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.
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
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.
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"
yeah, but there's few things as insufferable (well ok, reading YouTube comments or something) as reading someone's writing who's learnt to write according to standardised essay marking procedures...
Are you sure about that? "Paper 1: Insert (Modified A4 18pt) November 2017" quite clearly states: "The source cannot be reproduced here due to third party copyright restrictions."
I highly doubt this. I had access to basically all past papers (questions and answers) for my GCSE and A levels. The exam board cannot assume students don't have this. (That said, it was not hard to spot patterns in the questions they asked over time. English was generally reasonably different, but the electronics papers would just copy and paste questions from one year to the next and change some of the numbers).
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
>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.
>"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.
Better than some other cases (http://archive.is/TEp6g) , in which not only is a dadaist bit of a very wild book (which i really like and recommend) used as a test question, the ending was changed so it really really makes no sense!
There is something deeply ironic about a standardized test asking students to analyze a Pinkwater story. It's the sort of thing he would have written a story about, really. :)
I 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
In classes where I knew the subject well, I generally did well on the tests. In classes where I had gaps in my understanding, I usually did poorly. In classes where the grades were posted publicly, my general subjective judgment of how well people knew the material matched up with their scores. Not perfectly, obviously, but the correlation has been high enough that I’ve never really been convinced that testing in general is “missing” some critical element of learning.
There might be a really strong correlation, but the deviations from that correlation might not be totally random.
That is, there might be people who consistently test above or below their skill level. This creates some weird imbalances that are far from fair.
It would be a lot more acceptable if deviation of test scores from skill were to be totally random for every test.
I can understand biases in a specific test (e.g. cultural biases), but those can (and should!) be corrected with better design and specific accommodations. Do you think that testing as a general method of evaluation is biased though? Because the objection I typically see isn't "we need better test design" it's "there's a component of student ability that cannot be measured by a test".
It is more about things like stressing over tests, dyslexia, ability to sit still for x hours and ability to express yourself in writing.
These all affect how well you test, but do not determine your skill in the subject. Hence, having a disadvantage in any of the above gives you a system disadvantage in the educational system.
That works for most of us, but not for all. It's basically the same as public speech, some people simply will do badly unless they go through some radical change.
I guess, but, all the same, I see a world of difference between a topical test, designed by a teacher, to measure your understanding of what they just taught you, and these standardized tests that have become so common.
For one, the latter are often bullshit, as TFA points out. For two, they measure all sorts of stuff aside from actual proficiency. If nothing else, unless they took all the same classes - literally the same classes - throughout their school careers to date, no two kids got the same education. As anyone who's got the vaguest training in science can tell you, that kind of uncontrolled variability in your population will destroy any validity your measure might have. And lastly, so often these standardized tests really do have hacky questions put together with hack procedures. For my part, I distinctly remember completely stumping an IQ test proctor when I was a kid (yeah, I had helicopter parents). I had 5 cards, each showing a house, with the sun and shadows in different positions. I was supposed to put them in the correct order. So, naturally, my first move was to ask if the pictures showed the north or south side of the house.
There's no standardized test that measures the kinds of reasoning skills that really matter in life, such as the kind you'd use to make an educated guess that a question is being asked by the kind of people who would assume, unwittingly, that east is always on the right hand side.
Maybe the test was really asking you which was the normal frame of reference. Of course, the direction would also be reversed if you were in the southern hemisphere, or were on a planet that spun the other way, or maybe a planet in a binary star system, etc.
I would expect the intelligent test taker to understand the test was not a trick, and that unstated assumptions mean use the defaults.
As for math, there are many ways to teach math, but 2+2=4 in all of them. It is reasonable to assume it is base 10, not base 3, unless the test said "in base 3".
It’s because tests aren’t just testing knowledge. They are testing the ability to express the entirety of that knowledge under completely arbitrary conditions (time limits, schedules, no references, etc.) with outsized consequences for mistakes.
Also good tests are hard to write. I’ve seen T/F questions that could go either way. Multiple choice questions with more than one correct answer. (Professors will tell you to choose the “best” answer. But that’s a matter of opinion in many, if not all, cases.)
I think what someone can DO with their knowledge is more important than what individual bits of knowledge they maintained. I’d rather hire or work with someone who can get things done and knows certain algorithms exist than hire or work with someone who can’t get anything done but can recite the same algorithms from memory. Tests favor the second person. (I was that person in HS calculus. Aced the class without understanding a thing just because I have a gift for remembering and applying rules. I had no idea what I was doing.)
> Also good tests are hard to write. I’ve seen T/F questions that could go either way. Multiple choice questions with more than one correct answer. (Professors will tell you to choose the “best” answer. But that’s a matter of opinion in many, if not all, cases.)
This is why I am so glad that all of my university exams (and the _vast_ majority of exams before that, at least post-Y9/age 13) were open-ended questions[1], then marked by someone who will (likely) know the subject better than you even will. Even if you couldn't get the the answer, but could understand and articulate the starting points, or made a compelling argument but misread or misunderstood part of the question, you will at least get partial credit. The physics exams would also have a standardised formulae reference sheet.
[1] A typical paper would be three hours, answering 5-6 questions, and a typical subquestion can be as open-ended as "Write brief notes about a tree representation of functional arrays, subscripted by positive integers according to their representation in binary notation. How efficient are the lookup and update operations?"
It seems like you'd be surprised to learn that the ability to recall and utilize something under constraints is highly indicative of a person's understanding of that material. The kids who "memorize formulas" aren't the ones getting straight A's. The ones who understand and grasp the material are the ones who will have no trouble performing under pressure, because if they forget something, they can recall it using their knowledge structures.
E.g. Say I forgot the formula for Simpson's Rule on a test, but remember that it had to do with approximating integrals with trapezoids. Someone who thoroughly understands the course material could re-derive this formula in under 5 minutes if they had forgotten.
> They are testing the ability to express the entirety of that knowledge under completely arbitrary conditions (time limits, schedules, no references, etc.) with outsized consequences for mistakes.
Right. And if you know the material, this isn't a problem.
Good test questions are hard to write. That's why standardized tests usually have lots of them so deficiencies with individual questions become statistically irrelevant. At the end of the day, we aren't trying to probe exactly what the students know. We aren't trying to read minds here. We just want an accurate distribution curve. We don't need great test questions for that. We just need some correlation between the correction answers and academic abilities.
I've never understood how someone could master a subject and yet be unable to answer any questions about it.
How about spoken English? I know a great many people who are able to express themselves clearly and gramatically - surely mastery of spoken English - but ask them what the rule is for order of adjectives or some such and many of them would even need to double check what an adjective is.
That's hardly being "unable to answer ANY questions"; try asking them which is more common: "the big red car" vs "the red big car", do you think they'd be unable to answer?
That's not a question about the English language. That's asking someone to use it.
The question of this nature about the English language would be "how do I know what order to put adjectives in?" and the answer would be something along the lines of "opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose".
I do think they would be unable to answer. The rule of course then goes deeper, into ablaut reduplication and so on. People master spoken English without knowing anything [0] about it.
[0] Yes, I know, I said "anything" and now your literalist side is jumping in joy at being able to say "Aha, aha, they DO know at least one thing and therefore your statement is not literally correct!" I don't care.
In the context of the parent comment "I've never understood how someone could master a subject and yet be unable to answer any questions about it.", isn't this your literalist side jumping in joy at being able to say "Aha, aha, I can think of a group of people who have mastered a subject but cannot answer questions about it"?
Except, they can answer questions to show what they know, they just can't answer your carefully selected subset of questions with the exact answers you demand using the terminology you demand.
Draw an arbitrary line around the allowable questions and you can make every group of experts, "people who can't answer questions about it". But what use is that?
It might be somewhat safe to take a poor test result as correlating with poor knowledge on a subject.
And it might be safe to assume a high test score is repeatable.
The challenge is to find a test that correlate high scores with good knowledge - not merely with being good at taking tests.
Because rarely do we care about how good someone is at taking tests; we'd like to measure how good their knowledge is. That's hard to do if we only can infer poor knowledge from a poor test result, but not good knowledge from a good test result.
My understanding is that your experience is correct, but incomplete - it doesn't account for people who don't know the subject, but do well on the test.
Particularly with multiple-choice tests, this is not only possible, but in my experience common. It became a kind of running joke among my classmates that we know our teachers, not the material - over time we just learned the quirks of whoever designed the test and eliminated the wrong answers based on that.
Why waste your time learning that? Just learn the material. I'm often bemused by the effort people put into avoiding learning the material, much more than it would take to just learn the material.
I once asked my history teacher why his multiple choice questions followed predictable patterns. Such as, "all of the above" or "none of the above" were always the right answers.
He laughed, and said the stupid kids needed a break.
