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)

#381

Post by toby » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 4:54 PM UTC

kyle-rb wrote: post #372

oldjokes wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

OOP design is usually part of a CS curriculum (at MIT it was, at least) since it has some theoretical framing and applies to a wide variety of practical problems.

I don't think I've ever heard of a class in crypto scams or Agile.

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

#382

Post by mcguire » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 4:55 PM UTC

kbenson wrote: post #363

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…

> It was all subjective and her own opinion. I fed her back her crap and I passed the class. I had an English class I thought was like this. I generally tried not to do that unless I had to, but given this English teacher had given me a D and C- on the first two essays (which is all we were graded on), I decided for the third essay I would get as much help as possible directly from her to see exactly what she wanted…

I had an experience similar to that in high school. When my grades started falling in it, my mother set up an appointment with the school counselor and the teacher; the teacher didn't bother to show up. I was immediately moved into a different class with a different teacher...

...who was excellent. Who had fun getting students to come up their own ideas. Who didn't treat teaching as a day job to be gotten past with as little effort as was possible.

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

#383

Post by mcguire » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 4:59 PM UTC

mox1 wrote: post #362

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…

This is soo very spot on and exactly how I felt about a lot of my humanities classes in college. I almost failed the first one, then learned how to play the game and did a lot better. Sad but true. I always say I loved engineering classes simply because 1 + 1 = 2, not much room for debate there.

Unfortunately, most interesting questions in life don't have single, un-debatable, simple answers.

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

#384

Post by mcguire » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 5:02 PM UTC

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…

Funny story: Most people today agree that Fahrenheit 451 is about (for some definition of "about") the evils of TV, consumerism, and mass-entertainment culture. Bradbury agrees.

Back in the dim, distant past, many people thought it was about censorship. Bradbury, in an interview at the time, agreed.

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

#385

Post by blackflame7000 » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 5:08 PM UTC

isostatic wrote: post #342

RHSeeger wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For any given activity X, there will be people for which X is not a reasonable thing. That doesn't mean X isn't a good thing, it just means it isn't for everyone.

OP stated "I can't stress enough how important youth sports are for kids" Based on a sample size of one. For any given activity X, there will be people for which X is a reasonable thing. That doesn't mean X is really important, it just means it's important for one person.

Here are a number of things youth sports helps foster:

1) leadership qualities

2) coping with adversity

3) how to win and lose gracefully

4) coordination (all sports take practice)

5) fights childhood obesity

6) forces kids to be around other kids instead of in isolation

7) Experience working with a team from an early age

These will work for any child, not just me.

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

#386

Post by mcguire » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 5:14 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #289

ascar wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I absolutely agree with this. This was a constant source of frustration for me in literature classes. I enjoyed exploring alternative solutions and answers. Most science teachers encouraged that, even though th…

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…

"Midnight" by Sara Holbrook

    When it’s Sunday
    and it’s midnight,
    the weekend
    put back in its chest,
    the toys of recreation,
    party times
    and needed rest.


    When I lie in wait
    for Monday
    to grab me by the ear,
    throw me at the shower,
    off to school
    and when I hear
    the train at midnight
    from so many miles away . . .
    when it’s Sunday . . .
    and it’s midnight . . .
    the train
    in passing brays and boasts
    it’s steel-track-straight,
    on schedule,
    arrival times to keep.
    And I meander to its rhythm,
    flopping like a fish.
    Why can’t I get to sleep?
    Why can’t I get to sleep?

(I personally have never really understood poetry. Possibly because I don't have a sense of rhythm.)

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

#387

Post by your-nanny » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 5:18 PM UTC

kermitismyhero wrote: post #350

your-nanny wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In middle school I was placed, by standardized testing, into bonehead classes, where I was extremely bored, not because I was so smart that I knew it already, but because it was boring. I took a writing elective course, impressed the teacher sufficiently that she got me into eighth grade honors English, where my dear teacher lectured on grammar like it was a game of chess. I lived it, but I struggled to get my C. Get…

>where my dear teacher lectured on grammar like it was a game of chess. The greatest teacher I ever had was a middle-school english teacher who marked strictly on the basis of attendance and participation, never opened a textbook, enthusiastically read aloud from books of his students' choice as if he were performing them professionally on stage for half the class time, and spent the other half of the time just casua…

Actually the sentence diagramming was useful introduction to a type of analysis. Not too different from computer science foundations of programming languages, automata, etc

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

#388

Post by mcguire » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 5:21 PM UTC

ascar wrote: post #254

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…

> 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. I absolutely agree with this. This was a constant source of frustration for me in literature classes. I enjoyed exploring alternative solutions and answers. Most science teachers encouraged that, even though th…

"I just put that stanza break in there because when I read it aloud (I’m a performance poet)..."

But why does she pause there? A lack of breath? (She's going to be unconscious by the end of the second stanza.) To emphasize some kind of separation in some aspect of the poem?

I have this strange feeling the author is being intentionally obtuse.

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

#389

Post by kradroy » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 5:23 PM UTC

jknoepfler wrote: post #374

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…

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…

I feel it's more like there's chicken shit everywhere always, but most of it is inconsequential and unremarkable. The exceptional cases (e.g. Theranos) draw attention again to the existence of chicken shit and the dangers of constantly buying into it.

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

#390

Post by kradroy » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 5:43 PM UTC

mox1 wrote: post #362

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…

This is soo very spot on and exactly how I felt about a lot of my humanities classes in college. I almost failed the first one, then learned how to play the game and did a lot better. Sad but true. I always say I loved engineering classes simply because 1 + 1 = 2, not much room for debate there.

Your comment encapsulates most of the controversy and disagreement in this thread.

Many engineers and technically-oriented people are naturally inclined to accept a fixed worldview: binary logic, set theory, F = ma and not F=ma^2, etc. If you reject the accepted worldview of physics, computer science, math, then you're a crank. Following a set list of rules is a safety blanket. There are no alternatives ("no room for debate") so that quiets the mind.

The world of the humanities doesn't have a fixed view and that can result in discomfort. Even everyday life doesn't have a fixed view and it's part of the language game ( from Wittgenstein) we play.