I Can’t Answer Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems (2017) • Hacker News Board

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

#371

Post by soared » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 4:00 PM UTC

kabouseng wrote: post #200

dragonwriter wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Either one of these is wrong, or they somehow managed to craft a test where the score percentage matches the score percentile, which while possible to engineer is somewhat improbable and also contradicts the next sentence: > For a first grader to score…

It's a form of Goodheart's law [1]. If you use the test scores to select for gifted students and the requirement is this high you will only select for highly test prepared students (the set of prepared and gifted or prepared and capable students). You're final student selection will be higher correlated to preparation and less to how naturally gifted a student is. This is not necessarily a bad thing though. [1] - htt…

You'd expect a first grader who is highly prepared for a test to be likely to be gifted, correct?

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

#372

Post by kyle-rb » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 4:07 PM UTC

oldjokes wrote: post #309

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 feel the same way about much of Computer Science. So much nonsense was forced into my head as the "best practices", from OO development to Agile to cloud snake oil to crypto scams. And then on top of that it turns out the CPUs are designed to be inherently insecure so all those amazing mathematical proofs in perfect penmanship were a waste of time.

I feel like OOP, Agile, "cloud" as a concept, and cryptocurrency/blockchains are not computer science topics.

The way in which blockchains are implemented, sure, that's math, applied as cryptography, applied to achieve distributed consensus, which is very much computer science. But you specifically mention crypto scams, which is much more applying the general concept of distributed consensus to different areas, and I think that's where it jumps out of the realm of computer science.

Maybe a better label for the "best practices" for the application of computer science is "software development". I think that, as an area of instruction, is more inherently subjective.

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

#373

Post by dkarl » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 4:08 PM UTC

jtms wrote: post #139

_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…

I was in the gifted program when I was in elementary school and I don’t recommend it. It took a kid like me who was already prone to social isolation and isolated him further. I voluntarily left the program after 2 years and was playing catch up socially and I wasn’t any better off academically. Don’t put your kids in that program.

I don't think that's always true. I found "gifted" programs much less isolating that regular school. I was lucky enough to participate in some summer academic programs, and while I still had a lot of social difficulty, at least there was a feedback loop where people would engage with what I was saying and I could evaluate and adjust my behavior according to people's reactions. I remember gaining a lot of social confidence in those summer programs and going back home and starting the school year thinking, I'm finally catching on, I've learned how to engage in this back-and-forth where I interact with people and watch their reactions to me, I've learned how to learn, only to go right back to being isolated and mystified in school, unable to see a relationship between my behavior towards people and their behavior back towards me.

For me, I needed to have a little bit more in common with my peers before I could even get traction socially. In fact, it might have been a net negative for me to be surrounded by other kids and cut off from them at the same time, because it messed with my confidence so badly. In the long run it is proving harder to unlearn the bad habits that stemmed from that than it was to learn basic social skills when I got the chance.

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

#374

Post by jknoepfler » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 4:10 PM UTC

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…

I disagree entirely. Traditional humanities courses are in general about learning intellectual history, contemporary thinking, and critical thinking.

Mistaking the worst-case for the central tendency is a classic fallacy that is easy to fall into when expressing contempt.

Bullshit companies don't raise millions of dollars because people study poetry or art history. They seem to raise millions of dollars because there's a long tail of bad startups and a long tail of bad investment decisions, and the intersection of those can be cherry-picked to create the illusion that "the world is full of chicken shit".

The world does indeed contain some chicken shit, but chicken shit is not the central tendency of the world. Terrible startups get funding less frequently than good ones. Good technical ideas often raise millions of dollars and thrive, but sometimes they fail despite their merits. Sometimes "chicken shit" succeeds, sometimes good ideas fail, but it's foolish to mistake the exception for the rule.

But again, all this has very little to do with poetry.

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

#375

Post by pojzon » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 4:14 PM UTC

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 still remember one poem from high school we were supposed to guess a meaning of. The author was still alive at the time. It was about black crows soring on the sky and landing on a gray cement floor.

Teacher went all out saying its about dark thoughts and existential crisis etc.

I actually met the author and asked him about the poem. She said, she just likes crows because there was a lot of them in the city she grew up in.

Thats it. I even wrote THAT interpretation as my answer to some test later on and i got a failing grade.