Sometimes the material is absolutely unhelpful when doing a badly designed test, and you may even fail them. I had a Calculus teacher that taught 100% from the books but his tests were always 5 special case questions, that you might very well get wrong in under 45' even if you know the bread and butter.
Still learning how to do "Professor X's questions" was a guaranteed ace. Forget the subject, memorize the borderline cases, max grade. Do all exercises on the text book, also, get a second text book and do all of those too, and you might fail the test.
That's not what I meant. I didn't say "tests are hard". I said "It's hard to measure knowledge using tests", from the perspective of whoever needs to elaborate those.
In the end, tests end up approving a lot of people that learned next to nothing, as I myself succeeded in several by memorizing for the short term. I couldn't tell how many jingles I used to go through tests. In rarer cases, they also bombing someone with a reasonable understanding of the subject that maybe just was having a bad day or was sick.
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.
They are a product of industrialization! But here is what's the nagging thought on my mind. This industrialized schooling has allowed basic human knowledge to be disseminated at a faster pace than ever before. The need to do so caused it to roll back on quality, sometimes greatly. But without this tradeoff, would knowledge be able to reach so many? Is there some sort of balance point to be reached?
I agree that currently, education systems are terrible, but is there any way to maintain them at scale that is not?
That's an interesting point - sacrificing quality for quantity. You see it in so many fields. Like agriculture. Back in the day, every farm was 100% organic. But just try feeding today's population that way. Now you pay a premium for organic. So in some sense maybe education is no different. Just doing more with less, or rather, doing less, for more people.
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.
>"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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
The people producing art and the people talking about what it means are so very often are mutually exclusive that it is very hard to take the people talking about it seriously.
My experience with literary analysis is being forced to analyze pieces which I often believed didn't have any abstract meaning to speak of and then inventing some nonsense I thought would appeal to the teacher. The criticism is apt because my experience is generally the only experience many people have with the study of languages and literature. If it didn't exist these classes might add value to the lives of the people taking them.
My experience of programming is making a turtle move around on a screen, so programming is dumb. My experience of math is working out how fast trains traveling towards each other are going, so math is dumb. My experience of chemistry is making a bit of paper change color when dipped in vinegar, so chemistry is dumb. And so on ad nauseam.
Those all proved useful though using real empirical based systems. If your programming class was, “what do you think the author meant by this line of code?” with no evidence to support any kind of guess, then yes it would be dumb.
As I said in another comment, at this level "literary criticism" is intended to develop rudimentary skills of textual interpretation. You learn what symbolism is and are asked to produce some examples. It doesn't matter what the poem "actually" means any more than it matters that you're ignoring friction and variable speeds and the changing mass of trains as they burn fuel when you work out how fast they're going in school math tests. When you get to more advanced textual analysis, you have to justify readings based on the work as a whole, the writer's oeuvre, historical context, linguistic concerns, philosophical frameworks, and so on.
> at this level "literary criticism" is intended to develop...skills of textual interpretation
But it is also at this level that multiple-choice tests about which bits of a text mean what (as the original article illustrates) proliferate. It is at this level that the textbook is the One Truth about what a text means. As one other comment points out, at this level there is no recourse but "authority" which is, ironically, detached from the author.
> It doesn't matter what the poem "actually" means any more than it matters that you're ignoring friction
This is a false equivalence. When we ignore 'what the poem "actually" means' it opens up interpretation to a colossal array of extremely subjective possibilities. "The curtains are blue" could symbolize anything from the author's depression to his thoughts about the Yuan dynasty. In contrast, the effects of ignoring friction can be objectively proven (if not empirically demonstrated) and would give us a definite answer, no mental gymnastics required.
In real-life engineering, we also tolerate a certain amount of slack and simplification in our models so long as the discrepancy between computation and observation is not so drastic. In this sense, ignoring those variables is tantamount to practice in iterative refinement (you are launching a projectile in an indoors gymnasium; you wouldn't really care if your computation is off by a foot or so because you ignored air resistance and the curvature of the Earth). The simplification can still provide value (not to mention practicality). But eking out an explanation just for the sake of giving an explanation, relegating "the work as a whole, the writer's oeuvre, historical context, linguistic concerns, philosophical frameworks, and so on" to more advanced levels, is just sloppy scholarship and build poor habits.
Your argument seems to boil down to this. Only empirical disciplines count as valid scholarship. Interpretive disciplines in the humanities are not empirical in the same way as engineering and scientific disciplines. Therefore they are not valid scholarship.
Unless you're prepared to budge on the first premise, there's nothing much I can say to persuade you.
The people The people producing literary criticism and the people talking about what it means are so very often are mutually exclusive that it is very hard to take the people talking about it seriously.
I just refused. I had good enough grades that I could afford to actively sabotage those lessons with passive aggressive responses that let my teacher know very well by the end of it what I thought of the whole thing.
I found it quite interesting that I was the only person in that class who regularly both read and wrote poems, and at the same time the one who had the sharpest reaction to being forced to analyse them in ways I felt actively destroyed my enjoyment of those poems.
One of the highlights of my school years was during this torture, when I got a chance to read a poem I'd written during one of those lessons aloud, with the intent that we would analyse it.
The teacher walked right into it, not yet aware how much I detested it.
My poem was a scathing criticism of tearing poems apart to invent meanings, unsupported by facts, that the author likely never intended, just barely civil enough to be read out in school.
My teacher got red and mumbled something I think nobody in class heard over the cheering and clapping.
I don't think I ever want to perform any of my poems again - it's a hard reaction to beat.
My teacher and I reached a cautious detente - he didn't punish my grade as much as he could have for that and other demonstrations, and I contained it and mostly played along. But the following year we did have to do a major report that included a literary analysis of a novel, and I told him flat out that I knew I could afford to come out a full grade lower and still not drop a grade for my final grade of the year, and that I just would ignore substantial parts of the requirements.
I did all of the 'mechanical' analysis of vocabulary and identifying allegories and the like, but then flat out refused to speculate on what the text meant. That was purely demonstrative - I certainly could have talked about my subjective interpretation, but the exercise in pretending there was an objective interpretation just made me upset.
It did not just affect my enjoyment of reading, but also my enjoyment of writing - the thought of my writing even potentially being treated like that was profoundly depressing.
To this day I think these kinds of lessons are destructive and do massive damage to students enjoyment of literature.
I have been censured for proposing the 'wrong' interpretation. And it totally destroyed my respect for that teacher. My interpretation was supported strictly by the actual text. The 'correct' interpretation not just according to our teacher, but our textbooks, required a tortured reading and assuming a comma was misplaced when this author always otherwise had perfect grammar. The only defense was an appeal to authority: surely I did not expect to understand it better than some idiot who'd failed at basic reading comprehension a century ago.
Let's call spade a spade: if a literary critic is creating an interpretation that goes beyond what the author intended to convey, they're pulling meaning out of their ass. It's completely arbitrary and has no validity; at best it boils down to psychoanalyzing the author (and the critic is not qualified for that), trying to guess what the author "truly wanted" to say without realizing they want it to say. A simple experiment: imagine a blind test in which the critic doesn't know whether the work was produced by a human or a GAN. If they can give similar statements about "what the author meant", then they're talking garbage.
Trying to put the work in context of other works from the same genre or historical period? Sure, that's useful. Telling you what the author "truly meant", even though the author never said that? That's just entertainment. Let's label it as such explicitly, instead of trying to tell people it's a form of "deeper truth".
Not quite. The humanities are fundamentally about persuasion, not about objectivity. There is no objectivity in the arts, creators are not the last word on their work [1], and any good observation is considered a success if it's persuasive to at least some people some of the time.
A lot of academic-level criticism is really an advanced game of "Hunt the hidden metaphor." People can take it or leave it, but as a pastime it's unlikely to go away. No one competent [2] seriously expects any one interpretation to be definitive. It's all just opinion, and sometimes it's interesting and insightful opinion - and sometimes it isn't.
[1] A lot of people find this strange, but why should it be? Creators are no more aware of their own internal motivations than anyone else is.
[2] This may not include high school teachers attempting the same thing, because they're likely to be teaching by rote from standard interpretations and marking them right/wrong rather than trying to elicit interesting personal insights.
Fair. Then I guess my argument boils down to, "I wish high-school teachers and a bunch of other people stopped doing that".
I can appreciate the argument of a work of art being like a mirror, where looking at it reveals as much about it as it does about the person looking. I can appreciate "hunt the hidden metaphor" exercises and even "bend the interpretation so hard to make the book be about something it obviously isn't" games. I've done both, and I enjoyed it - it's a nice workout for imagination and arguing skills. But I wish it was presented as such, clearly labeled as intellectual entertainment. As it is, the way I - and perhaps many other people in this thread - was exposed to literary criticism always made the critics look like historians - dispensing factual, if not always obvious, knowledge about works of literature.
