Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

huffpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 464 posts

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

#141

Post by JimboOmega »

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 was awkward, and it was about the only place I could focus entirely on academics and be among peers that valued that.

My identity is complicated (and queer) and while my adolescence would have been a mess no matter what, having something that I could work hard on and had meaning - grades - made a ton of difference. At a school where everyone was an awkward geek, I didn't stand out.

I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

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

#142

Post by Veen »

dragonwriter wrote: post #128
derp_dee_derp wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too bad I can't read it because HN quotes suck on mobile and don't work with the brave browser in Android. @dang fix your mobile css and styling.

> Too bad I can't read it because HN quotes suck on mobile HN quotes are fine on mobile. But, just to be clear, this is how HN does quotes: “quoted text” And this is how HN does code blocks def this_is(code) not_a_quote end HN code blocks abused for long prose quotations suck on mobile (and aren't appealing on desktop, either), but that's abusing code blocks.

You'd have a point if the quote in question was a long prose quotation. It isn't; it's a poem and code formatting is often the only way to get poetry to appear reasonable.

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

#143

Post by ajdlinux »

sytelus wrote: post #130
ajdlinux wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was accelerated by two full grades in primary school when my parents realised that _not_ asking about gifted and talented support was going to cause me mental health issues. My family and my school did _not_ raise their expectations of me unreasonably. I quite enjoyed the rest of my school life, where I performed quite well but I certainly did not have perfect grades or come top of every class. Didn't win the dux/v…

What "mental health issues" you might have experienced? boredom? You were apparently comfortable working 2 grades above so I'd say you were good fit for those programs. Parents who push their kids in by doing massive prep might get different experience.

I can't really remember my state of mind clearly, I was a 6 year old when I started partial acceleration in reading and maths in Kindergarten, and a 9 year old when I was generally accelerated from Year 3 to Year 5. My family tells me that I made it very clear that I was unhappy at the time though - mostly the boredom.

Conversely, I know people who were recognised as gifted students but who weren't generally accelerated out of concern for their social skills or whatever, some of them ended up having problems later on and should probably have just been accelerated and pushed out to higher education faster. And I also know people who are pretty clearly gifted, but went through school in the normal fashion and were entirely happy with that, good for them.

I think the key thing is it has to be about the needs of the child, not the egos of the parents.

Anyway, point is - gifted programs are useful for the kids who need them. And as a rural kid with a limited selection of schools and little by way of gifted program resourcing, I'm glad for the handful of teachers who made my individualised educational plan happen regardless - their special ed programs need more support, not less.

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

#144

Post by Angostura »

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…

The people The people producing literary criticism 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.

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

#145

Post by Veen »

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 influences, the historical period, and other context.

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

#146

Post by Angostura »

komali2 wrote: post #100
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…

From what I know of Hemingway, it's sincere. The image he gives of himself (or imagines of himself) is a barrel chested beer swigging straight shooting Man's Man. He bullied "pencil necked" little Fitzgerald into alcoholism, and possibly abandoning his wife. He used a writing style that was the quintessential "no fluff" style of the period. I don't know him but from what I know of him he would not be a fan of having…

> from what I know of him he would not be a fan of having untanned literary professors claiming his works were about more than literally just an old man pissing in the sea or a bull fighter fighting bulls.

... I think that's the point - even if it were more than that, he might not be a fan of admitting it.

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

#147

Post by tachion »

sytelus wrote: post #115
ganzuul wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a doged bullet. You might however still want to consider not enroling her in a normal school since they will surely waste her talent.

So what is not "normal" school?

Private school? Home schooling?

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

#148

Post by vidarh »

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…

I have been censured for proposing the 'wrong' interpretation. And it totally destroyed my respect for that teacher. My interpretation was supported strictly by the actual text. The 'correct' interpretation not just according to our teacher, but our textbooks, required a tortured reading and assuming a comma was misplaced when this author always otherwise had perfect grammar. The only defense was an appeal to authority: surely I did not expect to understand it better than some idiot who'd failed at basic reading comprehension a century ago.

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

#149

Post by kortilla »

Veen wrote: post #140
colechristensen wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My experience of programming is making a turtle move around on a screen, so programming is dumb. My experience of math is working out how fast trains traveling towards each other are going, so math is dumb. My experience of chemistry is making a bit of paper change color when dipped in vinegar, so chemistry is dumb. And so on ad nauseam.

Those all proved useful though using real empirical based systems. If your programming class was, “what do you think the author meant by this line of code?” with no evidence to support any kind of guess, then yes it would be dumb.

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

#150

Post by kortilla »

twic wrote: post #125
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…

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”.
Post reply on HN