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Standardized tests are designed to serve the needs of the school. Such tests let the teacher and school system assess multiple students efficiently and -- theoretically -- "fairly." They aren't actually designed to serve the needs of students.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That isn't what art is about though. If you feel there's symbolism to you, then that's that. It isn't anything objective, but the author consciously or unconsciously elicited something.
Sure, but then why take one person's subjective experience and turn it into an entire discipline with questions on standardized tests?
Standardized tests are designed to serve the needs of the school. Such tests let the teacher and school system assess multiple students efficiently and -- theoretically -- "fairly." They aren't actually designed to serve the needs of students.
They don't even serve the needs of the school (certainly not of the teachers, who we assume are in this for the kids). They serve the needs of the administrators and politicians.
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…
I walked up to a couple debating what a hand in my painting was holding.
It wasn't holding anything in my creation.
But art, like writing, is subjective.
It's not the only place in the world where the work (educating students) is jeopardised by the evaluation of that work (tests). Tests in schools are even worse, though, because they conflate 2 completely separate issues: the success of the efforts of the education system and the success of the efforts of the student. On the other hand, I will say that standardised testing is good at one thing: predicting which studen…
There are so many examples of things that are terrible to read because the author never edited themselves or bothered to think about what they were trying to get across to the reader.
She present the answer next day and teacher gave her a bad grade.
Better than some other cases ( http://archive.is/TEp6g ) , in which not only is a dadaist bit of a very wild book (which i really like and recommend) used as a test question, the ending was changed so it really really makes no sense!
There is something deeply ironic about a standardized test asking students to analyze a Pinkwater story. It's the sort of thing he would have written a story about, really. :)
I can't recommend Borgel enough, either; it's really good.
I have mixed feelings about this article. On the one hand I’m completely here for the argument that standardized tests aren’t a good way to evaluate poetry (or other sorts of literature). But in the current environment that frequently reduces to an argument that because it’s not obviously quantifiable we shouldn’t do it. That I disagree with. Most problems don’t have objectively quantifiable metrics naturally so bein…
My impression of the article is that we should be giving students better education than requiring them to master tests prepared as cheaply as possible, sacrificing coherency, sold as expensively as possible, administered by randos from craigslist with next to no training. Because that's currently the benchmark for middle schoolers.
That reminds me of a story of a student who got a homework "Explain the writer's intention". The writing was her father's work. So naturally, she asked her dad for the answer which he replied, "I was thinking at the time of this writing was that I want to finish this goddamn writing ASAP". She present the answer next day and teacher gave her a bad grade.
This feels like the literary version of the "what in tarnation would you ever need this new-fangled multiplication for" critiques of common core math. > Holbrook wrote that asking students to guess an author's intent in writing a piece of literature is doomed to be a pointless exercise. It's pedagogy! Students aren't trying to divine the One True Meaning of the piece. They're trying to learn how to read a piece of li…
Don't even get me started on the way mathematics is taught at most schools. For one thing, it isn't. If English were taught the same way, the lessons would consist only of spelling, grammar and punctuation.