There are two things. 1) what the author wrote, and 2) what they meant to write. Whey may have wanted to communicate something but failed at it. As long as the author is alive, or as long as they left notes or explanatory works, you can learn it. But going beyond these two things and claiming "this is what's in the text" is where literary criticism becomes bullshit.
> ...dismissing an entire academic field because you had a poor experience as a child is self-aggrandizement.
Can we please try to be more polite than this? Accusing someone of self-aggrandizement doesn't usually lead to a friendly and interesting conversation.
I was using "you" in the general sense. The site guidelines encourage readers to assume good faith on the part of others and if you have an issue with a comment it can be flagged so that a moderator can deal with it.
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.
"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)
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.
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.
It isn't all that silly an idea that there is information encoded into the work that the creator didn't intend to be there.
Some of the best literature works with characters rather than plot. I can easily see how an author trying to work accurately with characters based on generic memories of how someone should behave would actually leave a lot of evidence for interpretations they didn't expect.
Author's intent is important, but sometimes even the author will stand up and say their not quite sure what their characters would do in a given situation.
As engineers we usually have a direct conscious intention for the details of our creation.
Art doesn't work that way. The art piece is a piece of the artist and her surroundings. Including her conscious intentions, the naturalized social norms, her deep subconscious urges and desires, And with today's commoditized art, it includes the preferences of the collective unconscious.
Literary analysis have plenty to work with. Diminishing art to the artist intentions does injustice to culture.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
... I think that's the point - even if it were more than that, he might not be a fan of admitting it.
Actually.. ;) Fitzgerald’s insane wife bullied him into alcoholism. Hemingway was more of a rum drinker and the main bully of the writers of the time was Gertrude Stein.
But your point still stands. Hemingway thought not highly of literary critics.
The fun thing about Hemingway was his persona was 50% real and 50% self-cultivated myth, except we can’t really tell which half was which. As far as his style, that was a direct result of his journalism training at the Kansas City Star. https://www.kansascity.com/entertainment/arts-culture/articl...
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.
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".
I disagree. War and Peace was written 150 years ago and depicts events happening over 200 years ago - the difference between that society and the one you grew up in is far greater than the difference between modern Russia and modern US. Just to give one example (ironic in this context): the language usually spoken by most characters is not Russian, it’s French! Something like 5% of the novel is literally in French, and has to be translated for modern Russians (French was the “official” language of Russian nobility 200 years ago).
> For the life of me I don't get why non-Russian people read Russian classical literature.
> What remains is still formidable
I think you answered your own question there.
As for the rest of your comment, yes, someone without the cultural background will miss something. But the same goes for those not born in the same age, those of a different gender than the author, those of a different social standing and so on. There is always a mismatch between author and reader, the better the author the better they are able to compensate for that mismatch and the more the reader will get.
Reading an ancient and translated text is going to have those problems in spades and it can still be very much worthwhile to read them anyway, as long as you recognize the gap between you and the author.
In my own experience reading of books from different cultures and times, even in translation, is one of the most enriching things you can do short of traveling, and what with the physical limitations on time travel in some cases it is the only way in which we can experience the products of other cultures simply because they are no longer there.
It's not "ancient", really. Things are largely the same in Russia as they were 150-200 years ago, they even have something like a Tsar now: Putin. People are largely the same, too. Sure, there are cars and cell phones and internet now, but at a deeper level the people haven't really changed, and they can still imagine the life of a 19th century Russian aristocrat or commoner much better than, say, someone from the US or Western Europe, perhaps with the exception of France, owing to the cultural affinity between the two countries' aristocracies in the 19th century.
>> is one of the most enriching things you can do short of traveling
I agree with you there. I was just explaining to the OP the likely reasons why he didn't enjoy what I consider to be one of the best novels ever written.
No need for gatekeeping. Maybe you won’t get 100% but you still get close to russian culture if you read War an Peace and that’s precisely why it’s so interesting and fun. It expands your world view, show you new points of view and you get interesting story too. Now it seems that you propose only reading your native country authors?
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).
That was shocking at the time the book was written. The murderer was supposed to be an Other, not someone you can relate to. The book was shocking because it made the reader feel the murderer's dilemmas. See his rationales, such as they were.
I have the impression that the book has kept a part of its old reputation, even as the world has changed and it would never get that reputation in today's world.
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.
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?
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.
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.
the writer's mind is a palette and on it are his experiences, his instincts, his biases. to be fully aware of the meaning "X" is to be fully aware of not only his own meta-cognition, but the context of the world that he lives in that coloured his person, that resulted in him deciding to write something in order to bring forth the message "X".
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.
> 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.
That’s sort of like a parody I would write to prove my point.
You’re clearly emotional about the topic, to a degree that cannot be explained purely by doing a few interpretations in school. I don’t see, for example, this sort of venom directed at sports, even though I have heard more anecdotes about the dread of PE classes.
I could also make the same sort of claim about science and math: namely that school did little to inspire any sense of wonder and appreciation for the subject; that it tended to dwell on the rote application of some learnt rules to slightly varying problems without capturing the essence of the subject.
I have an inkling that people here might agree that some amount of rote learning was necessary for sciences to later be able to appreciate them, and that some of us may not have been ready to appreciate those subjects fully as early teens anyway. To not extend this sort of benefit of the doubt to the humanities them seems baffling. It may be explained people never going further in those fields and therefore not evolving the understanding that lets them reinterpret their early experiences. Or it’s an almost active socialization, a choice to fully identify with one group of academia and to deny the other’s validity in an in-group/out-group dynamic.
It’s also somewhat indefensible to claim “pure bullshit”—one just needs a single counterexample to show this, and others in this thread have brought up law as a rather impressive example of the power of interpretation. Personally, I’d point to Hannah Arendt, but I’m sure there are other philosophers for everyone. Heck, even Ayn Rand is squarely in the humanities. Or Carl Schmid if you like Trump, or Hobbes if you hate everyone.
Oh, and I just noticed this, Frankfurt’s On Bullshit is itself very much in the humanities’ wheelhouse.
Were the interpretations you were taught mere bullshit? I bet if you were to go back in time, or pick up a textbook, you’d find that no, they tended to be, if anything, a bit too much on-the-nose. Of course it’s not just about a white whale, but about something in the human experience that we can see far more often than any hunt for large marine mammals. But as teenagers, that sort of introspection was liable to instill a certain amount of existential dread, and quite possible ruin the easy enjoyment of what is otherwise an engaging but rather superficial adventure story on the high sees.
Because many of us recognise (even if learned later in life than the time we were doing PE) the benefits of physical activity in terms of increased health and capability, which is not true for the time spent on humanities in education?
> I don’t see, for example, this sort of venom directed at sports, even though I have heard more anecdotes about the dread of PE classes.
PE is hard for those who're not fit and/or don't particularly like sports. But PE classes don't carry the air of intellectual superiority and don't hold the banner of truth the way humanities classes do. Also, people like me who dislike all kinds of physical sports know enough about human society to keep their mouths shut on the topic.
> I could also make the same sort of claim about science and math: namely that school did little to inspire any sense of wonder and appreciation for the subject
Observe the general disdain for maths and STEM among the general population.
> To not extend this sort of benefit of the doubt to the humanities them seems baffling.
It's not about rote learning, it's about truthiness. Getting burned by a math class leaves you with a perception that math is hard and probably useless. Getting burned by a literary analysis class leaves you with perception that the field is arbitrary and bullshit.
Note that I wasn't bad at literature classes at school. As long as I at least skimmed the work we were talking about, I could think on my feet fast enough to bullshit my way to B whenever asked. But I was acutely aware that I was bullshitting, and that so was the interpretation the teacher was reciting. This wouldn't be a problem as long as we both acknowledged we were spinning up interpretations, but became a problem once an interpretation became "the truth" (and one we'd be tested on).
As for humanities in general - and I tend to classify most psychology and social sciences under it - I thought a lot about it, and traced my own mixed feelings to them being essentially a hatred for bullshit. I enjoy the works of art, I enjoy introspection, I enjoy spinning up countless theories and interpretations - but I hate when someone takes what is an arbitrary interpretation and tries to pass it as fact about the real world.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
You'd have a point if the quote in question was a long prose quotation. It isn't; it's a poem and code formatting is often the only way to get poetry to appear reasonable.
Code formatting does not get poetry to appear reasonable. That's actually the whole issue being discussed.
On the other hand if you don't like each line spaced as a paragraph, as it would be if you try to keep the line structure I. HN non-code text, you can, on HN, use the same convention used everywhere else that it is impossible, impractical, or undesirable to set poetry while preserving the line structure:
“this is a line of poetry / and this is another line / each separated from the next with / a solidus set with space / on either side.”
(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.
