I always enjoyed this story from Michael Crichton. http://www.openculture.com/2014/01/george-orwell-got-a-b-at-...
I Can’t Answer Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems (2017)
311–320 of 464 posts
Re: I Can’t Answer Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems (2017)
#312The whole poem and questions are here: https://www.jiskha.com/questions/1027961/Midnight-by-Sara-Ho... . Frankly, I think the author is being a bit disingenuous. Question 5 for example: What function does the stanza break serve? She says she put it where it is because she's a performance poet and thought it should go there. One, that isn't the question. The question isn't asking about the author's subjective state of…
Per your last para, isn't that "the train is important to the exam boards recognised interpretation of the poem because ...". Unless the poet makes it explicit then you're making up facts and expecting people to buy that one, likely false, interpretation.
It's simply not useful to anyone except exam paper sellers and politicians who want numbers to put in election material and don't care how many years of other people's lives are wasted to make those figures appear to mean something.
That sort of lame education system needs putting out of its misery.
Re: I Can’t Answer Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems (2017)
#313The whole poem and questions are here: https://www.jiskha.com/questions/1027961/Midnight-by-Sara-Ho... . Frankly, I think the author is being a bit disingenuous. Question 5 for example: What function does the stanza break serve? She says she put it where it is because she's a performance poet and thought it should go there. One, that isn't the question. The question isn't asking about the author's subjective state of…
If you’re a good test taker, the answers they want are clear, but that’s not the point. The point is that applying this model to art, something which has been essential to the human experience for tens of thousands of years, is a stultification of our culture for no better reason than that we want to measure something. If the goal of education in a democratic society is to produce an informed, well-rounded electorate…
The problem is you're trying to educate millions of kids and you want some common standard to judge them against (to figure things out like college admissions). You can't just say "put down whatever and we'll judge it by how you feel or how I feel".
Besides, you're not testing their artistic abilities, you're testing learning comprehension and and things they learned in English class. Do you know that we're graduating kids who are functionally illiterate? I think that's a bigger problem to tackle than worrying about how poetry is taught to kids.
>The point is that applying this model to art, something which has been essential to the human experience for tens of thousands of years, is a stultification of our culture for no better reason than that we want to measure something.
You say that but what are you basing this on? Just personal feelings?
>I would hesitate to dismiss the damage done by a system that produces questions like these at the societal scale.
I disagree. These are perfectly fine questions. In fact, if you converted to the education system to the montessori-style system that would be disastrous.
Re: I Can’t Answer Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems (2017)
#314This 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…
Gifted programs were mostly just designed to segregate white students from minority students.
Re: I Can’t Answer Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems (2017)
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a reading test, not an art test. Here, whatever "art" is in the poem, there is also text with plain, objective meaning and discernible structure. The test is directed to the latter, not the former. And that is, by far, the more important thing to teach children. An informed citizenry in a democracy doesn't need art. They do need to be able to convey their thoughts in a structured, clear manner in writing.
If that's the objective, then give them a piece of technical writing, and then ask them whether the nuts should be screwed tight before or after the wooden pieces are put in their slots. I think we all know why they're using poetry, though. They want to PRETEND to be testing ability at deep literary criticism.
>then give them a piece of technical writing, and then ask them whether the nuts should be screwed tight before or after the wooden pieces are put in their slots.
And I'm sure they do get technical writing samples to analyze. Also poetry. Why? Why not! Why not, vary it up a bit. They could have done the same exercise with Rap lyrics.
Again, I'm not sure what the problem is?
>They want to PRETEND to be testing ability at deep literary criticism.
I think you need to manage your expectations. Kids aren't going to give you 'deep literary criticism'.
