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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)

#401

Post by Bartweiss »

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…

> Nobody cares why she put the stanza break where she did. That's not what the question is asking.

I agree that this is true, but it's worth pointing out that the question does actually say "allows the poet to". Recognizing that the poet's intent is irrelevant means deciding to ignore the explicit text of the question in favor of obeying the internal logic of standardized testing.

Taking the question at face value, Holbrook's objection is just fine: the stanza break allows the poet to take a breath. She put a sentence break between the Sunday and Monday sections to contrast them, then added the stanza break for a different reason altogether. (Yes, the breathing point is between those two sections because they contrast, but if we're being that picky we might also argue that it's not 'allowing' contrast but accommodating an existing contrast.)

I get that most students will answer this correctly, and certainly the other three answers are more wrong than C. But I don't like the idea that "best answer presented" is an adequate standard for simple factual claims. Moreover, I watched English teachers and professors go through agonies trying to teach death of the author, largely because questions like this actively undermine any attempt to think clearly about the difference between text and creator.

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

#402

Post by mcguire »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #206
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…

Now imagine your boss would grade you on how well you can recite a particular co-worker's GoT interpretation, and cut your paycheck if you get too many things wrong - or if you dared to say you disagree with that interpretation. This is how humanities in school feel. Being told some arbitrary interpretation is the truth, being forced to learn it, and being tested on it.

And yet, when I point out that I find The Moon is a Harsh Mistress to be a story about a god-like entity that appears, saves the libertarians from their inability to play well with others, and then disappears before we get to ask any questions about its existence, or The Puppet Masters to be tedious (yeah, I get it, commies bad) and to demonstrate that Heinlein wasn't very good at seeing the consequences of his ideas,...I get a lot of crankiness from the same "humanities are about punishing disagreement" people.

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

#403

Post by MockObject »

kradroy wrote: post #379
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 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 w…

Seems like a perfectly reasonable comment, nevertheless being silently downvoted. Mysterious.

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

#404

Post by kermitismyhero »

your-nanny wrote: post #387
kermitismyhero wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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

I would argue that sentence diagramming is of dubious use outside of an ESL or primary school class. And even then the English language is such a self-contradicting mongrel tongue that it's effectively rule-less.

It's a living, evolving, consensus language. It can't be nailed down to an algorithm. It's a language in which writers who break the rules become legendary. Would James Joyce or Charles Dodgson or the Bard himself have diagrammed a sentence? Heck no. They played with grammar and spelling the way a child plays with a pile of lego: with enthusiasm and imagination and a gleeful disregard for the instructions.

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

#405

Post by MockObject »

mcguire wrote: post #380
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 t…

Very few actual social dynamics are "a grand conspiracy".

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

#406

Post by selimthegrim »

rayiner wrote: post #296
xtian wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re a good test taker, the answers they want are clear, but that’s not the point. The point is that applying this model to art, something which has been essential to the human experience for tens of thousands of years, is a stultification of our culture for no better reason than that we want to measure something. If the goal of education in a democratic society is to produce an informed, well-rounded electorate…

This is a reading test, not an art test. Here, whatever "art" is in the poem, there is also text with plain, objective meaning and discernible structure. The test is directed to the latter, not the former. And that is, by far, the more important thing to teach children. An informed citizenry in a democracy doesn't need art. They do need to be able to convey their thoughts in a structured, clear manner in writing.

This is incredibly dangerous and I’m going to push back hard on this narrative. If informed citizens of a democracy don’t need art, how are they supposed to differentiate between propaganda, nationalist myth making, hate speech attempting to clothe themselves as legitimate attempts at artistic expression? When my mom’s nationalized school in Pakistan had dance classes cancelled by the dictatorship, that wasn’t an anti-democratic attack? When they covered up that statue of Justice in Bangladesh, is that OK because citizens don’t need art? When they said that the national fruit of Bangladesh was the jackfruit so why not have a national religion, you don’t think any time to stop and smell the rose of aesthetics reveals that argument to be the equivalent of GW Bush saying his favorite political philosopher was Jesus Christ?

When Milorad Pavic wrote that book “Dictionary of the Khazars” that was not too far from a call from genocide in print, no aesthetic training would have been useful then? Art correlates with history and I daresay you wouldn’t maintain informed citizens of a democracy don’t need to know history. Art tells you something about the motivations of an elite (which some of those citizens might be a part of someday), and what is chosen for a high culture tells you about where the place might be going.

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

#407

Post by selimthegrim »

empath75 wrote: post #316
rayiner wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a reading test, not an art test. Here, whatever "art" is in the poem, there is also text with plain, objective meaning and discernible structure. The test is directed to the latter, not the former. And that is, by far, the more important thing to teach children. An informed citizenry in a democracy doesn't need art. They do need to be able to convey their thoughts in a structured, clear manner in writing.

> An informed citizenry in a democracy doesn't need art. There's no point in _having_ a democracy without art.

See my reply to him above. I think the demos is taken as a given by him without any thought whence it came.

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

#408

Post by gideon_b »

dragonwriter wrote: post #123
_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…

> 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…

Coaching raises scores on both aptitude and intelligence tests.

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1984-16352-001

https://psycnet.apa.org/buy/2007-03270-007

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/1097-4679(19...

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

#409

Post by singingboyo »

soared wrote: post #371
kabouseng wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Up to maybe 90-95%, I'd agree. Past that... well, that last 5% is often weird bits that you have to specifically have come across before.

For something at a first grade level, consider, say, spelling bees. I read a lot as a kid, and correspondingly did very well on things like that, but across the hundreds or thousands of words these things go through... well, the people at Scripps aren't just reading lots of books.

It's also been my experience that the people who implicitly understand something tend not to want to bother with recommended prep. That was me for CS courses, some calculus, and english/writing, where I got high grades but often not top of the class. I was on the opposite side for history and statistics (and outscored at least some of the people who are far better at those subjects than I am).

Basically, if you're gifted and already have knowledge of a subject, you probably don't really want to spend lots of time studying it. This leaves you vulnerable to the weird 5% of edge cases you haven't seen before. If you don't know the subject, and have to do a lot of prep, you're going to come across those cases during prep.

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

#410

Post by singingboyo »

usgroup wrote: post #304
fjsolwmv wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gifted classrooms are funded by a budget and have a certain number of seats available. In must be a percentile selection (mixed with subjective judgments, diversity, etc)

Anyone with the same percentage score will obviously be in the same percentile ... so if you have a limited number of places and everyone scores the same mark, then the fact that you’re filtering by a percentile doesn’t help you in the slightest: it’s tantamount to picking at random. If none scores 99% then you just don’t take anyone ... in your method if everyone scored 0% you’d still take a bunch. I don’t think tha…

Differentiation between candidates with equal scores is probably done by going through applications and whatever subjective info is provided there. That can be effectively random, but there's not much of an option at that point.

> in your method if everyone scored 0% you’d still take a bunch.

Yes, and they will. My understanding is it's still a normal school, just with a special selection of students; what are they going to do, shut down for the year?

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