That reminds me of a story of a student who got a homework "Explain the writer's intention". The writing was her father's work. So naturally, she asked her dad for the answer which he replied, "I was thinking at the time of this writing was that I want to finish this goddamn writing ASAP".
She present the answer next day and teacher gave her a bad grade.
This 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I was part of two programs. First from ages about 8 to 12 then another from age 13 to 15.
The program from 8-12 was what you described. Lots of random subject areas. Programming, history, chess, I learned how to build a mud brick hut (built a scale model and everything). Lots of self direction.
The program from 13 to 15 wasn't like that. It was more of a straight bump. We approximately did 2 years worth of core curriculum in one year and were then a year ahead for the remainder.
Unfortunately then at age 16 I and everyone else from that program re-entered the regular classrooms and had to do much of the same year's material again. It was really, really stupid.
My elementary school "GIFTED" program didn't attempt to teach us at a higher grade level at all. Instead it introduced us to different ideas and challenges that normal classes didn't cover. It was everything from an egg-drop contest to programming to creating slides for a report to adopting a manatee to solving "logic problems".
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.
What "mental health issues" you might have experienced? boredom? You were apparently comfortable working 2 grades above so I'd say you were good fit for those programs. Parents who push their kids in by doing massive prep might get different experience.
I can't really remember my state of mind clearly, I was a 6 year old when I started partial acceleration in reading and maths in Kindergarten, and a 9 year old when I was generally accelerated from Year 3 to Year 5. My family tells me that I made it very clear that I was unhappy at the time though - mostly the boredom.
Conversely, I know people who were recognised as gifted students but who weren't generally accelerated out of concern for their social skills or whatever, some of them ended up having problems later on and should probably have just been accelerated and pushed out to higher education faster. And I also know people who are pretty clearly gifted, but went through school in the normal fashion and were entirely happy with that, good for them.
I think the key thing is it has to be about the needs of the child, not the egos of the parents.
Anyway, point is - gifted programs are useful for the kids who need them. And as a rural kid with a limited selection of schools and little by way of gifted program resourcing, I'm glad for the handful of teachers who made my individualised educational plan happen regardless - their special ed programs need more support, not less.
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.
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.
I agree on home schooling having a socialization problem. Private schooling is kind of the opposite: the most measurable effect of private schooling are the connections formed, followed by similar effects of having a more wealthy demographic.
I was homeschooled for most of my pre-univeristy education. I disagree with the notion that homeschoolers have a socialization problem. In my mostly rural Ohio county of about 50,000 people, there were around 50 families homeschooling about 100 kids. There were regular events like drama and chess clubs. I never felt like I didn't get enough socialization.
>>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.
> 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.
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.
Gifted classrooms are funded by a budget and have a certain number of seats available. In must be a percentile selection (mixed with subjective judgments, diversity, etc)
Anyone with the same percentage score will obviously be in the same percentile ... so if you have a limited number of places and everyone scores the same mark, then the fact that you’re filtering by a percentile doesn’t help you in the slightest: it’s tantamount to picking at random.
If none scores 99% then you just don’t take anyone ... in your method if everyone scored 0% you’d still take a bunch. I don’t think that makes any sense.
Differentiation between candidates with equal scores is probably done by going through applications and whatever subjective info is provided there. That can be effectively random, but there's not much of an option at that point.
> in your method if everyone scored 0% you’d still take a bunch.
Yes, and they will. My understanding is it's still a normal school, just with a special selection of students; what are they going to do, shut down for the year?
Lol, this is getting a bit hypothetical... but running a "gifted" programme for a selection of kids that score 0% in the test sounds like a waste of time. I think you'd reasonably be better off just not doing it.
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.
Up to maybe 90-95%, I'd agree. Past that... well, that last 5% is often weird bits that you have to specifically have come across before.
For something at a first grade level, consider, say, spelling bees. I read a lot as a kid, and correspondingly did very well on things like that, but across the hundreds or thousands of words these things go through... well, the people at Scripps aren't just reading lots of books.
It's also been my experience that the people who implicitly understand something tend not to want to bother with recommended prep. That was me for CS courses, some calculus, and english/writing, where I got high grades but often not top of the class. I was on the opposite side for history and statistics (and outscored at least some of the people who are far better at those subjects than I am).
Basically, if you're gifted and already have knowledge of a subject, you probably don't really want to spend lots of time studying it. This leaves you vulnerable to the weird 5% of edge cases you haven't seen before. If you don't know the subject, and have to do a lot of prep, you're going to come across those cases during prep.
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.
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.
I guess that means what you mean by 'gifted' or 'notable'. Being very creative, having the confidence to express this creativity and most importantly, being both capable and _willing_ to have a high workload over time is probably correlated to having high IQ, but I strongly doubt that they follow in lockstep. Perseverence and hard work seems to be more correlated to "success" than IQ.
IMHO there's a lot of smart people that compromise their health and well-being by forcing themselves to work too hard at being notable, and in itself I don't think these are the best objectives to strive for in life.
What I'm reading from your comment is that you have a strong, implicit association between "giftedness" and "notability" - perhaps the latter taking the form of socially recognizable achievement.
Speaking as someone who was in a gifted program in my youth (and who knew others in more advanced programs), I would like to caution against this perspective. My achievements are not notable, and I would not use that as a heuristic for determining whether or not a particular program/standard is successful or useful. Yet I found my experience to be very positive. Despite the fact that not all programs are created equal, I would generally recommend a suitable one to any parent with a gifted child.
I understand MENSA is a bit loaded since it can come across as pretentious, so let me reframe the example for you. Take a look at past winners of the Putnam exam. Most of them are not nearly as notable as cperciva[1], but they're all demonstrably gifted.
Giftedness is not about being entrepreneurial or about how you apply your intelligence in a notable way. Programs designed for gifted people are not trying to create a class of people who are more impressive. In general, they try to foster natural talent in a way that cannot typically be accommodated in the modal classroom setting.
________________
1. For those unaware I'm referring to Colin Percival, an HN user who designed scrypt and developed Tarsnap. He won the Putnam.
I was in the gifted program when I was in elementary school and I don’t recommend it. It took a kid like me who was already prone to social isolation and isolated him further. I voluntarily left the program after 2 years and was playing catch up socially and I wasn’t any better off academically. Don’t put your kids in that program.
I 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 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.)
Did California's GATE actually have a purpose? I was in it for 13 years (~1982-1996) and it seemed completely and utterly pointless. No extracurriculars, no meetings, no resources... it seemed like a smart-kid inventorying service for (insert random conspiracy theory here). Worse, I was constantly pulled out of class to take IQ tests and then bored to death because I was 3 years ahead after coming from a private school that had phonics and aggressive material plans (Challenger).
> more to do with my family's obsession with being smarter than everyone else, which made me an insufferable, lazy little jerkwad.
Massive props to you for having the self-awareness to make that realization. So many people don't.
And so many smart people fail to realize that being smart is just one gift among many. And all things considered, once you reach a certain minimum, other attributes are probably more important in life success (like work ethic, and social ability). It took me until my mid-20s to make that realization.
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
Let me guess. You don't have a coordination problem?
I do. I received about a year of therapy for the fact that my left hand quite literally doesn't know what my right hand is doing. That helped. But being clumsy still made school sports really unpleasant for me.
Just because sports was right for you doesn't mean that it is right for everyone.
For any given activity X, there will be people for which X is not a reasonable thing. That doesn't mean X isn't a good thing, it just means it isn't for everyone.
If schools do not take into account those people for whom X is not reasonable, it's entirely possible for the marginal net benefit to be negative. E.g. the students who benefit most from sport would do plenty of exercise anyway, but the students who are most harmed be sport will end up permanently hating exercise.
OP stated "I can't stress enough how important youth sports are for kids"
Based on a sample size of one.
For any given activity X, there will be people for which X is a reasonable thing. That doesn't mean X is really important, it just means it's important for one person.
Yes, it fights childhood obesity. None of the rest is universally true. Let me go through them one by one to demonstrate.
1) leadership qualities Constant reminders of how I was at the bottom of the totem pole didn't develop leadership for me. You develop leadership by doing something you are good at, not bad at. My positive experiences only happened much later in life.
2) coping with adversity I got lots of practice with adversity. Particularly when my physical challenges made me a target for bullying. I never noticed that the experience helped me cope with adversity though.
3) how to win and lose gracefully If by luck I wound up on a winning team in PE, it was clear to all that I did not contribute to the victory. I got practice at losing, but never noticed that the other children learned to be particularly graceful at winning.
4) coordination (all sports take practice) Did you notice the bit about my having a medical problem which required therapy? Yes, physical activity builds coordination. But the way it was done in school did not build mine. I wound up fixing that as an adult.
5) fights childhood obesity This I grant. Though it was superfluous in my case. Everyone in my family is skinny until at least 30.
6) forces kids to be around other kids instead of in isolation Given the way it made me a target for bullying, isolation would have been better.
