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)

#391

Post by mcguire » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 5:44 PM UTC

isostatic wrote: post #339

elliekelly wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also was not being a smart ass. It really bothers me that you even have to clarify something like this. Students should be skeptical of what they're being told. That doesn't make a student a smart ass - it makes them a critical thinker. Teachers who take offense when their "authority" is innocently questioned are doing a massive disservice to their students.

There's two types of people who ask the questions 1) Those that want a response that they can consider. These are critical thinkers. 2) Those that don't care what the response is. These are smart asses. In schools the latter are far more common, and far more likely to speak out

Note that the difference is not necessarily obvious. I was once in several classes with a guy who would ask questions that were just slightly off-topic and odd---possibly about differing interpretations, possibly just trying to completely derail the class. I still don't know which of the two cases was right. I do know he managed to drag the class so that we missed rather a lot.

AI classes, by the way.

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

#392

Post by Bartweiss » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 5:52 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…

This is one of my favorite takes ever on the way we teach literature K-12: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2112

I definitely had some English teachers who were simply bad. Your 'sentence' experience resonates with my teacher who insisted that the five sentence "hamburger" paragraph format was inviolate and marked any paragraph shorter than five sentences as 'incorrect'. (Good luck obeying dialogue rule that way...) But I had a lot of others who actually knew about their topic and cared about teaching it well. A lot of them were open to multiple interpretations of stories; one even managed to competently outline "death of the author" and explain why "the author intended..." wasn't always the right way to look at things.

That was where the problems of the classroom format became painfully obvious. The way we read books wasn't centered on keeping kids interested or even promoting deep analysis. Rather, it was shaped by the need to assign reasonable amounts of homework, and to practice writing brief essays without referencing the text - because that's what standardized tests require. The length and pace of book discussions was based on how long it took to finish the book at 30 pages/night, which also encouraged discussions that were completely invalidated by the next days reading. And the ideal "result" of a book was 40 minutes of writing on a single thesis which had to be simple enough to produce without opening the book.

The result was that we simply didn't learn a lot of useful things which didn't fit the format, like contextual analysis or studying an author's canon. Meanwhile, lots of the things we did learn - close reading, deconstruction, death of the author - came through in ludicrously contrived examples that made them seem idiotic. Failing to teach a subject is a shame, but actively leading students to hate the subject is shameful.

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

#393

Post by btilly » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 5:56 PM UTC

blackflame7000 wrote: post #385

isostatic wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, it fights childhood obesity. None of the rest is universally true. Let me go through them one by one to demonstrate.

1) leadership qualities Constant reminders of how I was at the bottom of the totem pole didn't develop leadership for me. You develop leadership by doing something you are good at, not bad at. My positive experiences only happened much later in life.

2) coping with adversity I got lots of practice with adversity. Particularly when my physical challenges made me a target for bullying. I never noticed that the experience helped me cope with adversity though.

3) how to win and lose gracefully If by luck I wound up on a winning team in PE, it was clear to all that I did not contribute to the victory. I got practice at losing, but never noticed that the other children learned to be particularly graceful at winning.

4) coordination (all sports take practice) Did you notice the bit about my having a medical problem which required therapy? Yes, physical activity builds coordination. But the way it was done in school did not build mine. I wound up fixing that as an adult.

5) fights childhood obesity This I grant. Though it was superfluous in my case. Everyone in my family is skinny until at least 30.

6) forces kids to be around other kids instead of in isolation Given the way it made me a target for bullying, isolation would have been better.

7) Experience working with a team from an early age For me it was so demoralizing that I never felt like I was really part of any team until I was in my 30s. And when I did, it was programming that got me there, not sports.

These will work for any child, not just me. Bullshit. I am a definite counterexample to your theory. As you would have known if you paid attention to what I said before.

I am strongly in favor of all children who are physically capable of it getting exercise. But competitive sports are NOT a good idea for everyone.

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

#394

Post by mcguire » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 5:56 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 have a friend who was in a gifted program when he was growing up. (They didn't have them when and where I grew up. Hmph.) As I understand it, they effectively took the gifted students and put them into their own school.

He says it didn't do much academically or in terms of later life, but it did do something he values very much: it gave him a normal childhood.

According to him, they took the ostracized nerds out of other schools and combined them so that some of them were the jocks of their school, some were the nerds, most were run-of-the-mill students, and so on.

He's pretty damn smart.

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

#395

Post by Bartweiss » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 6:01 PM UTC

mcguire wrote: post #384

yomly wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks for getting the history on that story right. I see the urban legend version all the time, where students say it's about censorship and shout down Bradbury when he explains the "real" meaning about mass entertainment. As far as I can tell it never actually happened, and the whole idea that people are ignoring the author falls apart when you find out that Bradbury has changed his own interpretation.

I don't know that the two readings are incompatible, either. They fit together quite nicely in a reading about voluntary censorship, where popular disinterest makes it easy to peel away information and silence voices on the margins. But it's interesting to see how the focus between the parts shifted, even in Bradbury's mind.

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

#396

Post by Glyptodon » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 6:01 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…

It's true that there are bad choices when it comes to text and interpretation. That doesn't implicate testing, but test construction, which is often poor.

I still distinctly remember a surreal class discussion in high school (more than a decade ago) where classmate after classmate of mine in an AP English class responded to a verbal question about a phrase expressing regret over not doing something as though it'd actually been done and the regret was about having done it. It was like "WTF, most of my classmates have problems with basic reading comprehension?" The question was basic, and the teacher basically went row by row to try and get an answer, and it was clear that a huge proportion of the class so misunderstood the text that they didn't even know how to respond to the question.

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

#397

Post by Bartweiss » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 6:06 PM UTC

mcguire wrote: post #386

rayiner wrote: post #289

Earlier 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…

"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-straigh…

To go along with the text, a quote from the article: "Only guess what? The test prep materials neglected to insert the stanza break. I texted him an image of how the poem appeared in the original publication."

Asking author's-intent questions without checking the author's intent isn't great, but asking students to explain a stanza break that doesn't exist is a particularly exciting sort of unproductive.

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

#398

Post by mcguire » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 6:06 PM UTC

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…

That's the version that doesn't have the stanza break. :-)

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

#399

Post by mcguire » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 6:19 PM UTC

netcan wrote: post #198

Funny... As I write this, the office I work with is abuzz with game of thrones talk. Does Arya fullfil the prophecy. How winter fell to the Starks. If it gets to pints after work it'll be the war of roses, white walkers as a symbol of climate change, dragons as nuclear weapons... We delve into art we like, insert meaning and extend the stories with our interpretations. Sometimes we hope, imagine or expect that the ar…

"You can standardize-test arithmetic, because they's an objective answer."

And yet you can't, because why the answer is wrong is more important that that it is wrong.

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

#400

Post by singingboyo » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 6:20 PM UTC

mcguire wrote: post #386

rayiner wrote: post #289

Earlier 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…

"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-straigh…

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

The first thing most people think of when they think 'poetry' is patterns with a fixed meter and maybe rhyming patterns, but there's a great deal of poetry that doesn't really have either. Instead, those poems use line endings to give breaks and maybe an overarching pattern. Some of it is quite good at making use of those breaks, and they can form a rhythm of a sort, but it's not necessarily an obvious one.

This poem, though, is... weird. It almost seems like there was an attempt to use a rhythm, and then it got busted up by line breaks to try to do something else, and in the process both context and rhythm got broken to the point of making it hard to read.

This being the first time I've come across it, I can't say I'm a fan of the poem. It's alright, but there are strange choices made by the author that I can't get past.