Re: I Can’t Answer Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems (2017)
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you’re a good test taker, the answers they want are clear, but that’s not the point. The point is that applying this model to art, something which has been essential to the human experience for tens of thousands of years, is a stultification of our culture for no better reason than that we want to measure something. If the goal of education in a democratic society is to produce an informed, well-rounded electorate…
This is a reading test, not an art test. Here, whatever "art" is in the poem, there is also text with plain, objective meaning and discernible structure. The test is directed to the latter, not the former. And that is, by far, the more important thing to teach children. An informed citizenry in a democracy doesn't need art. They do need to be able to convey their thoughts in a structured, clear manner in writing.
> An informed citizenry in a democracy doesn't need art.
There's no point in _having_ a democracy without art.
Re: I Can’t Answer Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems (2017)
#317I always though how silly it was for teachers to pretend they got the correct answer in a text analysis of a century old author. Apparently it's even true for authors that are still alive. Some things seemed so far fetched, so random, so made up. And yet it was supposed to be _the_ right answer. When I offered another one, even knowing the official one but disagreeing, I was graded as failing. Hell, I'm pretty certai…
Really liked this post and really hit me deep, given that I grew up hating all "arts"-based subjects only to discover in my 20s that I loved them, but lacked the correct mental model to appreciate them growing up. The concept that education on arts can bias certain mindsets definitely resonates with me as I struggled with English as a child and I recall struggling to grok what a "sentence" was: once a teacher explain…
Fwiw most people here won't be able to give a hard and fast definition of a sentence; this is why we have Recurrent Neural Networks.
Re: I Can’t Answer Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems (2017)
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that part of the article actually perfectly captures why the author's argument is wrong. Nobody cares why she put the stanza break where she did. That's not what the question is asking. The question is asking about the objective effect of the stanza break in the context of the poem. All the student is being asked to do is recognize that there is an (objective) shift in subject from one stanza to the other, an…
You are right that, for the purpose of this exercise, the author's intent is not the issue (though it explicitly is in the next question.) This question is not the best one to make the point; take, for example, question 35 -- personally, I would pick B but can understand why someone might pick C, which might, for all I know, be the nominal answer. The worst cases seem to be where the question-setter has a fixed idea…
Question 35 is testing whether you know how "metaphors" work. B is correct because "putting toys back into the chest" is a metaphor for the weekend's fun-and-games being over. C cannot be correct because it's referring to the text's literal meaning ("organizing things") without giving effect to the "metaphor" call-out in the prompt.
Re: I Can’t Answer Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems (2017)
#319I think few people probably knows how textbooks are written. Given millions of students spend millions of hours on these textbooks, one would expect there is a great care taken in writing textbooks. This is often not true and it was very well described by Richard Feynman. He was so repulsed by the quality of textbooks that this Nobel prize winning physicist decided to be part of committee. To his surprise, in committ…
In the UK exams are privatised, you buy the exams from an exam board. They often have massive errors in them and clearly haven't been properly tested - I used to do mark checking.
500,000+ kids take the papers at £30+ a time. You'd think for £15M you could afford to do things properly; but of course the key metrics are profit/bonus/wages.
Moreover the boards compete in part on making their tests easier, or at least that they give the highest grades. You can't objectively compare students in such a system, it's moronic.
Re: I Can’t Answer Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems (2017)
#320I always though how silly it was for teachers to pretend they got the correct answer in a text analysis of a century old author. Apparently it's even true for authors that are still alive. Some things seemed so far fetched, so random, so made up. And yet it was supposed to be _the_ right answer. When I offered another one, even knowing the official one but disagreeing, I was graded as failing. Hell, I'm pretty certai…
>I always though how silly it was for teachers to pretend they got the correct answer in a text analysis of a century old author.
Some elements of analysis are verifiable, like when someone provides meaningful context around lines in Shakespeare, but once you get past very elementary discussions of literature the notion of "right answer" is kind of over.
My primary degree is literature; above dumb-freshman courses, the emphasis is on analytical thinking about the text, and on the rigor of that thinking, not on the supposed correctness of the analysis.
But, of course, this interferes with your thesis, so...