7) Experience working with a team from an early age For me it was so demoralizing that I never felt like I was really part of any team until I was in my 30s. And when I did, it was programming that got me there, not sports.
These will work for any child, not just me. Bullshit. I am a definite counterexample to your theory. As you would have known if you paid attention to what I said before.
I am strongly in favor of all children who are physically capable of it getting exercise. But competitive sports are NOT a good idea for everyone.
> leadership qualities, coping with adversity, forces kids to be around other kids instead of in isolation, Experience working with a team from an early age
Got all that from IT club (adversity being when things didn't go well - bugs, network crashes etc)
> how to win and lose gracefully
LAN parties
> coordination
rock climbing
> fights childhood obesity
Not eating junk food seemed to work for me. I wouldn't be so arrogant to say that works for everyone though.
In your case, you had a condition that prevented you from competing on a level playing field with other kids your age. I see your point. You're right that sports might not be for everyone, but I will argue it will do good for most. I'm suggesting that if you become a parent to an able-bodied child, that you enroll them in sports. Additionally, at that age, the difference between the best player on the team and the worst is that the best player is probably practicing with their dad a few additional times a month. As a parent, you can bond with your child and help them be the best player on the team by spending time with them and helping them practice.
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.
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 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.
Having a representative sample is essential to being able to do statistics. And collecting self-reported anecdotes does not constitute a valid sampling technique. It doesn't matter how your massage your observations afterwards, GIGO still holds and what you received was statistical garbage.
>Having a representative sample is essential to being able to do statistics.
That's orthogonal. Whether the collection is representative or not individual data elements are still anecdotes.
(Plus, not all data is used for statistics, nor do we always have an advance knowledge of what is representative -- e.g. when researching an unknown domain).
Submitted data is still data, just at worst biased. Which may or may not be important.
The question is always what bias and whether collecting much less data yourself is preferable. Your non-submission sampling tactic may be biased too. (E.g. telephone questionnaires select for people having free time on demand. Emails select for people with bad spam filters and present in mailing list. Walking to ask has other limitations such as range and again availability. Asking third parties may be biased too, just like asking first parties.)
Usually when there are lots of unique submissions the question of bias or lack of representation can be put to rest.
If e.g. there are racial biases compared to baseline population due to submissions, this can be taken into account. Likewise if there is his due to some school districts responding less or more. You will have to handle these issues anyway.
If you guess what the representative sample might be, you may be committing scientific fraud...
You shouldn't blindly perform standard statistical analysis on such data with the usual techniques. But to declare it statistical garbage is simply going too far.
In fact, anecdotes are the way in which we are able to make sense of the world at all. We do not as individuals do most of our learning via explicit statistical analysis.
Your essential point, however, stands in the sense that one should certainly not act as if anecdotes are statistically unbiased. And your average person is terrible at proper statistical reasoning. People tend to over-emphasize their own experience. (Though this is evolutionarily and historically useful - a feature, not a bug). So, yes, someone presenting their own anecdote or set of anecdotes as data is often misguided.
But there are, in fact, many studies (academic or industrial), that, are, in fact, just that! Collections of anecdotes. Self-reported experiences via surveys, error reports, reviews, and the like, which can be mined for data or looked at to see if there are any patterns.
There are issues such as "WEIRD" (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) samples.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain...
There are three basic approaches: Ignore the problem and use the results as-is. Declare the sample hopelessly biased and throw it out altogether until you can find a more representative sample. Or acknowledge the bias in the sample, but continue to use it along with careful annotations as a low-confidence best-guess until better data come along. The last is the obvious best approach in an ideal world, though biases such as motivated reasoning and poor reporting by the media often means that reporting such partial results can do more harm than good.
For a more mathematically grounded approach, you could apply Bayesian reasoning: take into account your priors (including the best guess of your expected bias in your sample compared to the distribution from which you are sampling), and figure out exactly how much evidence each anecdote constitutes. It might not be much, but it's something.
“I said ‘The plural of anecdote is data’ some time in the 1969-70 academic year while teaching a graduate seminar at Stanford. The occasion was a student’s dismissal of a simple factual statement–by another student or me–as a mere anecdote." - Wolfinger
I'd actually like to see a study on slipping on banana skins. When I was young I heard the phrase and soon after I tested it. Banana skins aren't that slippery unless the medium under it, or the shoe above it is slippery.
Admittedly, this is just my experience, and probably not statistically significant
In my experience, banana peels are quite slippery, especially when they form that 'layer of slime' (when the banana becomes quite ripe) and on a smooth (though not necessarily inherently slippery) surface.
Since you asked for a study, here you go (though I cannot speak for its correctness):
Wow, that is awesome! Thanks for the link. HN delivers again.
For anyone who doesn't want to download the link, the abstract states:
"We measured the frictional coefficient under banana skin on floor material. Force transducer with six degrees
of freedom was set under a flat panel of linoleum. Both frictional force and vertical force were simultaneously
measured during a shoe sole was pushed and rubbed by a foot motion on the panel with banana skin.
Measured frictional coefficient was about 0.07. This was much lower than the value on common materials and
similar one on well lubricated surfaces. By the microscopic observation, it was estimated that polysaccharide
follicular gel played the dominant role in lubricating effect of banana skin after the crush and the change to
homogeneous sol."
The type of banana you get at the grocery store now is called Cavendish. When the slip on banana peel meme was invented, the common banana was the Gros Michel, which has a more slippery skin.
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.
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.
>where my dear teacher lectured on grammar like it was a game of chess.
The greatest teacher I ever had was a middle-school english teacher who marked strictly on the basis of attendance and participation, never opened a textbook, enthusiastically read aloud from books of his students' choice as if he were performing them professionally on stage for half the class time, and spent the other half of the time just casually discussing the books with the students. The first words he said to the class on day one was "I don't want to hear the word preposition, and I don't think you do either."
Actually the sentence diagramming was useful introduction to a type of analysis. Not too different from computer science foundations of programming languages, automata, etc
I would argue that sentence diagramming is of dubious use outside of an ESL or primary school class. And even then the English language is such a self-contradicting mongrel tongue that it's effectively rule-less.
It's a living, evolving, consensus language. It can't be nailed down to an algorithm. It's a language in which writers who break the rules become legendary. Would James Joyce or Charles Dodgson or the Bard himself have diagrammed a sentence? Heck no. They played with grammar and spelling the way a child plays with a pile of lego: with enthusiasm and imagination and a gleeful disregard for the instructions.
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.
There is one more thing that is important that most people miss: a "gifted" student (whatever that means) mixed in with the rest challenges the other students to do better.
The right way to run a gifted program is to have class placement tied to ability, not to age. If someone is good at math, put them in the next higher math class. If someone is good at reading, bump them up. It works well for under-performing kids as well: if they fail math, they can retake just that class and continue in the rest.
This keep gifted kids challenged while not pushing anyone through too fast.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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%)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
462 comments
[ 18.8 ms ] story [ 382 ms ] thread> 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.
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
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"
It is actually omitted due to testcenter policy, to enable reuse. You cannot reuse an exam with its answer key published.
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.
1: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/standardized-tests-are-so-bad...
A multiple-choice, norm-referenced test doesn't measure justifiable answers.
Perfectly correct, only that's not what's happening here.
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.
Now I for, 1 wood, find that too be useful!
I guess that the result of this will be the test makers using long dead authors more.
I can't recommend Borgel enough, either; it's really good.
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.
Indeed, but a multiple-choice standardized test question is the antithesis of such an environment.
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.
The problem is that tests tend to be subverted into tools for ranking the students, which doesn't serve their learning.
In actual practice, they tend to not be used that way.
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.
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.
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.
Overall, if your question has an answer there, it's not a hard one...
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
In classes where I knew the subject well, I generally did well on the tests. In classes where I had gaps in my understanding, I usually did poorly. In classes where the grades were posted publicly, my general subjective judgment of how well people knew the material matched up with their scores. Not perfectly, obviously, but the correlation has been high enough that I’ve never really been convinced that testing in general is “missing” some critical element of learning.
It would be a lot more acceptable if deviation of test scores from skill were to be totally random for every test.
These all affect how well you test, but do not determine your skill in the subject. Hence, having a disadvantage in any of the above gives you a system disadvantage in the educational system.
For one, the latter are often bullshit, as TFA points out. For two, they measure all sorts of stuff aside from actual proficiency. If nothing else, unless they took all the same classes - literally the same classes - throughout their school careers to date, no two kids got the same education. As anyone who's got the vaguest training in science can tell you, that kind of uncontrolled variability in your population will destroy any validity your measure might have. And lastly, so often these standardized tests really do have hacky questions put together with hack procedures. For my part, I distinctly remember completely stumping an IQ test proctor when I was a kid (yeah, I had helicopter parents). I had 5 cards, each showing a house, with the sun and shadows in different positions. I was supposed to put them in the correct order. So, naturally, my first move was to ask if the pictures showed the north or south side of the house.
