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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)

#351

Post by chris_wot »

kolinko wrote: post #347
segmondy wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those classes are all about conformity. It's about learning how to play the game of life and not going against the grain. "smart students" learn to read their teachers and know how to feedback the expected answers even if they don't agree or believe in it. A lesson that's very much needed in life. A lot have not learned this lesson and this is why many of us on this site still marvel at the bullshit companies raising…

Which is ironic, considering humanities are supposed to be about exploration of ideas and creative thinking.

Yes, but only if the result of your exploration and/or your ability to creatively think conforms to the educator(s) viewpoint.

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

#352

Post by brobdingnagians »

>>> My poems are a whole lot cheaper than Mary Oliver’s or Jane Kenyon’s, so there’s that.

Byron, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Oliver Goldsmith they are all free to license, could we really not use any of the thousands of poems by them and hundreds of other poets? Sure use some modern ones, but use some of the classics too.

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

#353

Post by zentiggr »

i4t wrote: post #348
segmondy wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those classes are all about conformity. It's about learning how to play the game of life and not going against the grain. "smart students" learn to read their teachers and know how to feedback the expected answers even if they don't agree or believe in it. A lesson that's very much needed in life. A lot have not learned this lesson and this is why many of us on this site still marvel at the bullshit companies raising…

"... are all about conformity." You give them too much credit, imo. That would be way to clever, too much 'conspiracy'-like. But, I agree that if you go against the grain, confront their bs... you're toast.

Nothing to do with conspiracies, just human nature filtered through the "never enough time or money to do it well" conditions.

There are some awesome educators out there who can inspire their students to think and explore the world.

There are far too many more who assemble a syllabus of their own viewpoint and expect their students to just absorb it.

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

#354

Post by mieseratte »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #288
_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…

Is the test out of 100%? I did a maths exam once where the top score possible was 120% (ironic!). The idea was you could ordinarily complete only enough to get 100%, but if you did complete more you got the marks for it. Why don't they make it harder and differentiate more easily?

> I did a maths exam once where the top score possible was 120% (ironic!). The idea was you could ordinarily complete only enough to get 100%, but if you did complete more you got the marks for it.

Was your test developed by Spın̈al Tap? What is the purpose for doing a test this way?

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

#355

Post by mieseratte »

ultrarunner wrote: post #110
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…

> and I always wondered if they were scanning the names in the top right corner to make their judgment.

This is most certainly a thing. Even funnier, I had a few A's on assignments I never even turned in.

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

#356

Post by criley2 »

kolinko wrote: post #347
segmondy wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those classes are all about conformity. It's about learning how to play the game of life and not going against the grain. "smart students" learn to read their teachers and know how to feedback the expected answers even if they don't agree or believe in it. A lesson that's very much needed in life. A lot have not learned this lesson and this is why many of us on this site still marvel at the bullshit companies raising…

Which is ironic, considering humanities are supposed to be about exploration of ideas and creative thinking.

Liberal arts / liberal education is less about "creativity" and more about "getting people to be capable enough to understand the national legislature and have a non-garbage political opinion". The liberal arts in America were seen as a prerequisite of a democracy.

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

#357

Post by asleori239k »

yomly wrote: post #292
sametmax wrote: post #234

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. 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…

The flip side of this that it's not limited to the arts. I came to love math later, more and more as I got into higher-level math, because I realized lower-level stuff tended to be taught in this way that is very focused on minute almost irrelevant details. If people had started with big-picture principles and worked down, I would have been much more into it earlier.

I had a stats professor in college who said (in a course on nonparametric statistics) something like "there are two types of statisticians out there, those who are horrible at arithmetic, and those who are great at it." His point was just that it's possible to get very abstract math concepts really well and also be kinda sloppy with other things.

I guess my point is that early exposures to anything can really bias people's perceptions a lot, even when it's not representative or necessary. Vocational stuff I think can be like that too: early exposures to different types of careers can be really biasing even when your understanding of it as a broader field is really misleading.

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

#358

Post by asleori239k »

ubermonkey wrote: post #320
sametmax wrote: post #234

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. 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, t…

Yeah I came to say something similar. Good art education (at least with criticism) is really focused on the strength of the arguments and the strength of the expression of those arguments.

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

#359

Post by zaphar »

rayiner wrote: post #278

The 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…

    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.
That was just side commentary though. The question wasn't bad because the stanza breaks were arbitrary. The question was bad because the poem wasn't formatted correctly in the test itself.

The teacher was writing her because he himself couldn't figure out where the stanza breaks were and had to ask.

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

#360

Post by _ieq6 »

segmondy wrote: post #330
sametmax wrote: post #234

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. 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…

Those classes are all about conformity. It's about learning how to play the game of life and not going against the grain. "smart students" learn to read their teachers and know how to feedback the expected answers even if they don't agree or believe in it. A lesson that's very much needed in life. A lot have not learned this lesson and this is why many of us on this site still marvel at the bullshit companies raising…

> Those classes are all about conformity. It's about learning how to play the game of life and not going against the grain. "smart students" learn to read their teachers and know how to feedback the expected answers even if they don't agree or believe in it. A lesson that's very much needed in life.

> A lot have not learned this lesson and this is why many of us on this site still marvel at the bullshit companies raising millions and wondering HTF! Because those "smart founders" learned how to feed BS that their audience expected back to them.

> I learned this lesson when I took humanities, it was so stupid, but I knew exactly what the teacher wanted to hear when we studied architectures & paintings. It was all subjective and her own opinion. I fed her back her crap and I passed the class.

> If you haven't learned this yet, it's not too late. The world is full on chicken shit.

> "smart students" learn to read their teachers and know how to feedback the expected answers even if they don't agree or believe in it.

Telling something even though you don't believe in it for personal gain is called cunningness.

I see many people misunderstand smartness with cunningness, people who are smart can be cunning as well but they chose not to.

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