Told the teacher about my visit and discussion with the author. But he said he does not care because thats not whats written in the answers spreadsheet.

After that i realized majority of such teachers are retards and should be fired. Unfortunately our education system is so underpaid, getting anyone half decent wont happen.

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

#376

Post by kybernetikos » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 4:15 PM UTC

It is well accepted within the arts that the authors interpretation should not be considered privileged over the readers. I was taught that interpretations can vary in quality - particularly if they fail to take account of salient features in the work, but there's no particular reason that an artist who may have just created what 'felt right' necessarily understood why it felt so right.

I like to quote Socrates on questions like this:

After I had finished with the politicians I turned to the poets, dramatic, lyric, and all the rest, in the belief that here I should expose myself as a comparative ignorammus. I used to pick up what I thought were some of their most perfect works and question them closely about the meaning of what they had written, in the hope of incidentally enlarging my own knowledge. Well, gentlemen, I hesitate to tell you the truth, but it must be told. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that any of the bystanders could have explained those poems better than their actual authors. So I soon made up my mind about the poets too: I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled them to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean. It seemed clear to me that the poets were in very much the same case; and I also observed that the very fact that they were poets made them think that they had a perfect understanding of all other subjects, of which they were totally ignorant.

— Socrates, quoted by Plato in The Apology of Socrates (translated by Hugh Tredinnick)

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

#377

Post by staticautomatic » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 4:35 PM UTC

everdrive wrote: post #324

staticautomatic wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why must societal approval still be taught? And who gets to decide what society approves of? Hint: "Society" isn't the answer.

Because it explains why the work gained popularity, and what the nature of that popularity was. Why are you reading it today instead of something else? [edit] There's no reason societal approval must be taught uncritically. Maybe I used a poor term. I just meant that some historical works are seen as great literature. And the values that society currently held at the time, and subsequently must be part of the staying…

I agree with you and think the term should be "important." There are works most would agree are important but not everyone would agree are good or "great" in an approving sense, like Joyce, for example.

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

#378

Post by derrick_jensen » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 4:44 PM UTC

In my senior year English course, there was an extra credit assignment that involved analyzing Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I decided to just email the author and ask about the book, hoping he would give some unorthodox answers that I could say we're the authors true intent. He ended up sending me some wacky email with Futurama references, and he died about a month after that before I finished the paper

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

#379

Post by kradroy » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 4:44 PM UTC

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…

I learned this in freshman interpretation class in college. In the beginning I fought against the TA (English PhD candidate) teaching the class and I ended up with Cs on my assignments. Then midway through I started playing her game.

"Oh yeah, that cushion represents a vagina; the broom a phallus! Cinderella has a conundrum - her Electra complex will remain unresolved because her birth mother is dead and her father will continue to replace any dead wives by marrying anew. How can she overcome her predicament?! In this version Perrault introduces the fairy godmother as a foil to the mother in Freud's complex. Now the godmother helps Cinderella obtain her own princely phallus and win a bloodless coup over her foul stepmother! Actually in the end all the ladies get a phallus!"

A+

Joking aside, it took me another decade to have this sink in and apply it in life. I still deal with this foolishness daily. The originality of the and variety of the "chicken shit" determines whether or not I stick around at the job or in the situation the chicken shit is flowing.

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

#380

Post by mcguire » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 4:47 PM UTC

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…

Many teachers are pretty crappy.

For these sorts of topics, there are no right answers, although there are certainly some wrong ones. Your job, as a student, is to learn to, and to demonstrate that you can, think about the material, to have some sort of insight beyond the surface features.

You can certainly say some author is not interesting to you; you can say you didn't learn anything from it. You cannot say the text is boring or talent-free; that's the same as saying there is one right answer. And keep in mind: the reason a classic is considered a classic (Hiawatha not withstanding) is because other people found it interesting, talented, and learned from it.

One difficulty is that a good answer and a wrong answer are not immediately distinguishable, especially from the student's side. The teacher's job is to, among other things, explain why an answer is wrong without pushing some "one true answer". That's hard.

Unfortunately, many teachers are crappy. The current US primary and secondary school system tries really hard, with its standardized testing, to enforce crappiness, in the name of fighting other kinds of crappiness, so...yeah.

P.S. There isn't a grand conspiracy out to get you. Well, the probability is really low, anyway.