There's no standardized test that measures the kinds of reasoning skills that really matter in life, such as the kind you'd use to make an educated guess that a question is being asked by the kind of people who would assume, unwittingly, that east is always on the right hand side.
I would expect the intelligent test taker to understand the test was not a trick, and that unstated assumptions mean use the defaults.
As for math, there are many ways to teach math, but 2+2=4 in all of them. It is reasonable to assume it is base 10, not base 3, unless the test said "in base 3".
Also good tests are hard to write. I’ve seen T/F questions that could go either way. Multiple choice questions with more than one correct answer. (Professors will tell you to choose the “best” answer. But that’s a matter of opinion in many, if not all, cases.)
I think what someone can DO with their knowledge is more important than what individual bits of knowledge they maintained. I’d rather hire or work with someone who can get things done and knows certain algorithms exist than hire or work with someone who can’t get anything done but can recite the same algorithms from memory. Tests favor the second person. (I was that person in HS calculus. Aced the class without understanding a thing just because I have a gift for remembering and applying rules. I had no idea what I was doing.)
This is why I am so glad that all of my university exams (and the _vast_ majority of exams before that, at least post-Y9/age 13) were open-ended questions[1], then marked by someone who will (likely) know the subject better than you even will. Even if you couldn't get the the answer, but could understand and articulate the starting points, or made a compelling argument but misread or misunderstood part of the question, you will at least get partial credit. The physics exams would also have a standardised formulae reference sheet.
[1] A typical paper would be three hours, answering 5-6 questions, and a typical subquestion can be as open-ended as "Write brief notes about a tree representation of functional arrays, subscripted by positive integers according to their representation in binary notation. How efficient are the lookup and update operations?"
E.g. Say I forgot the formula for Simpson's Rule on a test, but remember that it had to do with approximating integrals with trapezoids. Someone who thoroughly understands the course material could re-derive this formula in under 5 minutes if they had forgotten.
Right. And if you know the material, this isn't a problem.
How about spoken English? I know a great many people who are able to express themselves clearly and gramatically - surely mastery of spoken English - but ask them what the rule is for order of adjectives or some such and many of them would even need to double check what an adjective is.
The question of this nature about the English language would be "how do I know what order to put adjectives in?" and the answer would be something along the lines of "opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose".
I do think they would be unable to answer. The rule of course then goes deeper, into ablaut reduplication and so on. People master spoken English without knowing anything [0] about it.
[0] Yes, I know, I said "anything" and now your literalist side is jumping in joy at being able to say "Aha, aha, they DO know at least one thing and therefore your statement is not literally correct!" I don't care.
Except, they can answer questions to show what they know, they just can't answer your carefully selected subset of questions with the exact answers you demand using the terminology you demand.
Draw an arbitrary line around the allowable questions and you can make every group of experts, "people who can't answer questions about it". But what use is that?
And it might be safe to assume a high test score is repeatable.
The challenge is to find a test that correlate high scores with good knowledge - not merely with being good at taking tests.
Because rarely do we care about how good someone is at taking tests; we'd like to measure how good their knowledge is. That's hard to do if we only can infer poor knowledge from a poor test result, but not good knowledge from a good test result.
Particularly with multiple-choice tests, this is not only possible, but in my experience common. It became a kind of running joke among my classmates that we know our teachers, not the material - over time we just learned the quirks of whoever designed the test and eliminated the wrong answers based on that.
Why waste your time learning that? Just learn the material. I'm often bemused by the effort people put into avoiding learning the material, much more than it would take to just learn the material.
He laughed, and said the stupid kids needed a break.
Still learning how to do "Professor X's questions" was a guaranteed ace. Forget the subject, memorize the borderline cases, max grade. Do all exercises on the text book, also, get a second text book and do all of those too, and you might fail the test.
In the end, tests end up approving a lot of people that learned next to nothing, as I myself succeeded in several by memorizing for the short term. I couldn't tell how many jingles I used to go through tests. In rarer cases, they also bombing someone with a reasonable understanding of the subject that maybe just was having a bad day or was sick.
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.
I agree that currently, education systems are terrible, but is there any way to maintain them at scale that is not?
https://excellentjourney.net/2015/03/04/art-fear-the-ceramic...
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.
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.
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.
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.
This has been commuted by the Tory government to "parents are fined if their children are not in school".
I find that very telling.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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
But I agree that forcing your interpretation on everyone else is pointless and often irritating.
My experience with literary analysis is being forced to analyze pieces which I often believed didn't have any abstract meaning to speak of and then inventing some nonsense I thought would appeal to the teacher. The criticism is apt because my experience is generally the only experience many people have with the study of languages and literature. If it didn't exist these classes might add value to the lives of the people taking them.
But it is also at this level that multiple-choice tests about which bits of a text mean what (as the original article illustrates) proliferate. It is at this level that the textbook is the One Truth about what a text means. As one other comment points out, at this level there is no recourse but "authority" which is, ironically, detached from the author.
> It doesn't matter what the poem "actually" means any more than it matters that you're ignoring friction
This is a false equivalence. When we ignore 'what the poem "actually" means' it opens up interpretation to a colossal array of extremely subjective possibilities. "The curtains are blue" could symbolize anything from the author's depression to his thoughts about the Yuan dynasty. In contrast, the effects of ignoring friction can be objectively proven (if not empirically demonstrated) and would give us a definite answer, no mental gymnastics required.
In real-life engineering, we also tolerate a certain amount of slack and simplification in our models so long as the discrepancy between computation and observation is not so drastic. In this sense, ignoring those variables is tantamount to practice in iterative refinement (you are launching a projectile in an indoors gymnasium; you wouldn't really care if your computation is off by a foot or so because you ignored air resistance and the curvature of the Earth). The simplification can still provide value (not to mention practicality). But eking out an explanation just for the sake of giving an explanation, relegating "the work as a whole, the writer's oeuvre, historical context, linguistic concerns, philosophical frameworks, and so on" to more advanced levels, is just sloppy scholarship and build poor habits.
Unless you're prepared to budge on the first premise, there's nothing much I can say to persuade you.
I found it quite interesting that I was the only person in that class who regularly both read and wrote poems, and at the same time the one who had the sharpest reaction to being forced to analyse them in ways I felt actively destroyed my enjoyment of those poems.
One of the highlights of my school years was during this torture, when I got a chance to read a poem I'd written during one of those lessons aloud, with the intent that we would analyse it.
The teacher walked right into it, not yet aware how much I detested it.
My poem was a scathing criticism of tearing poems apart to invent meanings, unsupported by facts, that the author likely never intended, just barely civil enough to be read out in school.
My teacher got red and mumbled something I think nobody in class heard over the cheering and clapping.
I don't think I ever want to perform any of my poems again - it's a hard reaction to beat.
My teacher and I reached a cautious detente - he didn't punish my grade as much as he could have for that and other demonstrations, and I contained it and mostly played along. But the following year we did have to do a major report that included a literary analysis of a novel, and I told him flat out that I knew I could afford to come out a full grade lower and still not drop a grade for my final grade of the year, and that I just would ignore substantial parts of the requirements.
I did all of the 'mechanical' analysis of vocabulary and identifying allegories and the like, but then flat out refused to speculate on what the text meant. That was purely demonstrative - I certainly could have talked about my subjective interpretation, but the exercise in pretending there was an objective interpretation just made me upset.
It did not just affect my enjoyment of reading, but also my enjoyment of writing - the thought of my writing even potentially being treated like that was profoundly depressing.
To this day I think these kinds of lessons are destructive and do massive damage to students enjoyment of literature.
The test demands an answer, whereas good teaching would be a discussion.
I'd prefer my kids to finish school knowing how to read and enjoy poetry, than knowing how to complete multiple choice tests.
Trying to put the work in context of other works from the same genre or historical period? Sure, that's useful. Telling you what the author "truly meant", even though the author never said that? That's just entertainment. Let's label it as such explicitly, instead of trying to tell people it's a form of "deeper truth".
A lot of academic-level criticism is really an advanced game of "Hunt the hidden metaphor." People can take it or leave it, but as a pastime it's unlikely to go away. No one competent [2] seriously expects any one interpretation to be definitive. It's all just opinion, and sometimes it's interesting and insightful opinion - and sometimes it isn't.
[1] A lot of people find this strange, but why should it be? Creators are no more aware of their own internal motivations than anyone else is.
[2] This may not include high school teachers attempting the same thing, because they're likely to be teaching by rote from standard interpretations and marking them right/wrong rather than trying to elicit interesting personal insights.
