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

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/standardized-tests-are-so-bad-i-cant-answer-these_b_586d5517e4b0c3539e80c341

by ilamont • 7 years ago

617 442 7 years ago

huffpost.com

nxrabl• 7 years ago

(2017), and original source is located at https://www.huffpost.com/entry/standardized-tests-are-so-bad...

akubera• 7 years ago

and a nice discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13348672

dang• 7 years ago

Ok, we added the date and changed to that URL from https://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-texas-poem.... Thanks!

ben509• 7 years ago

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 literature, identify literary techniques, and think critically about it. If a student can produce a justifiable answer, they're winning.

I agree that dissecting literature is not fun, and I agree this is probably not the optimal way to teach it. But these are precursors to learning how to read and analyze critically, and we need more of that in society.

fungiblecog• 7 years ago

But they're not being asked to produce a justifiable answer. This is multiple choice with only 1 'correct' answer.

The only way to really test comprehension is through essay questions but then the complaints on subjectivity are raised and we're back at standardised multiple choice

Symbiote• 7 years ago

Britain manages to set questions for the exams taken at ages 16, (17) and 18 with essay-type questions, for most questions of all subjects.

There's a complete paper for GCSE (at 16) English here. Choose the June 2017 one, as the November one has the source material omitted due to copyright.

https://www.aqa.org.uk/subjects/english/gcse/english-languag...

You can skip to the last few pages of the mark scheme to get the idea of how the long-form answers are marked. "Varied and inventive use of structural features, Writing is compelling, incorporating a range of convincing and complex ideas, Fluently linked paragraphs with seamlessly integrated discourse markers"

rcxdude3• 7 years ago

They are given a set of answers and are trying to find the most justifiable among them (note that the questions pretty much all have most likely or some other variant of the phrase in them). The student is tasked with evaluating these interpretations of the poem and picking the one which is most justified, which at least required some understanding of the poem and literary terms.

For example,

The poet includes these lines most likely to suggest that the speaker

—F does not wish to be pushed on a swing

-G wants to deal with the situation alone

-H does not often receive help from others

-J is not physically strong

J is the most obviously wrong, as it is at best irrelevant to the lines in question. F is reasonable if you accept the lines as literal, but it's fairly obviously metaphorical (punning off of the phrase 'mood swing'). H seems relevant in that the passage is about receiving help from others, but it's clearly commenting on how she would react to help, not about the likelyhood of receiving it. J seems the most reasonable: the passage is saying she would push back against attempt to cheer her up, and so concluding she would like to be left alone in this mood is a reasonable interpretation.

Note that the final answer doesn't have to be the one the person taking the test would, it just has to be the most justified and reasonable of the one presented. In terms of evaluating skill at interpreting writing and in terms of evaluating interpretations of this writing, this seems a reasonable approach. Essay questions may be better, and indeed the push to multiple choice is almost certainly to reduce the cost of marking as opposed to any other concerns, but these don't seem like terribly designed multiple choice questions.

Boxbot• 7 years ago

they're not being taught to read a piece of literature, identify literary techniques, or think critically; they're being taught how to choose one "correct" answer from a selection of garbage. whether they can justify that choice or not never enters the picture, this is a standardized test and there is only one acceptable answer.

earenndil• 7 years ago

If you look at the original article[1], it quickly becomes clear that no answer really makes sense, and for many of the questions there are multiple answers that could reasonably be justified, not to mention that the test conflates interpretation with authorial intent.

1: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/standardized-tests-are-so-bad...

drivingmenuts• 7 years ago

It’s a poem meant to be performed, not so much just read. On paper, it’s rather lifeless. I definitely buy her arguments, in that context. Perhaps if the people at Pearson had actually considered that, they could have picked something more appropriate to the task.

morpheuskafka• 7 years ago

If a student can produce a justifiable answer, they're winning.

A multiple-choice, norm-referenced test doesn't measure justifiable answers.

andrepd3• 7 years ago

They're trying to learn how to read a piece of literature, identify literary techniques, and think critically about it. If a student can produce a justifiable answer, they're winning.

Perfectly correct, only that's not what's happening here.

inflatableDodo• 7 years ago

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.

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.

basicplus2• 7 years ago

Now I for, 1 wood, find that too be useful!

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 7 years ago

"My final reflection is this: any test that questions the motivations of the author without asking the author is a big baloney sandwich," she wrote. "Mostly test makers do this to dead people who can’t protest. But I’m not dead. I protest."

I guess that the result of this will be the test makers using long dead authors more.

hprotagonist2• 7 years ago

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!

duskwuff• 7 years ago

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. :)

hprotagonist2• 7 years ago

he probably has, somewhere.

I can't recommend Borgel enough, either; it's really good.

kasey_junk• 7 years ago

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 being comfortable in frameworks that allow for that ambiguity is important.

mannykannot3• 7 years ago

"...so being comfortable in frameworks that allow for that ambiguity is important."

Indeed, but a multiple-choice standardized test question is the antithesis of such an environment.

ppseafield• 7 years ago

In the case of one of the poems in the article, the test makers incorrectly formatted the author's poem, and then asked a question about the format of the poem. That's nuts, right? She even received desperate letters from teachers asking for the answer because the test had made it ambiguous.

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.

DoreenMichele3• 7 years ago

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.

SiempreViernes• 7 years ago

Well, getting a good picture of how a student is doing is important for teaching them properly, so test that provides such a picture efficiently would be serve to clarify the actual needs of the students.

The problem is that tests tend to be subverted into tools for ranking the students, which doesn't serve their learning.

DoreenMichele3• 7 years ago

A test is merely a tool. In the hands of a skilled professional, it can help cast light on the needs of the students.

In actual practice, they tend to not be used that way.

HarryHirsch• 7 years ago

If the students only knew what their needs were. My students need "word problems". Their schooling didn't teach them how to deal with ambiguity or how to make a reasoned argument. Also, in real life you won't encounter the right answer plus four decoy answers.

But they want check-a-box tests. They even went to complain to administration because they weren't getting any. Apparently, I'm asking erroneous [sic!] questions in class. You despair, you do.

DoreenMichele3• 7 years ago

I hear you.

I took a college class. Environmental Biology, iirc. We were running out of time and the professor announced she would be cutting a few things from the curriculum.

Everyone was all "Hurrah! Yes! Less work! Feel free to cut even more and just give us As for doing nothing!"

Except me. I was the killjoy going "What if you actually need to know this stuff for a future class? Or even your job?!"

Everyone gave me the stink eye. I'm such a party pooper.

SimbaOnSteroids• 7 years ago

Also, in real life you won't encounter the right answer plus four decoy answers.

On the contrary, if you've ever looked for programming help on stack overflow you'll be quite familiar with the real life experience of being presented with a right answer and 4 or more decoys.

andrepd3• 7 years ago

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.

analog312• 7 years ago

They serve the needs of Pearson -- the Intuit of K-12 education.

analog312• 7 years ago

Unfortunately, the tests also serve as a driver for the curriculum. Take poetry off the standardized test, and they will have to stop teaching it, because it would take time away from some other tested topic.

philliphaydon2• 7 years ago

I absolutely agree

I dropped out of school because of this. Because I failed writing an essay on world war 1 poetry.

It’s not right to dissect art and fail a student for “wrong” answers.

goto11• 7 years ago

It is absolutely possible to misunderstand poetry. (Not saying you did that)

yifanl• 7 years ago

Even if you misunderstand the intent of the author, you can give a well-reasoned interpretation.

From what I remember of the standardized tests, they were either more interested in marking the structure of the content than the content itself, or looking for keywords and marking off a checklist.

To the snarky cynic in me, this might be good training for resume-writing, but not really how you want to teach your high school students to be good at creative interpretation.

rdiddly3• 7 years ago

Perfect example of mistaking measuring for knowing. Everything that can be measured can be known, but not everything that can be known can be measured.

Correct answer to the question about capitalization: "I don't know; neither do you; somebody could trivially ask the poet; regardless it's not really of primary importance; and arguably (postmodernism) the answer is up to me anyway."

winchling• 7 years ago

mistaking measuring for knowing

Precisely. Another bugbear is questions of the type 'On a scale of 1-10, how convinced are you that measuring is a form of knowing?' with response options 'Not convinced', 'Somewhat convinced', etc.

everdev• 7 years ago

Or simply: "In the scheme of what I want to do with my life it doesn't matter."

dejaime4• 7 years ago

That's a good analogy. It's really hard to "measure knowledge," and in my humble opinion, as someone who once was a teacher, tests are one of the hardest ways of doing so.

skookumchuck9• 7 years ago

tests are one of the hardest ways of doing so

I've never understood how someone could master a subject and yet be unable to answer any questions about it.

In my experience, people who did well on tests tended to understand the topic, and the people who didn't do well made excuses.

oska• 7 years ago

It's really hard to "measure knowledge"

And the idea of doing so is a fairly recent (and I would say toxic) invention. The concept of graded tests, marks and class grades (A, B, C etc) are all only a bit more than 100 years old. They're a product of the industrialisation of schooling.

nothis• 7 years ago

I was skeptical because the headline just sounds _too_ good. But yep, this is as stupid and cynical as it sounds. An a-b-c questionnaire about the meaning of a poem. Wow. Something went WRONG here.

nydel• 7 years ago

is this testing method: a) dumb b) silly c) aromatically identical to balls d) two of the above

andrepd3• 7 years ago

"Forget joy of language and the fun of discovery in poetry, this is line-by-line dissection, painful and delivered without anesthetic."

Describes my experience with $first_language classes in school to a tee. I love reading and learning and discussing stuff. I loathed those hours where we were told to cram the (god-given) standardised interpretation of the problem, no matter how little sense it made to you or how you might have an alternative opinion or assessment. Stifling all creativity and capacity for independent thought, not to mention killing the joy of reading in millions of kids.

mikekchar2• 7 years ago

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 students will do well at standardised tests in further schooling. This may sound useless, but if you consider that the education system is what it is, you can help students either get better at the system or choose a different path after their compulsory term is over (like going to a trade school, running a shop, etc, etc).

