #107

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 stat…

She may have dodged a bullet - some GATE programs are rubbish, others excellent and it's hard to know what you'll get.

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

#176

Post by princeb »

kortilla wrote: post #150
twic wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the alternative point of view: A playwright is not the best person to talk about his own work for the simple reason that he is often unaware of what he has written. -- Alan Bennett

The playwright is still within his/her realm to call bullshit when people claim that the playwright “meant X”.

the writer's mind is a palette and on it are his experiences, his instincts, his biases. to be fully aware of the meaning "X" is to be fully aware of not only his own meta-cognition, but the context of the world that he lives in that coloured his person, that resulted in him deciding to write something in order to bring forth the message "X".

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

#177

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #172
gatherhunterer wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literary analysis is overly criticized due to poor teaching of humanities. I disagree with some of the interpretations that I have heard of major literary works but no one has ever forced those ideas on me, I have never been censured for proposing an interpretation that differs from another. Bad teaching is a shame but dismissing an entire academic field because you had a poor experience as a child is self-aggrandize…

Let's call spade a spade: if a literary critic is creating an interpretation that goes beyond what the author intended to convey, they're pulling meaning out of their ass. It's completely arbitrary and has no validity; at best it boils down to psychoanalyzing the author (and the critic is not qualified for that), trying to guess what the author "truly wanted" to say without realizing they want it to say. A simple exp…

Not quite. The humanities are fundamentally about persuasion, not about objectivity. There is no objectivity in the arts, creators are not the last word on their work [1], and any good observation is considered a success if it's persuasive to at least some people some of the time.

A lot of academic-level criticism is really an advanced game of "Hunt the hidden metaphor." People can take it or leave it, but as a pastime it's unlikely to go away. No one competent [2] seriously expects any one interpretation to be definitive. It's all just opinion, and sometimes it's interesting and insightful opinion - and sometimes it isn't.

[1] A lot of people find this strange, but why should it be? Creators are no more aware of their own internal motivations than anyone else is.

[2] This may not include high school teachers attempting the same thing, because they're likely to be teaching by rote from standard interpretations and marking them right/wrong rather than trying to elicit interesting personal insights.

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

#178

Post by neilv »

Veen wrote: post #145

High school literary criticism is just training for basic interpretation skills. It doesn't matter what's really "in" the poem, just that the student is capable of rudimentary analysis of meaning and symbolism and so on. If they went on to study literary criticism at a higher level with a decent teacher, they'd have to justify their interpretations with reference to the work as a whole, the writer's other work, their…

Thank you. I think a lot of us in tech (including myself) have had only shallow/imperfect exposure to the humanities in school, and then later seen many noisy/poor/confusing examples from the field.

However, I've known some people well-educated in the humanities, and (for example) I've often seen them to have on-point insight into real-world situations, while most of us with engineering/science-heavy educations are fumbling around with our overconfident opinions based on little/mistaken information.

Which is not to say that there might not be a lot of noise in any field, but it would be foolish to naively dismiss someone who's invested many years in intense reading and analysis in any of those fields. Surely that person knows things and has gotten good at some kinds of thinking that we haven't even heard of.

Consider the example of someone who took and Web/app framework class, but has no experience in CS basics, algorithm design, systems architecture, engineering process and collaboration, product lifecycles and maintainability, etc. They can make a site/app, and don't see what all the fuss and perceived posturing in the field is about.

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

#179

Post by nimih »

oh_sigh wrote: post #101
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

Only tangentially related, but one of the most incredible accomplishments of Parks & Rec seems to be that Ron Swanson's lines are equally loved by folks who get the joke and folks who don't even realize that there is one.

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

#180

Post by C1sc0cat »

philwelch wrote: post #88
mykowebhn wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think artists intentionally encode secret messages or deep meanings into their work, but it doesn't necessarily have to be intentional. Or you could just stop caring about intentionality and just acknowledge that you're basically cloudwatching.

Some do the structure of Gravity's rainbow for example.
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