I can appreciate the argument of a work of art being like a mirror, where looking at it reveals as much about it as it does about the person looking. I can appreciate "hunt the hidden metaphor" exercises and even "bend the interpretation so hard to make the book be about something it obviously isn't" games. I've done both, and I enjoyed it - it's a nice workout for imagination and arguing skills. But I wish it was presented as such, clearly labeled as intellectual entertainment. As it is, the way I - and perhaps many other people in this thread - was exposed to literary criticism always made the critics look like historians - dispensing factual, if not always obvious, knowledge about works of literature.
Interpretations differ, and hence a literary critic is born.
Can we please try to be more polite than this? Accusing someone of self-aggrandizement doesn't usually lead to a friendly and interesting conversation.
(Usually attributed to Picasso but seems to be apocryphal)
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.
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.
Yes I am being sarcastic but I actually heard this kind of comment about my then wife's work.
Some of the best literature works with characters rather than plot. I can easily see how an author trying to work accurately with characters based on generic memories of how someone should behave would actually leave a lot of evidence for interpretations they didn't expect.
Author's intent is important, but sometimes even the author will stand up and say their not quite sure what their characters would do in a given situation.
What are you saying about the people who make such comments about your then wife's work? Something demeaning, I infer.
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.
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.
... I think that's the point - even if it were more than that, he might not be a fan of admitting it.
But your point still stands. Hemingway thought not highly of literary critics.
The fun thing about Hemingway was his persona was 50% real and 50% self-cultivated myth, except we can’t really tell which half was which. As far as his style, that was a direct result of his journalism training at the Kansas City Star. https://www.kansascity.com/entertainment/arts-culture/articl...
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.
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".
> What remains is still formidable
I think you answered your own question there.
As for the rest of your comment, yes, someone without the cultural background will miss something. But the same goes for those not born in the same age, those of a different gender than the author, those of a different social standing and so on. There is always a mismatch between author and reader, the better the author the better they are able to compensate for that mismatch and the more the reader will get.
Reading an ancient and translated text is going to have those problems in spades and it can still be very much worthwhile to read them anyway, as long as you recognize the gap between you and the author.
In my own experience reading of books from different cultures and times, even in translation, is one of the most enriching things you can do short of traveling, and what with the physical limitations on time travel in some cases it is the only way in which we can experience the products of other cultures simply because they are no longer there.
>> is one of the most enriching things you can do short of traveling
I agree with you there. I was just explaining to the OP the likely reasons why he didn't enjoy what I consider to be one of the best novels ever written.
At least that was my impression of the book when I read it 25 years ago (I was 16 at the time).
I have the impression that the book has kept a part of its old reputation, even as the world has changed and it would never get that reputation in today's world.
Macbeth Act 5, scene 5, 19–28
-Ron Swanson
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.
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
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.
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.
You’re clearly emotional about the topic, to a degree that cannot be explained purely by doing a few interpretations in school. I don’t see, for example, this sort of venom directed at sports, even though I have heard more anecdotes about the dread of PE classes.
I could also make the same sort of claim about science and math: namely that school did little to inspire any sense of wonder and appreciation for the subject; that it tended to dwell on the rote application of some learnt rules to slightly varying problems without capturing the essence of the subject.
I have an inkling that people here might agree that some amount of rote learning was necessary for sciences to later be able to appreciate them, and that some of us may not have been ready to appreciate those subjects fully as early teens anyway. To not extend this sort of benefit of the doubt to the humanities them seems baffling. It may be explained people never going further in those fields and therefore not evolving the understanding that lets them reinterpret their early experiences. Or it’s an almost active socialization, a choice to fully identify with one group of academia and to deny the other’s validity in an in-group/out-group dynamic.
It’s also somewhat indefensible to claim “pure bullshit”—one just needs a single counterexample to show this, and others in this thread have brought up law as a rather impressive example of the power of interpretation. Personally, I’d point to Hannah Arendt, but I’m sure there are other philosophers for everyone. Heck, even Ayn Rand is squarely in the humanities. Or Carl Schmid if you like Trump, or Hobbes if you hate everyone.
Oh, and I just noticed this, Frankfurt’s On Bullshit is itself very much in the humanities’ wheelhouse.
Were the interpretations you were taught mere bullshit? I bet if you were to go back in time, or pick up a textbook, you’d find that no, they tended to be, if anything, a bit too much on-the-nose. Of course it’s not just about a white whale, but about something in the human experience that we can see far more often than any hunt for large marine mammals. But as teenagers, that sort of introspection was liable to instill a certain amount of existential dread, and quite possible ruin the easy enjoyment of what is otherwise an engaging but rather superficial adventure story on the high sees.
PE is hard for those who're not fit and/or don't particularly like sports. But PE classes don't carry the air of intellectual superiority and don't hold the banner of truth the way humanities classes do. Also, people like me who dislike all kinds of physical sports know enough about human society to keep their mouths shut on the topic.
> I could also make the same sort of claim about science and math: namely that school did little to inspire any sense of wonder and appreciation for the subject
Observe the general disdain for maths and STEM among the general population.
> To not extend this sort of benefit of the doubt to the humanities them seems baffling.
It's not about rote learning, it's about truthiness. Getting burned by a math class leaves you with a perception that math is hard and probably useless. Getting burned by a literary analysis class leaves you with perception that the field is arbitrary and bullshit.
Note that I wasn't bad at literature classes at school. As long as I at least skimmed the work we were talking about, I could think on my feet fast enough to bullshit my way to B whenever asked. But I was acutely aware that I was bullshitting, and that so was the interpretation the teacher was reciting. This wouldn't be a problem as long as we both acknowledged we were spinning up interpretations, but became a problem once an interpretation became "the truth" (and one we'd be tested on).
As for humanities in general - and I tend to classify most psychology and social sciences under it - I thought a lot about it, and traced my own mixed feelings to them being essentially a hatred for bullshit. I enjoy the works of art, I enjoy introspection, I enjoy spinning up countless theories and interpretations - but I hate when someone takes what is an arbitrary interpretation and tries to pass it as fact about the real world.
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.
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.
The Effort
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.@dang fix your mobile css and styling.
https://hackerweb.app/
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
HN code blocks abused for long prose quotations suck on mobile (and aren't appealing on desktop, either), but that's abusing code blocks.On the other hand if you don't like each line spaced as a paragraph, as it would be if you try to keep the line structure I. HN non-code text, you can, on HN, use the same convention used everywhere else that it is impossible, impractical, or undesirable to set poetry while preserving the line structure:
“this is a line of poetry / and this is another line / each separated from the next with / a solidus set with space / on either side.”
"It's like reading a short story, but the author has less time to make their point."
That was a fun place to work.
(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.
I wonder what he was trying to say with that poem ;)
She present the answer next day and teacher gave her a bad grade.
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.
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.
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.
The program from 8-12 was what you described. Lots of random subject areas. Programming, history, chess, I learned how to build a mud brick hut (built a scale model and everything). Lots of self direction.
The program from 13 to 15 wasn't like that. It was more of a straight bump. We approximately did 2 years worth of core curriculum in one year and were then a year ahead for the remainder.
Unfortunately then at age 16 I and everyone else from that program re-entered the regular classrooms and had to do much of the same year's material again. It was really, really stupid.
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.
Conversely, I know people who were recognised as gifted students but who weren't generally accelerated out of concern for their social skills or whatever, some of them ended up having problems later on and should probably have just been accelerated and pushed out to higher education faster. And I also know people who are pretty clearly gifted, but went through school in the normal fashion and were entirely happy with that, good for them.
I think the key thing is it has to be about the needs of the child, not the egos of the parents.
Anyway, point is - gifted programs are useful for the kids who need them. And as a rural kid with a limited selection of schools and little by way of gifted program resourcing, I'm glad for the handful of teachers who made my individualised educational plan happen regardless - their special ed programs need more support, not less.
Gifted programs reduce that.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gifted_At-Risk for more data points.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
If none scores 99% then you just don’t take anyone ... in your method if everyone scored 0% you’d still take a bunch. I don’t think that makes any sense.
> in your method if everyone scored 0% you’d still take a bunch.
Yes, and they will. My understanding is it's still a normal school, just with a special selection of students; what are they going to do, shut down for the year?
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law
For something at a first grade level, consider, say, spelling bees. I read a lot as a kid, and correspondingly did very well on things like that, but across the hundreds or thousands of words these things go through... well, the people at Scripps aren't just reading lots of books.
It's also been my experience that the people who implicitly understand something tend not to want to bother with recommended prep. That was me for CS courses, some calculus, and english/writing, where I got high grades but often not top of the class. I was on the opposite side for history and statistics (and outscored at least some of the people who are far better at those subjects than I am).
Basically, if you're gifted and already have knowledge of a subject, you probably don't really want to spend lots of time studying it. This leaves you vulnerable to the weird 5% of edge cases you haven't seen before. If you don't know the subject, and have to do a lot of prep, you're going to come across those cases during prep.