In my brief stint at teaching English, I always tried to separate the activities of learning English and passing tests in order to progress on to further education. If you just want to learn English, there is no need for evaluation. You don't need to fit it into X years of school. You don't have to hit some arbitrary school board imposed targets. You just have to learn English. IMHO a teacher should always be there to helps students learn (and especially help them learn how to learn by themselves).

However, the other role exists and is arguably more important in the students' school years. You need to help the students align themselves with the careers that they are eventually going to take. That this involves considerable hoop-jumping is very unfortunate, but it is what it is. Students shouldn't confuse being educated with having a high mark on a test.

2muchcoffeeman• 7 years ago

I really hate literature as a subject, but I always thought that English as a subject was to understand how to structure things like arguments, how to be concise, to develop decent grammar.

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.

mikekchar2• 7 years ago

Just to be clear, I was teaching English as a foreign language :-) But I agree with you!

goodcanadian2• 7 years ago

Upvoted specifically for:

Students shouldn't confuse being educated with having a high mark on a test.

It reminds me of one of my favourite quotes, attributed to Mark Twain, but a bit of googling suggests that the attribution is questionable. To paraphrase:

Never let schooling interfere with your education.

pbhjpbhj5• 7 years ago

UK Education Act says that children's parents are responsible for their receiving an education.

This has been commuted by the Tory government to "parents are fined if their children are not in school".

I find that very telling.

megy• 7 years ago

I mean, so? She writes poems. Why should that mean she is good at analyzing poems? Are game players good at writing games, and vice-versa? Are people who eat a lot good at cooking? Are runners great at designing shoes?

philliphaydon2• 7 years ago

Poetry is a form of art. The artist has their own meaning behind their work. Art has its own meaning to the person viewing reading hearing it. If one person gets different meaning and feeling from art, to another person, who is right and who is wrong? Neither. You can use it to understand how someone interrupts the art but you can’t fail them because their interruption was different to yours.

edflsafoiewq• 7 years ago

I agree that the author doesn't get to dictate the reading of a poem (nor does the test-maker), but these questions are usually formulated to explicitly reference the intentions of the author (the "author's purpose"). Although, now that I look at a few, it looks like the common language is "The author most likely did so-and-so in order to...".

But more honest language ("What does this line mean?") would erase the veneer of objectivity; hermeneutical questions do not have "right" answers you can pick from a list of multiple choices.

joesb• 7 years ago

But more honest language ("What does this line mean?") would erase the veneer of objectivity; hermeneutical questions do not have "right" answers

"When you say it honestly, it looks bad. So don't say it that way".

Not targeting at you, obviously you are explaining the thought process of the exam maker, but that kinda shows the issue with them.

They looked at the question and realize that there's no right answer for these kind of question to be made in to a multiple choice question. But instead of changing the test to something else, or making it a free text answer, they choose to play with wording of the question to hide the problem with it.

nradov• 7 years ago

No one is "good" at analyzing poems. There are no objective standards for determining quality of analysis (beyond the trivialities of proper spelling and grammar).

AllegedAlec2• 7 years ago

Death of the Author is a bullshit idea. The only person who knows what the writer's intention was when writing a piece of literature is the author him/herself. Any alternative interpretation is fanfiction at best.

learnstats22• 7 years ago

Would the question(s) be better if it asked it in a different way, i.e.

instead of "Dividing the poem into two stanzas allows the poet to―" the question could ask "The division of the poem into two stanzas has the effect of-"

rather than presuming to know what the author's intent was.

EFruit• 7 years ago

Texas' STAAR tests are administered in part by Pearson Assessments, a testing company that Holbrook called a "sadistic behemoth."

I have never heard a single good thing about Pearson. Having been assessed by them in Public schools, I think the consensus is well-earned.

smudgymcscmudge• 7 years ago

My neighbor says they pay pretty well. So there’s that. At least if you’re at the VP level.

pts_• 7 years ago

Off tangent but once I worked for a Pearson software contractor and they talked of their client with their nose turned up, as if they were the king's favourite in the middle ages. Cringe.

AllegedAlec2• 7 years ago

Their textbooks are pretty good. Campbell and Reece is still the bible for biologists around the world.

foxfired• 7 years ago

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 people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.”

― Ernest Hemingway

leejoramo• 7 years ago

I remember reading that that same quote while reading the book!

smt88• 7 years ago

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.

gatherhunterer2• 7 years ago

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-aggrandizement. As an adult one should be aware of the general public perception of one’s education. I grew up on standardized tests like the one in the article and even as a teenager I knew they were abysmal.

pishpash2• 7 years ago

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.

nitrogen• 7 years ago

Sure, but then why take one person's subjective experience and turn it into an entire discipline with questions on standardized tests?

skookumchuck9• 7 years ago

There are people who create art, and those who study/analyze art. I've often suspected the latter were just seeing pictures in clouds.

fenomas• 7 years ago

"When art critics get together they discuss form and meaning; when artists get together they talk about where you can get cheap turpentine", as the expression goes.

(Usually attributed to Picasso but seems to be apocryphal)

Zarath2• 7 years ago

I disagree, I think it's easy to look at this quote and say "yeah it doesn't really mean anything". But just because the author didn't intend for something, that doesn't mean it can't be interpreted that way.

Yes the ocean is the ocean, and the sea is the sea, and the fish is the fish, but if you were just to literally take the story at face value, it would be boring. Things come to be symbolic through their participation in the story. The fish doesn't represent anything literally. But the fish, and the man's battle with the fish, can be abstracted to any medium... that's the whole point of the fictional story. You're telling the story, but what is the point of the story, what is the subtext? The story is really about determination, and respect for another living being, the fish and the sea are simply the medium through which the real story is told.

massivecali• 7 years ago

I had an art show once.

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.

gumby• 7 years ago

But you see it was your own blindness that caused you not to realize what the hand was holding, though your subconscious expressed it. Of course you can't see this!

Yes I am being sarcastic but I actually heard this kind of comment about my then wife's work.

anbop• 7 years ago

One mark of a good classical education is that the literal reading is more meaningful than the allegorical.

C1sc0cat2• 7 years ago

Not sure I would agree with you some of the classical Greek plays have to be read with an understanding of what was happening at the time.

mykowebhn• 7 years ago

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 want to say indirectly.

1) Things tend to stick in our brains the more we have to work to gain that knowledge. If someone imparts knowledge to you and you take it in passively this knowledge tends not to stick around in our brains as well as if you had to struggle to acquire this knowledge.

2) Many times in our history what an artist said or wrote could get that artist killed. As a result, they tended to mask the true meaning of their message using allegory and/or metaphor.

philwelch• 7 years ago

I don't think artists intentionally encode secret messages or deep meanings into their work, but it doesn't necessarily have to be intentional. Or you could just stop caring about intentionality and just acknowledge that you're basically cloudwatching.

komali2• 7 years ago

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 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.

legohead• 7 years ago

I read Crime and Punishment for the first time recently. found it quite boring and with limited meaning. but I am a 40 year old man and understood the concepts the book was introducing a long time ago.

I feel like with the advent of the internet, shocking concepts/ideas are hard to come by. I'm sure ideas in the book were provocative "back then," but nowadays, not so much.

I even watched some lectures on youtube discussing the book, which brought to light a thing or two, but still nothing of significance for me.

m0zg2• 7 years ago

That's probably because you've read it in English. For the life of me I don't get why non-Russian people read Russian classical literature. Just don't. It is true that there aren't really any Western authors of the same stature as Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, but really, you aren't really reading what they wrote. Their work requires quite a bit of thought, and that thought requires quite a bit built-in stuff that a native wouldn't even notice.

30% of the meaning is not there because you don't have the same cultural background. Another 15-20% is lost in translation. What remains is still formidable, but nowhere near as good as the original work. I happen to also have recently re-read Crime and Punishment, but in my native Russian, after a gap of some 25 years. I've found it very vivid, engaging, and full of nuance I just wasn't even able see when I was a teenager. Likewise I have fairly recently re-read War and Peace, and it is now my favorite book of all time. When I was much younger it seemed "too long" and extremely boring, because it requires quite a bit of lived experience to fully appreciate, and not just any experience, but experience that only someone who has lived in Russia for an extended period of time (not necessarily originally Russian) would have. Really fundamental, basic things, which Americans just can't even begin to understand. I.e. how the government is perceived there (hint: Tsar-like figure is still perceived as a desirable thing), what it means to have a land war on your soil (Russia had many, some extremely devastating), Russian ideas about patriotism, yet at the same not liking how they do things over there, Russian fatalism, how women are perceived by men and the other way around, etc, etc.

Having spent 20+ years in the US and having traveled quite a bit, I've recently read The Grapes of Wrath. I liked the book, and the use of language in it (it almost reads like poetry at times), but I very strongly suspect I didn't quite "get" it to the extent that an American would, for the same reasons I alluded to above. And I have vastly more "American" lived experience than most Americans have "Russian".

p1esk3• 7 years ago

Actually... (sorry, couldn’t resist), I’m not sure why you expected something shocking or even provocative. The book is a deep dive into the mind of someone who decides to commit a murder, does it, and then has to live with it. That someone happens to be a relatively normal guy who you can understand and even relate to.

At least that was my impression of the book when I read it 25 years ago (I was 16 at the time).

dehrmann• 7 years ago

It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

Macbeth Act 5, scene 5, 19–28

oh_sigh• 7 years ago

"My favorite book is Moby Dick. No frou-frou symbolism. Just a story of a man who hates an animal. And that's enough."

-Ron Swanson

nimih• 7 years ago

Only tangentially related, but one of the most incredible accomplishments of Parks & Rec seems to be that Ron Swanson's lines are equally loved by folks who get the joke and folks who don't even realize that there is one.

Bukhmanizer• 7 years ago

Why do people here seem to think that the only form literary analysis is direct symbolism? Is it the only thing covered in the American high school curriculum?

munchbunny• 7 years ago

No, but it's seen by many engineers/scientists as too hand wavy to be worth spending mental cycles teaching/practicing it.

Personally, I believed that until I began to think about literary analysis like math. Some people make careers out of it because there are situations where it has real impact (law, for example). For the rest of us, it's a form of intellectual play as a proxy for other mental skills.

You might come up with some wonky and possibly wrong theorem or some useless formula, but I wouldn't jump to say "you're wasting your time" because the process is the valuable part of the exercise.

daveFNbuck• 7 years ago

It's the thing I remember most from my high school curriculum because it was the most annoying part of English classes. The majority of what I was taught was boring and forgettable.

twic• 7 years ago

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

kortilla2• 7 years ago

The playwright is still within his/her realm to call bullshit when people claim that the playwright “meant X”.

shaki-dora2• 7 years ago

It’s possible to leave traces of whatever inner conflict tortures you in your writing without even knowing.

For example, the disdain of the humanities in this thread (and generally on HN and the tech community) is just begging for an explanation, because the stated reasons (entirely useless, plain wrong) are neither true, nor would they seem sufficient to warrant the level of emotion.

So there’s something else in the subtext, such as status anxiety, even though the authors would vehemently deny it.

TeMPOraL6• 7 years ago

It’s possible to leave traces of whatever inner conflict tortures you in your writing without even knowing.

Identifying those borders on psychoanalysis. Even trained medical professionals have problems with that.

the disdain of the humanities in this thread (and generally on HN and the tech community) is just begging for an explanation

It's simple - humanities as most of us here were exposed to, have high propensity to bullshit. Bullshit in the On Bullshit (2005) sense - that is, not caring in the slightest whether what one says is true or false.

As for heightened emotions - well, for many of us, humanities at school were not just the first major exposure to bullshit, but also a situation in which you were graded on your ability to eat it and produce more of your own. The dislike may be particularly higher amount STEM crowd because STEM interests are much less tolerant to bullshit - there are right and wrong answers in hard sciences and engineering, and telling them apart is paramount.

usrusr• 7 years ago

On the other hand you have art talking about sensitive subjects that either cannot be talked about openly at all, or where the artist feels uncomfortable doing so. You can listen to whole albums of the B52s telling yourself that no LGBT topics are touched and it's already great fun, but the experience gets so much more interesting when you start reading between the lines.

And then there is the whole topic of non-deliberate creative decisions. I guess Tolkien was truly as convinced of not writing about his war experience as he liked to tell people, but "the enemy in the east" and so on, it all fits too well.

stcredzero2• 7 years ago

Herman Melville was said to have been amazed at the symbolism attributed to him in Moby Dick.

pocpoczoc• 7 years ago

This massive diatribe is symbolic of Melville's inability to stick to the fucking point.

stcredzero2• 7 years ago

Don't worry, your diatribe isn't that massive. Actually, I thought Melville's point was to digress. Wasn't the point to digress into all these side details out of the joy of describing the whaling world? (So I have read in commentaries.)

xtracerx• 7 years ago

Maybe I was a jaded student, but I always thought of these questions as a game of answering what I know they want me to answer. These types of questions are obviously dumb, and they shouldn't be included in multiple-choice tests.

ACow_Adonis2• 7 years ago

perhaps I'm even more jaded, but I assumed that was the point of all assessment material and procedures.

of course, this didn't really help me when I was younger, because its taken me almost 30 years to realise practically no one really cared whether assessment was valid or not, just about marks.

jimmaswell• 7 years ago

I felt like those questions mostly weren't that bad and had a clear "best" answer.

philips• 7 years ago

Former US poet laureate Billy Collins wrote a poem about this sort of thing:

The Effort

  Would anyone care to join me
  in flicking a few pebbles in the direction
  of teachers who are fond of asking the question:
  "What is the poet trying to say?"

  as if Thomas Hardy and Emily Dickinson
  had struggled but ultimately failed in their efforts—
  inarticulate wretches that they were,
  biting their pens and staring out the window for a clue.

  Yes, it seems that Whitman, Amy Lowell
  and the rest could only try and fail
  but we in Mrs. Parker's third-period English class
  here at Springfield High will succeed

  with the help of these study questions
  in saying what the poor poet could not,
  and we will get all this done before
  that orgy of egg salad and tuna fish known as lunch.

It continues on for a few more stanzas; consider purchasing a copy of Ballistics for the full poem. The rest of the book is filled with memorable insights as well.

derp_dee_derp2• 7 years ago

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.

lenova• 7 years ago

Try this instead:

https://hackerweb.app/

dragonwriter5• 7 years ago

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.

leggomylibro• 7 years ago

I once asked a co-worker what they liked about poetry.

"It's like reading a short story, but the author has less time to make their point."

That was a fun place to work.

lisper• 7 years ago

My own effort, written when I was in high school:

    A poem is a thought that tried
    In vain, just once, before it died
    To reach the page's right-hand side

mherdeg• 7 years ago

My two reference materials on this topic are:

(1) Bruce McAllister's symbolism survey - a 16 year old high school student straight-up asked bestselling authors whether they put symbolism in their work, with various replies - https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/12/05/document-the-...

(2) Ogden Nash's "Very Like A Whale" - Nash wrote a short, rhyming essay about how frustrating it was that authors sometimes try to use rhetorical techniques to convey meaning obliquely - http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~pahk/poems/021221.html . It always makes me giggle.

jacquesm2• 7 years ago

Excellent!

I wonder what he was trying to say with that poem ;)

V-2• 7 years ago

I found it at http://jatodd.pbworks.com/f/The+Effort-Billy+Collins.pdf and I got a strange delight out of the irony seeing it dissected (on page 2) :)

ezoe• 7 years ago

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.

Dylan16807• 7 years ago

That's cute but one single thought he had is not even close to a description of overall intent.

_7fvc• 7 years ago

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 statistics training, you'll see this score is like shooting yourself in the foot. You're more likely selecting prepared test takers than gifted students.

I congratulated my daughter on her score. We went out for dinner and got tasty pastries for dessert. Life is too short to waste our time on these dumb tests.

sytelus4• 7 years ago

I doubt the value of gifted programs. All parents innately want their child to be "gifted" but they don't understand what this program really means. They basically just accelerate by full grade or two while raising the expectations for each kid to another level. This is unnecessary burden on kids with a high risk that they can lose confidence or even burn out at tender age not willing to learn anything any more. I think there are probably 1 in 1000 kids who are going to earn PhD by the age of 18. May be gifted program is great for them but for everyone else parents should probably actively avoid them.

SpaceManNabs• 7 years ago

gifted programs in lower income areas are often the only path for decent class rooms that kids there will have.

The "standard" class rooms are often too interrupted, occasionally by violence. I once saw an 8th grader tackle the hell out of a large administrator. The 8th grader was giant too though.

ip26• 7 years ago

That's exactly what some kids need though. Forget about loaded terms like "gifted", some students just pick up the material more quickly and rapidly become bored to tears. Doesn't matter why- are they good at studying? Is the material presented in the way they learn best?- they need to be challenged.

dragonwriter5• 7 years ago

They basically just accelerate by full grade or two while raising the expectations for each kid to another level.

That's...not accurate. Gifted programs tend to increase the degree of personalization more than anything. Yes, most people who qualify for gifted programs at probably going to end up targeting at least a full grade up in each core curriculum area, but the programs don't do a straight bump.

This is unnecessary burden on kids with a high risk that they can lose confidence or even burn out at tender age not willing to learn anything any more.

Gifted programs are actually targeted narrowly at a segment that is more at risk of burning out by being subjected to the unmodified mainstream curriculum.

I think there are probably 1 in 1000 kids who are going to earn PhD by the age of 18.

There pretty clearly are not.

ajdlinux2• 7 years ago

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/valedictorian award in my graduating class of ~30 kids in my rural high school, that went to a regular non-accelerated classmate.

I don't regret it in the slightest.

btilly5• 7 years ago

Here is a data point for you. The high school dropout rate among kids with an IQ of 130+ is approximately 20 times the high school dropout rate among the general population.

Gifted programs reduce that.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gifted_At-Risk for more data points.

throwawaymath2• 7 years ago

It depends on the gifted program. I was in one in high school and rather enjoyed it, though it was a pretty wide range of "gifted" (top 10% of my age cohort). I wouldn't characterize my experience as raising the the grade, but rather by diving into different material alongside different people. The material was ostensibly advanced/sophisticated sure, but it was categorically different from what would be encountered in the higher grades at the same "level."

A friend of mine was in a much more rigorous gifted program (through Stanford) and I think it was the best thing that ever happened to him. He had a very poor home life but he's phenomenally brilliant (he's one of a specific handful of people I've personally met who I use that term for). All he really enjoyed doing from the time he was 12 was reading math and physics books. Going through the gifted program put him on a path that exercised his talents in a way that he found personally very fulfilling. He ended up finishing undergrad at Harvard before the age most kids become sophomores, and then completed a PhD from Harvard before the age most people even begin one.

Then he went on to work for the NSA and, later, a hedge fund. Those things probably look soulless to a lot of people, but he's very happy.

ganzuul• 7 years ago

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.

sytelus4• 7 years ago

So what is not "normal" school?

felipemnoa• 7 years ago

>She didn't study for it as recommended by our school district.

Kind of reminds of those fortune telling scams. i.e. The cards that you deal yourself will tell you the future. They tell you not to do it a second time in a row though ( for obvious reasons)

You showed too much respect for something not worthy of respect in my opinion.

dragonwriter5• 7 years ago

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 that high, she needs to answer the exam perfectly.

Irrespective of one’s current grade level, it doesn't require answering an exam perfectly to get a 98%. It might to get a 98 percentile score (depending on what other people taking the score get).

If you have some statistics training, you'll see this score is like shooting yourself in the foot.

If you have some statistics training you'll recognize the difference between percentages and percentiles and which of the former corresponds to a perfect score.