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...
IMHO there's a lot of smart people that compromise their health and well-being by forcing themselves to work too hard at being notable, and in itself I don't think these are the best objectives to strive for in life.
Speaking as someone who was in a gifted program in my youth (and who knew others in more advanced programs), I would like to caution against this perspective. My achievements are not notable, and I would not use that as a heuristic for determining whether or not a particular program/standard is successful or useful. Yet I found my experience to be very positive. Despite the fact that not all programs are created equal, I would generally recommend a suitable one to any parent with a gifted child.
I understand MENSA is a bit loaded since it can come across as pretentious, so let me reframe the example for you. Take a look at past winners of the Putnam exam. Most of them are not nearly as notable as cperciva[1], but they're all demonstrably gifted.
Giftedness is not about being entrepreneurial or about how you apply your intelligence in a notable way. Programs designed for gifted people are not trying to create a class of people who are more impressive. In general, they try to foster natural talent in a way that cannot typically be accommodated in the modal classroom setting.
________________
1. For those unaware I'm referring to Colin Percival, an HN user who designed scrypt and developed Tarsnap. He won the Putnam.
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.
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.)
Massive props to you for having the self-awareness to make that realization. So many people don't.
And so many smart people fail to realize that being smart is just one gift among many. And all things considered, once you reach a certain minimum, other attributes are probably more important in life success (like work ethic, and social ability). It took me until my mid-20s to make that realization.
I do. I received about a year of therapy for the fact that my left hand quite literally doesn't know what my right hand is doing. That helped. But being clumsy still made school sports really unpleasant for me.
Just because sports was right for you doesn't mean that it is right for everyone.
Based on a sample size of one.
For any given activity X, there will be people for which X is a reasonable thing. That doesn't mean X is really important, it just means it's important for one person.
1) leadership qualities
2) coping with adversity
3) how to win and lose gracefully
4) coordination (all sports take practice)
5) fights childhood obesity
6) forces kids to be around other kids instead of in isolation
7) Experience working with a team from an early age
These will work for any child, not just me.
1) leadership qualities Constant reminders of how I was at the bottom of the totem pole didn't develop leadership for me. You develop leadership by doing something you are good at, not bad at. My positive experiences only happened much later in life.
2) coping with adversity I got lots of practice with adversity. Particularly when my physical challenges made me a target for bullying. I never noticed that the experience helped me cope with adversity though.
3) how to win and lose gracefully If by luck I wound up on a winning team in PE, it was clear to all that I did not contribute to the victory. I got practice at losing, but never noticed that the other children learned to be particularly graceful at winning.
4) coordination (all sports take practice) Did you notice the bit about my having a medical problem which required therapy? Yes, physical activity builds coordination. But the way it was done in school did not build mine. I wound up fixing that as an adult.
5) fights childhood obesity This I grant. Though it was superfluous in my case. Everyone in my family is skinny until at least 30.
6) forces kids to be around other kids instead of in isolation Given the way it made me a target for bullying, isolation would have been better.
7) Experience working with a team from an early age For me it was so demoralizing that I never felt like I was really part of any team until I was in my 30s. And when I did, it was programming that got me there, not sports.
These will work for any child, not just me. Bullshit. I am a definite counterexample to your theory. As you would have known if you paid attention to what I said before.
I am strongly in favor of all children who are physically capable of it getting exercise. But competitive sports are NOT a good idea for everyone.
Got all that from IT club (adversity being when things didn't go well - bugs, network crashes etc)
> how to win and lose gracefully
LAN parties
> coordination
rock climbing
> fights childhood obesity
Not eating junk food seemed to work for me. I wouldn't be so arrogant to say that works for everyone though.
I only regret it wasn't around when I was young.
The elementary school one was amazing, and I would recommend it to anyone.
The middle school one was mediocre at best. I liked it, but it wasn't actually any better than regular classes.
So it can vary pretty wildly, even in the same school system.
But I've never heard of it being worse than regular school, worst case, you're with other gifted kids.
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.
Actually it is. Data is just many individual anecdotes collected. They just need interpretation.
Having a representative sample is essential to being able to do statistics. And collecting self-reported anecdotes does not constitute a valid sampling technique. It doesn't matter how your massage your observations afterwards, GIGO still holds and what you received was statistical garbage.
That's orthogonal. Whether the collection is representative or not individual data elements are still anecdotes.
(Plus, not all data is used for statistics, nor do we always have an advance knowledge of what is representative -- e.g. when researching an unknown domain).
The question is always what bias and whether collecting much less data yourself is preferable. Your non-submission sampling tactic may be biased too. (E.g. telephone questionnaires select for people having free time on demand. Emails select for people with bad spam filters and present in mailing list. Walking to ask has other limitations such as range and again availability. Asking third parties may be biased too, just like asking first parties.)
Usually when there are lots of unique submissions the question of bias or lack of representation can be put to rest.
If e.g. there are racial biases compared to baseline population due to submissions, this can be taken into account. Likewise if there is his due to some school districts responding less or more. You will have to handle these issues anyway.
If you guess what the representative sample might be, you may be committing scientific fraud...
In fact, anecdotes are the way in which we are able to make sense of the world at all. We do not as individuals do most of our learning via explicit statistical analysis.
Your essential point, however, stands in the sense that one should certainly not act as if anecdotes are statistically unbiased. And your average person is terrible at proper statistical reasoning. People tend to over-emphasize their own experience. (Though this is evolutionarily and historically useful - a feature, not a bug). So, yes, someone presenting their own anecdote or set of anecdotes as data is often misguided.
But there are, in fact, many studies (academic or industrial), that, are, in fact, just that! Collections of anecdotes. Self-reported experiences via surveys, error reports, reviews, and the like, which can be mined for data or looked at to see if there are any patterns.
There are issues such as "WEIRD" (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) samples. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain... There are three basic approaches: Ignore the problem and use the results as-is. Declare the sample hopelessly biased and throw it out altogether until you can find a more representative sample. Or acknowledge the bias in the sample, but continue to use it along with careful annotations as a low-confidence best-guess until better data come along. The last is the obvious best approach in an ideal world, though biases such as motivated reasoning and poor reporting by the media often means that reporting such partial results can do more harm than good.
For a more mathematically grounded approach, you could apply Bayesian reasoning: take into account your priors (including the best guess of your expected bias in your sample compared to the distribution from which you are sampling), and figure out exactly how much evidence each anecdote constitutes. It might not be much, but it's something.
I'll close by mentioning that the quote is actually a misquote: http://blog.danwin.com/don-t-forget-the-plural-of-anecdote-i...
“I said ‘The plural of anecdote is data’ some time in the 1969-70 academic year while teaching a graduate seminar at Stanford. The occasion was a student’s dismissal of a simple factual statement–by another student or me–as a mere anecdote." - Wolfinger
... and the definition of experience is not anecdote.
I think that 2 years of experience qualify as data. Anecdote is when you walk in a street and slip casually in a banana skin once.
Admittedly, this is just my experience, and probably not statistically significant
Since you asked for a study, here you go (though I cannot speak for its correctness):
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29253796 https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/trol/7/3/7_147/_pdf
For anyone who doesn't want to download the link, the abstract states:
"We measured the frictional coefficient under banana skin on floor material. Force transducer with six degrees of freedom was set under a flat panel of linoleum. Both frictional force and vertical force were simultaneously measured during a shoe sole was pushed and rubbed by a foot motion on the panel with banana skin. Measured frictional coefficient was about 0.07. This was much lower than the value on common materials and similar one on well lubricated surfaces. By the microscopic observation, it was estimated that polysaccharide follicular gel played the dominant role in lubricating effect of banana skin after the crush and the change to homogeneous sol."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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.
Not sure I would have ended up where I did but for their intervention.
The greatest teacher I ever had was a middle-school english teacher who marked strictly on the basis of attendance and participation, never opened a textbook, enthusiastically read aloud from books of his students' choice as if he were performing them professionally on stage for half the class time, and spent the other half of the time just casually discussing the books with the students. The first words he said to the class on day one was "I don't want to hear the word preposition, and I don't think you do either."
It's a living, evolving, consensus language. It can't be nailed down to an algorithm. It's a language in which writers who break the rules become legendary. Would James Joyce or Charles Dodgson or the Bard himself have diagrammed a sentence? Heck no. They played with grammar and spelling the way a child plays with a pile of lego: with enthusiasm and imagination and a gleeful disregard for the instructions.
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.
This keep gifted kids challenged while not pushing anyone through too fast.
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.
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.
I think this is what they are actually looking for
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.
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.
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?
Was your test developed by Spın̈al Tap? What is the purpose for doing a test this way?
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.
This is most certainly a thing. Even funnier, I had a few A's on assignments I never even turned in.