The test-retest validity of IQ tests (which tests for gifted programs either expressly are or are equivalent to) is such that it's not unreasonable at all to think that people will consistently score at about the same place based on ability over a short time period (over a longer span there'll be some variation) and that being a prepared test taker isn't a particularly significant factor, though anxiety about testing or the particular test could depress scores and soothing that is the main benefit of test prep.

Yes, the levels most districts use a gifted cutoff are very high (usually 97th-99th percentile). Yes, that means very few (1-3%) will make the cut. No, this doesn't mean the people that make the cut are just test-taking prodigies.

usgroup3• 7 years ago

If the optimisation problem is “pick a set of kids that can finish the curriculum quicker as measured by standardised tests” then any effective screening test is likely to select for “test taking prodigies” since that is the leading measure.

RE percentage vs percentile: I think you may be wrong here. Take for example, uni exams. 40% is the pass mark here in old Blighty. The exams are standardised and the 40% threshold is not a percentile. In fact, it makes almost no sense at all to stackrank every cohort of test takers. It wouldn’t be fair at all not comparable over time. I think the parent poster is correct. Doubtless the empirical distribution of real scores are used to decide cutoffs for grades, by 99% in the parents posts very likely refers to a percentage.

kabouseng• 7 years ago

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] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law

gideon_b• 7 years ago

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...

atian2• 7 years ago

Many school gifted programs follow Mensa requirement of top 2 percentile. I'm not sure the % score was mapped directly to the questions answered correctly.

AstralStorm5• 7 years ago

There are somewhat few notable people from MENSA... It is not a great standard for giftedness, more of a smart people club. People who do things are more often than not either too busy to join this club or see no point in it.

gozzoo• 7 years ago

98% sounds a lit like overfitting

jtms• 7 years ago

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.

JimboOmega• 7 years ago

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.

thaumaturgy• 7 years ago

I was fortunate enough to get into a GATE extracurricular program when I was in elementary school in the East Bay, a long time ago. In my case, I got to socialize more with some peer groups, visit a planetarium, make oddball things, get a good grasp of the sciences way ahead of the regular school curriculum, and participate in a problem-solving program that influenced my thinking for the rest of my life.

BUT: in retrospect, those programs are mostly for kids who just happened to be fortunate enough to be born into the right circumstances at the right time. East Bay public schools were pretty good at the time, I was born just in time to learn about computers just ahead of the rest of the world, I had a somewhat stable home life, and my family supported learning and nerdy hobbies.

I was a social outcast for most of my youth too, but that had less to do with GATE and more to do with my family's obsession with being smarter than everyone else, which made me an insufferable, lazy little jerkwad. It took getting out into the world in my late teens to begin realizing just how much of an idiot I really was.

So, YMMV, but if I were a parent I'd at least give a local GATE program a try. (But also sports.)

blackflame70003• 7 years ago

I was also in the gifted program and the thing that helped me the most was getting involved in youth sports like little league, rec basketball, and soccer. It allowed me to be friends with both the smart kids and athletic kids. I can't stress enough how important youth sports are for kids

ryandrake• 7 years ago

I was in a similar situation. My elementary school recommended to my parent that I skip a grade and join the [GRADE+1] cohort, which would remove me from my (already small) group of friends. This ended up happening over my strong, for a 10 year old, objection. In the first quarter I deliberately engineered my grades to be all C’s (was previously a straight A kid) which triggered school admin to reverse the decision. I consider this my first “achievement unlocked” moment.

Ensorceled3• 7 years ago

It was the best thing that happened to both of my step kids. They met great people, learned amazing things, socialized with people who had common interests and talent. Best of all they stopped hating school and flourished.

I only regret it wasn't around when I was young.

btilly5• 7 years ago

I am sorry that your experience was so terrible, but the plural of anecdote is not data.

For a counter-anecdote, my experience of gifted programs is that it was the first place where I wasn't bullied for being more interested in books than sports. This didn't help me fit in with other kids my own age, but it did wonders for my self-confidence and significantly improved my odds of having a decent life.

My wife's experience is similar.

The moral is that gifted programs are not in and of themselves good or bad. What they are is good for some kids and bad for others. The trick is figuring out which is better for any particular kid.

code_duck• 7 years ago

I would imagine it varies a lot. I went through three different programs in my midsize town growing up, with different class sizes and teachers. They varied in many ways and one way was the attitude of other children. When the program was large, like a magnet school, there weren’t social problems. When we had a class of 12 kids in a school of 300 we were ostracized.

I stood out so much in normal classrooms that it was difficult to participate. I was about three years or more ahead of everyone, reading at a college level in fourth grade while some students still struggled to read compound sentences. I felt very fortunate to be put in a class with a few people my age who were at a similar level of intellectual ability.

your-nanny2• 7 years ago

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. Getting extra credit for reading Chaucer, on my own initiative, probably made the difference--or more likely my teachers good will and support. Teachers count.

Not sure I would have ended up where I did but for their intervention.

TallGuyShort• 7 years ago

I think there's a right and a wrong way to run these programs. Some schools just pick a couple of outliers and make it obvious they're outliers. If you're going to group some kids by ability for some classes, do it to everyone. Yes, a few kids are really advanced. A few others are almost there. Don't make the first group so uniquely isolated at the expenses of making the second group miss out on similar opportunities entirely. I see the benefit of keeping everyone together some of the time, but I'm screaming inside when I see my daughter reading at a 3rd grade level next to kids who still don't know the alphabet, and her teacher has to keep them all in one big reading group. She has an alternative but it's strictly an addition to all her other work: which is how it was for me, so I got A's in the gifted program, and D's in my regular school work because it seemed pointless and stupid. My high school was only told about the D's so it took me 2 years to get back into Honors classes. Whoever designed that program was not gifted.

Let everyone spend some time grouped by ability. Don't just burden them with more busy work. And please make sure the teachers running special programs have a clue what they're doing to kids...

edit: Furthermore, I always thought it pathetic that I went from being a very average student in 2 other countries, moved to America and was suddenly seen as a gifted genius who was years ahead of my peers in math and science. I've obviously never seen it that way - I think kids are capable of for more than the American school system expects of them, but their intellectual growth is being stunted at a very young age.

cglace• 7 years ago

I was in the gifted program in elementary school and it was the absolute best part of school. I was normally completely bored but "horizons" was the only class I got to learn at my own pace, explore what I found interesting, and be with other kids like me.

dkarl• 7 years ago

I don't think that's always true. I found "gifted" programs much less isolating that regular school. I was lucky enough to participate in some summer academic programs, and while I still had a lot of social difficulty, at least there was a feedback loop where people would engage with what I was saying and I could evaluate and adjust my behavior according to people's reactions. I remember gaining a lot of social confidence in those summer programs and going back home and starting the school year thinking, I'm finally catching on, I've learned how to engage in this back-and-forth where I interact with people and watch their reactions to me, I've learned how to learn, only to go right back to being isolated and mystified in school, unable to see a relationship between my behavior towards people and their behavior back towards me.

For me, I needed to have a little bit more in common with my peers before I could even get traction socially. In fact, it might have been a net negative for me to be surrounded by other kids and cut off from them at the same time, because it messed with my confidence so badly. In the long run it is proving harder to unlearn the bad habits that stemmed from that than it was to learn basic social skills when I got the chance.

mcguire12• 7 years ago

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.

fancyfish• 7 years ago

As another anecdote, I was in one and do recommend it. Yes, the social isolation is a real thing and you have to work harder to meet other kids outside the program. However, I made lasting friendships with others in the program who remain my closest friends today. I think I covered more ground academically and it set me up well to take advanced classes in middle school. Note, this was in a well-funded public school and over 15 years ago so your mileage may vary.

rcxdude3• 7 years ago

is the 98% a percentile or a percentage of available marks? In that case it does seem like a poorly designed test. Tests I've seen which are designed to discriminate those at the high end of ability tend to be much harder, not have pass requirements in terms of marks (they may still take the top 2 percent of the curve, but this will correspond to ~75% of available marks instead of the high 90%)

saagarjha3• 7 years ago

I took the GATE exam in elementary school (which has a similar 98th percentile cutoff) and the test was an absolute joke. Lots of ambiguous pattern matching that I managed to cheese through because I had a decent sense of what the test "wanted" me to put down (FWIW, I didn't end up getting anything out of it, even though I scored in the 99th percentile, because the school closed the program the following year for "lack of funds"). Really: don't read too much into that test.

csunbird• 7 years ago

because I had a decent sense of what the test "wanted" me to put down

I think this is what they are actually looking for

nmca• 7 years ago

She may have dodged a bullet - some GATE programs are rubbish, others excellent and it's hard to know what you'll get.

Ensorceled3• 7 years ago

That's weird that she was expected to study for it, sounds like it was just testing if she was "ahead of grade level". So yeah, doing it wrong.

When my step kids were tested they were interviewed by a psychologist for a couple of hours and did various IQ and aptitude tests. The report was quite thorough.

AstralStorm5• 7 years ago

I mean, you could have a separate "prep test" which is an entirely different purpose and would have to be really super secret on questions and answers including timing.

Essentially, this checks if you bribed the right people to have the answers for previous tests or even this one, connections and decent enough memory.

Welcome to America's latest educational scam.

A test to gauge progress is supposed to be almost fully secret and unpredictable to not bias for people cramming previous answers.

matwood2• 7 years ago

I took the test in elementary school, and was in the gifted program for almost my entire public school life. I vaguely remember the test, and it doesn't seem like something that could really be studied for - practiced maybe. It was very IQ test like when I took it many years ago. Perhaps it has changed.

pbhjpbhj5• 7 years ago

Is the test out of 100%?

I did a maths exam once where the top score possible was 120% (ironic!). The idea was you could ordinarily complete only enough to get 100%, but if you did complete more you got the marks for it.

Why don't they make it harder and differentiate more easily?

mieseratte2• 7 years ago

I did a maths exam once where the top score possible was 120% (ironic!). The idea was you could ordinarily complete only enough to get 100%, but if you did complete more you got the marks for it.

Was your test developed by Spın̈al Tap? What is the purpose for doing a test this way?

empath752• 7 years ago

Gifted programs were mostly just designed to segregate white students from minority students.

hjk05• 7 years ago

You seem to have a bias in this case. Obviously the will accept higher scores before lower scores. It would make no sense to eliminate anyone who scored above 98% based on an assumed “they cheated or trained too much” assertion. Just to include the “addequately but not too good students” who are scoring around 95%, which must be objectively better because that’s where your daughter happened to land. In the alternate reality you would be on here complaining that your daughter didn’t get in even though she had a perfect score and instead a bunch of kids with only 95% got in...

I hate to break it too you, but there’s no conspiracy or broken system, a lot of other kids just scored better than your daughter.

zelos• 7 years ago

Isn’t the basic problem the use of multiple choice? Being able to write a few hundred words arguing an opinion about a poem (right or wrong) has some value. Picking an arbitrarily chosen ‘right’ answer from a list has almost none. I don’t think I’ve ever had a multiple choice exam in English Lit - actually, I don’t remember multiple choice in any serious exam.

ultrarunner• 7 years ago

Well, yes, but actually no. I grew up with both parents teaching in public schools in subjects that cannot be tested in a multiple choice format. They both sat down every night in front of the tv and shuffled papers from inbox to outbox, quickly scribbling a score on each. Very very little thought seemed to go into the content of the work, and I always wondered if they were scanning the names in the top right corner to make their judgment. I never did ask, though. Either way, I’m not sure much could change; even without giving these kids a fair shake, it still took hours to grade these. It’s a broken system and the only palatable response seems to be to throw more money at it and hope for different results.

mieseratte2• 7 years ago

and I always wondered if they were scanning the names in the top right corner to make their judgment.

This is most certainly a thing. Even funnier, I had a few A's on assignments I never even turned in.

pbhjpbhj5• 7 years ago

But then you'd have to pay examiners to mark it, and that means less profit. If it can't be marked by a robot, why bother with an education system. /s

sytelus4• 7 years ago

I think few people probably knows how textbooks are written. Given millions of students spend millions of hours on these textbooks, one would expect there is a great care taken in writing textbooks. This is often not true and it was very well described by Richard Feynman. He was so repulsed by the quality of textbooks that this Nobel prize winning physicist decided to be part of committee. To his surprise, in committee meetings no one came prepared, they often missed meetings and decisions were finally made ad-hoc. He was so frustrated by whole process that (I think) eventually gave up. I suspect similar thing happens in how exams are written. People who write questions aren't often deep thinkers who took at most care but rather low level leaf nodes who happen to have time for doing more work for peanuts.

mikojan• 7 years ago

Nobody has time for that. The hypocrisy rises to heaven when you decry "low level leaf nodes" even though they showed up and you didn't.

pbhjpbhj5• 7 years ago

In the UK exams are privatised, you buy the exams from an exam board. They often have massive errors in them and clearly haven't been properly tested - I used to do mark checking.

500,000+ kids take the papers at £30+ a time. You'd think for £15M you could afford to do things properly; but of course the key metrics are profit/bonus/wages.

Moreover the boards compete in part on making their tests easier, or at least that they give the highest grades. You can't objectively compare students in such a system, it's moronic.

atian2• 7 years ago

You are being measured to derive an acceptable answer based on the framework which you are taught against. Work is usually not taken as it was meant to be perceived. The presumption is naive.

These are not actionable findings.

Veen5• 7 years ago

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.

neilv• 7 years ago

Thank you. I think a lot of us in tech (including myself) have had only shallow/imperfect exposure to the humanities in school, and then later seen many noisy/poor/confusing examples from the field.

However, I've known some people well-educated in the humanities, and (for example) I've often seen them to have on-point insight into real-world situations, while most of us with engineering/science-heavy educations are fumbling around with our overconfident opinions based on little/mistaken information.

Which is not to say that there might not be a lot of noise in any field, but it would be foolish to naively dismiss someone who's invested many years in intense reading and analysis in any of those fields. Surely that person knows things and has gotten good at some kinds of thinking that we haven't even heard of.

Consider the example of someone who took and Web/app framework class, but has no experience in CS basics, algorithm design, systems architecture, engineering process and collaboration, product lifecycles and maintainability, etc. They can make a site/app, and don't see what all the fuss and perceived posturing in the field is about.

jayd16• 7 years ago

You don't find it odd that this analysis of meaning does not require meaning? Isn't it more like creative writing at the high school level?

AstralStorm5• 7 years ago

This means it is worthless for a multiple choice test and should be a write-up with argumentation. A miniature dissertation.

Like, say, maturity exam is here in Poland. They're a pain to grade, have to be very careful guidelines and alert examiners.

dannyw• 7 years ago

I’m sorry, in what world is literature or English multiple choice?!

In Australia / NSW it’s essays and essays, including a creative writing prompt that I’ve always genuinely found fun. Think /r/writingprompts.

Never really engaged with the rest of English but it requires choosing your own texts (no list) to compare and dissect. Still flawed? Yeah, but I feel like ‘they tried’.

saagarjha3• 7 years ago

I'm really disappointed that the author didn't post the answers. Putting my SAT Reading hat on, my guess would be G/B, possibly C?/G/B/F.

Grustaf• 7 years ago

“I’m a native speaker of Greek but I failed this grammar test”

evandijk70• 7 years ago

Out of curiosity, I took the test for the first poem and got all questions correct. I've always been relatively good at standardised tests, and agree they don't always measure something meaningful.

The author is being a little harsh, testing reading skills is difficult, and she does not provide a better alternative to evaluate students reading ability. Moreover, based on her comments, I'm pretty sure that if she were to take the text, she would score a 100%.

The questions and answers:

https://tea.texas.gov/WorkArea/linkit.aspx?LinkIdentifier=id...

goodcanadian2• 7 years ago

Well, I could probably figure out all of the "best" answers, but at the same time, I felt only the first question had a choice that was even remotely correct. As you say, it is more of a test of test taking skills than of reading comprehension.

netcan• 7 years ago

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 artist intended it this way. Sometimes we don't. We know this is our own embellishment.

I don't think the stuff the writer is describing is a problem really. It's fine that people understand poems in ways that are unrecognisable to the poet. I think the medium of standardized testing is just awkward applied to metaphorical babble about (possibly) metaphorical art.

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

Poetry & literature classes are about making students engage with stuff. Most teachers won't care if the kids read their own crazy theories into a poem or whatnot.

But... imagine forcing someone who isn't into game of thrones into articulating a metaphorical theory about it. Awkward.

TeMPOraL6• 7 years ago

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.

mcguire12• 7 years ago

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.

mikro2nd• 7 years ago

We delve into art we like, insert meaning and extend the stories with our interpretations.

Speaking as an artist, this is exactly what (some? most?) artists aspire to.

I want to paint a (word) canvas that requires you, dear reader, to do some work,... to colour that canvas and paint in the details for yourself. A canvas that evokes your own memories, your lost loves and missed opportunities, your triumphs, your dark moments, your wins and losses. If I don't pull that off, then I've failed. There are no "correct" interpretations, there are only your interpretations.

mcguire12• 7 years ago

"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.

learnstats22• 7 years ago

I work as a tutor and have tutored similar questions - sometimes I encourage students to think about 'how is the test-writer trying to test you?'

And, perhaps, that is what standardized tests are intended to test: can you anticipate and meet the arbitrary requirements of someone with power over you in a particular situation? If yes, you are very employable.

cmroanirgo• 7 years ago

"My final reflection is this: any test that questions the motivations of the author without asking the author is a big baloney sandwich," she wrote. "Mostly test makers do this to dead people who can’t protest. But I’m not dead. I protest."

azeotropic• 7 years ago

I was reminded of this passage from Plato's Apology of Socrates:

"I went to the poets; tragic, dithyrambic, and all sorts. And there, I said to myself, you will be detected; now you will find out that you are more ignorant than they are. Accordingly, I took them some of the most elaborate passages in their own writings, and asked what was the meaning of them - thinking that they would teach me something. Will you believe me? I am almost ashamed to speak of this, but still I must say that there is hardly a person present who would not have talked better about their poetry than they did themselves. That showed me in an instant that not by wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration; they are like diviners or soothsayers who also say many fine things, but do not understand the meaning of them. And the poets appeared to me to be much in the same case; and I further observed that upon the strength of their poetry they believed themselves to be the wisest of men in other things in which they were not wise."

So my expectation is that seventh graders would outperform the poet on this exam.

sametmax9• 7 years ago

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 certain most writers just wrote something, and never though about it more. Not all of them are pondering, rewriting every line. And even the ones that do don't necessarily do it for the result the teacher expects.

And as a kid, you certainly can't say a classic author is not interesting. You can't say the text is boring, that you don't see talent in it, that you didn't learn anything from it. It has been validated by society, hence it's good. Now you have to say why you think it is, even if you don't. Actually you have to say what you know what the status quo is, which means repeating something you read elsewhere instead of forming a opinion from that and what you think. The opposite of what's school is supposed to teach.

We wonder why fake news and bullshit work ? It's because we teach kids to repeat popular opinions and make up things because they look good. We teach them that not only there is a price to pay for not doing that, but that we are ok with being the ones making them pay it.

People that felt like that usually went the science road. It's not a bad thing, but it's a positive feedback loop. It means fields in desperate needs of honesty and pragmatism are only welcoming bullshiters and conformists.

longer_arms2• 7 years ago

And as a kid, you certainly can't say a classic author is not interesting. You can't say the text is boring, that you don't see talent in it, that you didn't learn anything from it. It has been validated by society, hence it's good.

That is because that statement is both not useful in the context (you're there to pick it apart) and reflects pretty badly on your understanding, clearly the text has some depth, even if not consciously included, to be analysed. If your conclusion was "rubbish" when you're meant to be making a point about subtext, you're failing, its pretty simple.

People include subtlety in their art even if they don't intend it. Things can not be fantastic but still reflect society, the author, your own experience, which is the point of literature analysis.

sametmax9• 7 years ago

Some are, but I think many don't.

Text analysis is a lot like wine tasting: there is something to it, but it's way over the top. And if you put a brand new text and put 10 experts on it, they will come up with different interpretations. They will even claim terrible wine is good because of the bottle.

There is also a huge mentality implication. See for example your reaction: you assume my understanding is bad while knowing nothing about me.

And I just criticized people drawing definitive conclusions about other people so distant we know little about them. The example in the article supports this and beyond, and while a few data point is not evidence, it calls for a debate.

I think it's perfectly ok for kids to be wrong about their text interpretation if they produce a personal constructed analysis. First because it's pretty hard to prove there is only one right analysis and you got it. Second because the process is as important as the result. Good teachers target that, but few do.

matwood2• 7 years ago

I appreciate the classics, but I would always get in trouble in school for asking how the teacher knew this is what the author meant. Even before I knew what a skeptic was, I was a skeptic. :)

I also was not being a smart ass. Many authors have additional writings that add color to the writing being studied.

sametmax9• 7 years ago

I agree. Plus the classics are too often talked about like this one homogeneous corpus.

But they span on over 2500 years, with huge objective, quality and target audience differences.

I can appreciate Seneca and at the same time don't give much credit to Kant. You could reflect deep into To kill a Mockingbird and see Flaubert as dry and over hyped. And you should be able to say that in class without being threaten with a bad grade. Even if you were hypothetically wrong, if such an absolute is possible in this field.

elliekelly2• 7 years ago

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.

ascar2• 7 years ago

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 there mostly was a "right" answer and I was missing some (mostly unknown to me) details in alternative theories. Exploring alternatives helps (me) to understand the problem and solution better.

But in the most subjective classes possible - literature analysis - where nobody really knows what the author meant, alternative opinions were considered wrong. And my only task was to repeat the teachers or text books opinion. Frustrating is an understatement.

This part of the article captures the issue perfectly:

I just put that stanza break in there because when I read it aloud (I’m a performance poet), I pause there. Note: that is not an option among the answers because no one ever asked me why I did it.

eru3• 7 years ago

I guess because of exactly how weak the 'right' answer's justification is, that they have to defend it so vigorously.

rayiner7• 7 years ago

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, and recognize what those subjects are. Moreover, the student is only being asked to choose the best answer out of the four presented, not to derive the "correct" answer.

Out of the answer choices, only one (C) fits:

A. compare the speaker's schedule with the train's schedule [incorrect because the first stanza isn't about the speaker's schedule]
B. ask questions to keep the reader guessing about what will happen [incorrect; the only questions in the poem are rhetorical]
C. contrast the speaker's feelings about weekends and Mondays [correct, because the first stanza mentions feelings about the weekend, while the second is about dread for Monday]
D. incorporate reminders for the reader about where the action takes place [incorrect, because both stanzas take place in the reader's bed]

mcguire12• 7 years ago

"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.

wccrawford4• 7 years ago

I had this experience in "music appreciation" in college. I was supposed to get the same feeling from the music that the "expert" in the book did, and was wrong if I didn't.

I failed that class. I never bothered re-taking it.

eru3• 7 years ago

We wonder why fake news and bullshit work ? It's because we teach kids to repeat popular opinions and make up things because they look good. We teach them that not only there is a price to pay for not doing that, but that we are ok with being the ones making them pay it.

Luckily, you are overestimating the effect of education.

Kids don't pay enough attention to be so indoctrinated.

ecocentrik• 7 years ago

No, I don't think he is. I've run across enough dull people who say things like "think outside the box", to understand the power of conformist indoctrination. I think you're underestimating the formative power of educational systems to teach through punitively reinforced repetition. Children are being failed for expressing creative interpretations of something that purposefully offers its audience multiple and sometimes conflicting interpretations. Most will abandon attempts at expression in formalized settings and shift their brains into parroting memorized interpretations offered by their teachers. In this case the teachers are training their students based on interpretations offered by the state.

sametmax9• 7 years ago

I think the meta teaching is more important, and more impactful that the information taught.

Nasrudith3• 7 years ago

Kids pay attetion like they eat stuff - not how you want them to neccessarily or what would be rational even.

One thing I noticed about socialization processes is they are about teaching things they are too afraid to teach directly like when and how to lie and when hypocrisy is acceptable.

If you practice some vice while expecting them to be virtuous you teach that the "good behavior" (say you serve them broccoli and water while you have fried chicken and soda) is childish and vice is to be preferred when not forced.

SolaceQuantum• 7 years ago

"...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."

Funnily enough, Death of the Author is well established critical theory in English literary interpretation (criticism). On Academic merit, if you have appropriate evidence in the literature to support your theory then your theory is valid and discussable on its interpretive merits. This is taught at the college level.

I would like to have English classes teach critical reading in the classical sense of english literary theory much earlier. But I'm really not sure how to begin to teach someone how to interpret before I show logical steps towards singular interpretations first.

rayiner7• 7 years ago

That was not my experience. I went through a libertarian phase in college and wrote lots of papers that were rather contrarian. I always got "As." Of course you can't just say "the text is boring" or that "you don't see talent in it." That's a really dull thing to say. You need to be able to understand the status quo well enough to be able to articulate it on its own merits, and then go beyond that to explain why you disagree. (And that's an important life skill! If you can't articulate your opponent's argument as well as they can, you can't hope to persuade them to change their mind.)

sametmax9• 7 years ago

I can write you a 20 pages essay about why a text is boring and why I don't see talent in it, with detailed analysis on the style, fit, comparison with similar intent and pieces of art and explain the reason I think the usual analysis is overblown given the weakness of the text.

If a teacher find intensity and depth in a text that has little substance or nuances in the most obvious lines, I'd argue that it's actually the most important point to make if you want to say something that matters.

Of course, to win the meta game is to know that is not actually the most important point to make if you, as a student and human being, want to open more opportunities in your life.

everdrive2• 7 years ago

And as a kid, you certainly can't say a classic author is not interesting. You can't say the text is boring, that you don't see talent in it, that you didn't learn anything from it. It has been validated by society, hence it's good. Now you have to say why you think it is, even if you don't. Actually you have to say what you know what the status quo is, which means repeating something you read elsewhere instead of forming a opinion from that and what you think. The opposite of what's school is supposed to teach.

I completely agree with this, but just want to note that it's possible to do this properly. Usually this happens in college. The societal approval must still be taught, but it ends up being a discussion unto itself. "This writing style was popular at the time, and people had the following social expectations for men and women of the upper class, and these were informed by the following social movements, etc, etc." A real discussion of why this work gained so much esteem allows for constructive criticism, or might even help a student to understand a work that would have otherwise been impenetrable.

[edit]

If anyone's read "The Rape of the Lock" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rape_of_the_Lock), this is a great example of a work that would have been impossible for me to understand without a great literature teacher an some historical and contextual education. The social norms, expectations, and how someone would politely and indirectly talk around them would have been completely impossible for me to grasp if I were left to my own devices.

staticautomatic2• 7 years ago

Why must societal approval still be taught? And who gets to decide what society approves of? Hint: "Society" isn't the answer.

sametmax9• 7 years ago

I'm all about teaching about societal approval as long as it's labelled as such and put in perspective. I think that actually it would have helped me a lot to have it labelled that way: I would have respected the teacher more, and learned about the way humans work sooner.

yomly• 7 years ago

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 explained it as being "about a line long" then proceeded to punish me when I took that too literally and put a full stop at the end of every line.

"Hell, I'm pretty certain most writers just wrote something, and never though about it more." On this particular point, to provide an alternative perspective on the subject, I have had an academic music professor argue to me that even the creator of any art may not be a good objective critic of their art within the context of some wider academic framework. This could be due to at least two reasons:

1. the artist was too emotionally involved in the art so is unable to unbiasedly critique it

2. the framework/wider context of analyzing a piece of art may take shape later after the initial inception of the art.

In any case, I'm probably talking a bit past you - any person who adopts an assertive position "the author did X because they intended to achieve effect Y" is at best lazy and worst wrong if they're unable to back up that assertion with some kind of evidence (e.g. autoanalysis by author or letters/interviews)

sansnomme• 7 years ago

Fwiw most people here won't be able to give a hard and fast definition of a sentence; this is why we have Recurrent Neural Networks.

asleori239k2• 7 years ago

The flip side of this that it's not limited to the arts. I came to love math later, more and more as I got into higher-level math, because I realized lower-level stuff tended to be taught in this way that is very focused on minute almost irrelevant details. If people had started with big-picture principles and worked down, I would have been much more into it earlier.

I had a stats professor in college who said (in a course on nonparametric statistics) something like "there are two types of statisticians out there, those who are horrible at arithmetic, and those who are great at it." His point was just that it's possible to get very abstract math concepts really well and also be kinda sloppy with other things.

I guess my point is that early exposures to anything can really bias people's perceptions a lot, even when it's not representative or necessary. Vocational stuff I think can be like that too: early exposures to different types of careers can be really biasing even when your understanding of it as a broader field is really misleading.

mcguire12• 7 years ago

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.

Bartweiss6• 7 years ago

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.

slothario• 7 years ago

Well, this is the way I saw it as a student: the purpose isn't to provide "the right answer," the purpose was to understand the test, give the answer that they wanted, and use school as a springboard to better things. If you treat it as a system to be gamed you don't have to worry about what the truth really is.

I actually was always better at English than I was at math (much better). I even won an NCTE writing award in high school, and found math difficult. But I studied physics in college because I'm someone who can't stand BS and don't like the way English is taught at the college level. The idea of pure, simple truths deeply appeals to me.

But I feel even writing this is heresy. Maybe I'm just being a smug STEM type and I don't appreciate the world of literature. Maybe I just don't get it. But I went into college wanting to understand things, and making a game out of extracting hidden meanings from books just didn't offer anything I was looking for.

oldjokes2• 7 years ago

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.

sametmax9• 7 years ago

CS is very new though, and already pressured by immense economical interests.

Give it a thousand years.

kyle-rb• 7 years ago

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 think that's where it jumps out of the realm of computer science.

Maybe a better label for the "best practices" for the application of computer science is "software development". I think that, as an area of instruction, is more inherently subjective.

ubermonkey2• 7 years ago

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.

Some elements of analysis are verifiable, like when someone provides meaningful context around lines in Shakespeare, but once you get past very elementary discussions of literature the notion of "right answer" is kind of over.

My primary degree is literature; above dumb-freshman courses, the emphasis is on analytical thinking about the text, and on the rigor of that thinking, not on the supposed correctness of the analysis.

But, of course, this interferes with your thesis, so...

redblacktree• 7 years ago

No OP, but I read his thesis that low-level courses should also be putting the "emphasis on analytical thinking about the text," but instead focuses on the "supposed correctness of the analysis"

I don't see that your comment interferes with his thesis at all.

sametmax9• 7 years ago

It doesn't. I just think I would have liked you as a teacher, and most I met didn't not have your point of view.

asleori239k2• 7 years ago

Yeah I came to say something similar. Good art education (at least with criticism) is really focused on the strength of the arguments and the strength of the expression of those arguments.

jtbayly• 7 years ago

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...

This also happened to Flannery O’Connor. She once wrote the following to an English Professor:

“The interpretation of your ninety students and three teachers is fantastic and about as far from my intentions as it could get to be.”

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/i-am-in-state-of-shock....

jfengel• 7 years ago

Note that she does not intend it approvingly. She's using "fantastic" to mean "of fantasy", as in, "not grounded in reality".

Despite her claims to the contrary, I do find her tone "obnoxious". Their fault was not in their interpretation, but in asking the author to confirm it. A great story will "go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it", but I find it self-important for a writer to declare that their piece achieves that lofty goal.

I agree with her assertion that their interpretation is dull and simple, but if that's where they've settled, it's as valid as any other. I feel like she's said, "No, I've written a great work of art, and if you've reached a boring conclusion from it, that's your fault." I find it dismissive of her to say in two sentences that there's "no lessening of reality" but simultaneously "not meant to be realistic": that's a cheap way to excuse vagueness.

It's not that difficult for a work to be open to multiple interpretations the longer you look. You can achieve that with ink blots. So if they find merit in the work, they should keep reading to appreciate that merit more fully rather than ask an author to affirm their decryption. But I feel like she hasn't engaged well with the work they have put in: she's dismissed it entirely and missed an avenue they have a right to explore.

segmondy• 7 years ago

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 millions and wondering HTF! Because those "smart founders" learned how to feed BS that their audience expected back to them.

I learned this lesson when I took humanities, it was so stupid, but I knew exactly what the teacher wanted to hear when we studied architectures & paintings. It was all subjective and her own opinion. I fed her back her crap and I passed the class.

If you haven't learned this yet, it's not too late. The world is full on chicken shit.

kolinko• 7 years ago

Which is ironic, considering humanities are supposed to be about exploration of ideas and creative thinking.

i4t• 7 years ago

"... are all about conformity."

You give them too much credit, imo. That would be way to clever, too much 'conspiracy'-like.

But, I agree that if you go against the grain, confront their bs... you're toast.

_ieq6• 7 years ago

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 millions and wondering HTF! Because those "smart founders" learned how to feed BS that their audience expected back to them.
I learned this lesson when I took humanities, it was so stupid, but I knew exactly what the teacher wanted to hear when we studied architectures & paintings. It was all subjective and her own opinion. I fed her back her crap and I passed the class.
If you haven't learned this yet, it's not too late. The world is full on chicken shit.
"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.

Telling something even though you don't believe in it for personal gain is called cunningness.

I see many people misunderstand smartness with cunningness, people who are smart can be cunning as well but they chose not to.

mox1• 7 years ago

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.

kbenson• 7 years ago

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 and try to provide exactly that, since she obviously didn't want my opinion. By the third visit during her office hours, she had very little feedback and thought it looked good. I got a C+. Visiting her afterwards I had her review the essay to give me pointers on what I could have done better. Her exact words, which I remember to this day, were "all I can say is it doesn't feel authentic."

That class broke me on the subject of English. It was the last required English class for my major, and I made sure not to take another elective in English (and I rather liked the subject before that). Sometimes you're damned if you do, damned if you don't.

jknoepfler• 7 years ago

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's a long tail of bad startups and a long tail of bad investment decisions, and the intersection of those can be cherry-picked to create the illusion that "the world is full of chicken shit".

The world does indeed contain some chicken shit, but chicken shit is not the central tendency of the world. Terrible startups get funding less frequently than good ones. Good technical ideas often raise millions of dollars and thrive, but sometimes they fail despite their merits. Sometimes "chicken shit" succeeds, sometimes good ideas fail, but it's foolish to mistake the exception for the rule.

But again, all this has very little to do with poetry.

kradroy3• 7 years ago

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 will continue to replace any dead wives by marrying anew. How can she overcome her predicament?! In this version Perrault introduces the fairy godmother as a foil to the mother in Freud's complex. Now the godmother helps Cinderella obtain her own princely phallus and win a bloodless coup over her foul stepmother! Actually in the end all the ladies get a phallus!"

A+

Joking aside, it took me another decade to have this sink in and apply it in life. I still deal with this foolishness daily. The originality of the and variety of the "chicken shit" determines whether or not I stick around at the job or in the situation the chicken shit is flowing.

manicdee• 7 years ago

Another lesson the poet learned from these studies is that these tests are about having the means to pass them, by which I mean having the money to buy the correct answers (whether that be in the form of written answers or a tutor who has seen the answers and knows how to guide your student to the right answer without explicitly communicating it).

It’s the college enrolment thing all over again.

Nasrudith3• 7 years ago

I suspect the bad humanities teacher is a result of university politics in the "office politics" sense allowed to degrade and stagnate.

Essentially if it takes those who are good at the bullshitting game to advance and compete for tenure bullshit becomes the defacto qualifier.

Making matters better yet worse for "optimizing" in both senses are those who actuly are sincerely interested in thd subject - I have had decent ones who would give good marks and respect those who differed philosophically but could give sincere and articulated explanations and justifications.

pojzon• 7 years ago

I still remember one poem from high school we were supposed to guess a meaning of. The author was still alive at the time. It was about black crows soring on the sky and landing on a gray cement floor.

Teacher went all out saying its about dark thoughts and existential crisis etc.

I actually met the author and asked him about the poem. She said, she just likes crows because there was a lot of them in the city she grew up in.

Thats it. I even wrote THAT interpretation as my answer to some test later on and i got a failing grade.

Told the teacher about my visit and discussion with the author. But he said he does not care because thats not whats written in the answers spreadsheet.

After that i realized majority of such teachers are retards and should be fired. Unfortunately our education system is so underpaid, getting anyone half decent wont happen.

mcguire12• 7 years ago

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 text is boring or talent-free; that's the same as saying there is one right answer. And keep in mind: the reason a classic is considered a classic (Hiawatha not withstanding) is because other people found it interesting, talented, and learned from it.

One difficulty is that a good answer and a wrong answer are not immediately distinguishable, especially from the student's side. The teacher's job is to, among other things, explain why an answer is wrong without pushing some "one true answer". That's hard.

Unfortunately, many teachers are crappy. The current US primary and secondary school system tries really hard, with its standardized testing, to enforce crappiness, in the name of fighting other kinds of crappiness, so...yeah.

P.S. There isn't a grand conspiracy out to get you. Well, the probability is really low, anyway.

MockObject2• 7 years ago

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

Glyptodon• 7 years ago

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.

microcolonel• 7 years ago

Dose of reality: test makers are for-profit organizations.

And public schools are really really bad at buying things.

bayareanative2• 7 years ago

Hehe. I believe it.

So I took the SAT-I (out of 1600) with zero prep around 1994.

Math - missed one question (dumb mistake)

English - ~560/800

I was too depressed and anxious (undiagnosed, untreated) at the time to be able to concentrate on the critical thinking and passage questions.

chuckgreenman• 7 years ago

I grew up in Florida, a state addicted to standardized testing, and after a while you start to notice something. Standardized tests are like a meta game. I'm sure they provide a basic bench mark to see if you're literate or can do basic math but beyond that it's just pattern recognition. After a certain point you stop reading the passages, just skimming, because it's always the same types of questions and you can sort of intuit which beats of the story you need to look at to get the answer. The math sections are the same kind of thing. Match the question up to the right memorized algorithm and run it.

The tests measure your willingness and ability to become good at something with no short-term, obvious benefit, which is a clever system. However, not every high school student has 200 hours to spend getting good at bullshit.

rayiner7• 7 years ago

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 mind, but to remark on the objective function of the stanza break. The subject of the poem clearly shifts at that point from reflecting on the weekend to talking about the anxiety of the upcoming day. Out of the answers presented, (C) is clearly the best answer. Two, the author's point simply begs the question. The break sounds good there because there is a structural break in the underlying poem. Her subjective impression of where the break should go reflects an objective fact about the structure of the poem.

The other questions are likewise quite straightforward. The website doesn't reproduce the full test booklet, but I suspect the prompt does not ask for the "right answer" but "the best answer out of the choices presented." The test is not asking students to plumb the depths of the author's pscyhe, but evaluate consistency or inconsistency between each answer choice and the objective aspects of the poem. It's not an exercise in literary analysis, it's an exercise in reading (knowing the meaning of words) and logical analysis.

Take Question 6: "The train is important to the poem because it represents..." Who knows what the author meant the train to represent? But to an objective observer, C ("following a planned routine") clearly "fits" the text better than the other answers. That's all the test is asking students to figure out.

xtian3• 7 years ago

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 then cultivating a relationship with art is as important as an understanding of science. It seems like we’re doing something else here though. I would hesitate to dismiss the damage done by a system that produces questions like these at the societal scale.

rayiner7• 7 years ago

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.

macspoofing3• 7 years ago

The problem is you're trying to educate millions of kids and you want some common standard to judge them against (to figure things out like college admissions). You can't just say "put down whatever and we'll judge it by how you feel or how I feel".

Besides, you're not testing their artistic abilities, you're testing learning comprehension and and things they learned in English class. Do you know that we're graduating kids who are functionally illiterate? I think that's a bigger problem to tackle than worrying about how poetry is taught to kids.

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.

You say that but what are you basing this on? Just personal feelings?

I would hesitate to dismiss the damage done by a system that produces questions like these at the societal scale.

I disagree. These are perfectly fine questions. In fact, if you converted to the education system to the montessori-style system that would be disastrous.

pbhjpbhj5• 7 years ago

Per your last para, isn't that "the train is important to the exam boards recognised interpretation of the poem because ...". Unless the poet makes it explicit then you're making up facts and expecting people to buy that one, likely false, interpretation.

It's simply not useful to anyone except exam paper sellers and politicians who want numbers to put in election material and don't care how many years of other people's lives are wasted to make those figures appear to mean something.

That sort of lame education system needs putting out of its misery.

StringEpsilon• 7 years ago

If these tests are about text comprehension and not interpretation of art, why use poems then? Wouldn't an advertisement, a legal text or simply a newspaper article serve a better purpose?

I've written some (bad) poems and asked people to tell me what it means for them and got some answers that are wildly different from my own. For example: I once described the sunrise as a "bleeding ceiling of the world", mainly because I needed a dramatic phrasing. But many people I asked thought it was about suicidial thoughts or death. Rather, I just wanted to emphasize the importance of (reaching) the sunrise while keeping the overall somber / grim tone I established in the first and second verse.

Which leads me to 'death of the author' vs. 'authorial intent'. What is the objective meaning of my metaphor? The readers or mine? And is my psychologists guess more valuable than that of a childhood friend of mine?

Dissecting meaning like this is also where you get into the whole death of the author vs. authorial intent rabbit hole. And you can write whole books about that topic and which is also a quite subjective topic (I'm leaning more towards death of the author, as you might guess).

That is also just another interpretation of the metaphor. A kid on a small island country might not associate trains with a fixed daily schedule at all, because they only know about trains from other media. Your answer only is "objective" within cultures that can make that association between trains and schedules. In duringearly industrialization, the SAT answer might be that the train stands for the unrelenting progress of technology and how it sucks all live out of factory workers (see charlie chaplins 'modern times').

zaphar• 7 years ago

    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.

That was just side commentary though. The question wasn't bad because the stanza breaks were arbitrary. The question was bad because the poem wasn't formatted correctly in the test itself.

The teacher was writing her because he himself couldn't figure out where the stanza breaks were and had to ask.

mcguire12• 7 years ago

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

dragonwriter5• 7 years ago

But to an objective observer

“objective observer” is a phrase that indicates a failure to understand either objectivity or observation, but, in the context of a reader of a written text, a distressingly common failure in the society that views the narrowest forms of biblical literalism (and also, arguably, Constitutional textualism) as even coherent, much less correct.

cascom• 7 years ago

1. I think it’s generally sort of amusing to see a bunch of STEM oriented people (who generally are less than sympathetic to people who are math or computer illiterate) take the position that the art subjects they probably struggled with are BS

2. I actually think many creators/authors of art are sometimes least well positioned to describe its cultural implications/significance

3. As everyone here knows standardized tests are less about the perfect/correct answer, but rather the least bad vs the other choices

Zutano• 7 years ago

I actually think many creators/authors of art are sometimes least well positioned to describe its cultural implications/significance

Then who is in the best position to describe the art? The test authors?

A better way to judge the students' understanding of literary concepts present in a poem would be to have them describe it however they want, and grade them on how well they can cite evidence for their claims about the author's intention.

mikorym• 7 years ago

I don't know if this holds in national exams or in many countries, but my teacher used to follow logical argument and would score that.

I do remember a few cases where there were outright red question marks when essentially I was trying to make elaborate con arguments.

Fortunately, we had no multiple choice questions for any of our three English tests.

ordinaryperson2• 7 years ago

Dose of reality: test makers are for-profit organizations

The College Board, the maker of the SAT and Advanced Placement (AP) exams, is a not-for-profit organization. While the test in question the author refers to is the Texas state assessment tests (STAAR), it is factually incorrect to say test makers are for-profit organizations.

elliekelly2• 7 years ago

The author never said anything about the SAT or AP exams. She was referring to the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) where her poems appear. STAAR is developed by Pearson, a publicly-traded for-profit publishing corporation.

ordinaryperson2• 7 years ago

Yes, and she generalizes about all testing organizations. To repeat hear exact line in full context:

Dose of reality: test makers are for-profit organizations. My poems are a whole lot cheaper than Mary Oliver’s or Jane Kenyon’s, so there’s that.

She does not say, "Texas state test makers..." -- she just says "test makers." She singles out STAAR in the rest of the article but that graph explicitly says "test makers."

eej71• 7 years ago

I always enjoyed this story from Michael Crichton. http://www.openculture.com/2014/01/george-orwell-got-a-b-at-...

IshKebab• 7 years ago

. . And I meander to its rhythm, flopping like a fish. Why can’t I get to sleep? Advertisement

Well said HuffPo. Are there rules on HN about linking to articles that are impossible to read because of adverts?

childintime• 7 years ago

Probably the same discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13348672

ineedasername• 7 years ago

I'm going through a bit of this sort of thing with my oldest child right now. Sometimes there are issues with the common core specifications themselves, but holy heck are there problems with their implementation. For example, common core math standards MP2 & MP3 relate to reasoning and logical arguments.

Typically these areas are targeted to 5th graders to start with. My son is in 3rd grade, yet out of the blue with no prior introduction, questions arise in a module on fractions about this. Suddenly my son is given a question like this:

"Jane has 6 apples but 4 of them are rotten. Jane's friend Bob says that less than half of the apples can be eaten. DERIVE A CONJECTURE about this situation and provide evidence to support your argument."

This is absolutely ridiculous. First, the concept of a conjecture has never previously been introduced. Second, even if it had been, as used here it is completely inappropriate. It has been pulled from the MP3 standard but clearly used by someone creating questions that had no idea of how to actually apply the concept or perhaps know themselves what a proper mathematical conjecture actually is, much less that its use here is basically a complete non-sequitur. The word probably should not appear in an elementary school core specification at all, as every instance I can find of it is used inappropriately as the generic layman's version of the word rather than its mathematical use, when math is the frickin' subject at hand /end rant

brobdingnagians• 7 years ago

>> My poems are a whole lot cheaper than Mary Oliver’s or Jane Kenyon’s, so there’s that.

Byron, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Oliver Goldsmith they are all free to license, could we really not use any of the thousands of poems by them and hundreds of other poets? Sure use some modern ones, but use some of the classics too.

nwah1• 7 years ago

Consistently, I was most frustrated by the demands in my English and Creative Writing courses that there were correct answers to what certain things within stories were meant to symbolize.

And creative writing in general is something that doesn't work well for people who think in more literal ways. It seems like a way for those who don't to torture those who do. I wonder how much sadism is truly involved in the grading process. My guess is... a lot.

sgslo• 7 years ago

Relevant preface from 'The Adventures of Huck Finn':

"Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR per G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE" - Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huck Finn

ggggtez• 7 years ago

When I was in highschool, this thought certainly occurred to me. On the other hand, the possibility exists that an author's intention is actually irrelevant.

kybernetikos• 7 years ago

It is well accepted within the arts that the authors interpretation should not be considered privileged over the readers. I was taught that interpretations can vary in quality - particularly if they fail to take account of salient features in the work, but there's no particular reason that an artist who may have just created what 'felt right' necessarily understood why it felt so right.

I like to quote Socrates on questions like this:

After I had finished with the politicians I turned to the poets, dramatic, lyric, and all the rest, in the belief that here I should expose myself as a comparative ignorammus. I used to pick up what I thought were some of their most perfect works and question them closely about the meaning of what they had written, in the hope of incidentally enlarging my own knowledge. Well, gentlemen, I hesitate to tell you the truth, but it must be told. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that any of the bystanders could have explained those poems better than their actual authors. So I soon made up my mind about the poets too: I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled them to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean. It seemed clear to me that the poets were in very much the same case; and I also observed that the very fact that they were poets made them think that they had a perfect understanding of all other subjects, of which they were totally ignorant.

— Socrates, quoted by Plato in The Apology of Socrates (translated by Hugh Tredinnick)

derrick_jensen• 7 years ago

In my senior year English course, there was an extra credit assignment that involved analyzing Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I decided to just email the author and ask about the book, hoping he would give some unorthodox answers that I could say we're the authors true intent. He ended up sending me some wacky email with Futurama references, and he died about a month after that before I finished the paper

sli• 7 years ago

When I was looking for one of the poems mentioned, I found what appears to be a sample test[0] (or perhaps one of the past tests the author mentions) with the poem and questions about it. I figured some of you folks might like to take a look.

[0] https://s3.amazonaws.com/scschoolfiles/200/a_real_case_1.pdf

lumberingjack• 7 years ago

This happened in real time in my high school we were one of the first classes to use the two-way classroom cameras and we interviewed a writer. Our English teacher was sure that the writer had made items in a scene that was depicted in the book red because the "red makes you feel a certain way"I straight-up ask the writer why he made the curtains in that scene red and they responded with "well they had to be a color why not red!"

BrandoElFollito• 7 years ago

Woah, my son is in the equivalent of 7th grade in France (5ème) and he would have never answered the questions correctly (not would I).

We have our share of twisted poetry, but it usually is about some soldier dying on the battlefield of WWI, or about a herring nailed on the wall (those who we at school in the 80's will recognize it (...sec, sec, sec...).

The answers are pretty much straightforward, at the level of a regional beauty contest when they are asked a personal question and they answer that they dream of a better world without starving children (or that the US should provide maps to the world, according to Miss South Carolina).

I would hate to have my future hanging on the interpretation of someone's trip when high. Especially when 13 years old.

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

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