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If she had known the answer, would that make the question any better? I remember back when I was in high school, I always sort of assumed that the authors of t

• Spooky23 10y ago
  You're lucky this is an engineer heavy forum. Around humanities people, your comment is like pouring gasoline in an open flame.
  • Freak_NL 10y ago
    How so? Crudely generalising; wouldn't engineering types be more susceptible to conclude that there is only one sanctioned way interpreting some text rather than someone with a humanities background? (I happen to be both. Poetry to me seems almost by definition something that will evoke different responses and insights for each reader.)
    • zo1 10y ago
      Spoken languages are inherently vague and open to interpretation and context. As an "engineering type", I would conclude that language is not a good mechanism for communicating concrete details without a lot of scaffolding around it to alleviate the ambiguity. Hence programming, mathematics, diagrams, etc. On top of that, poems are meant to be "artsy". I.e. They specifically use certain words in odd ways as part of the artistry of it. It's actually a step in the opposite direction of what "engineering types" would want to do to language in order to make it less ambiguous.
      • magic_beans 10y ago
        The beautiful and fun thing about written language is just how subjective or intentionally vague it is.
    • obstinate 10y ago
      There's a large debate in humanities about whether authorial intent matters which has been roiling for decades. I think it was either kicked off or summarized by an essay called "The Death of the Author." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author
    • Spooky23 10y ago
      An engineer is unlikely to have spent a lot of time around humanities academia. The university that I attended was going through a power struggle at the time that resulted in a feminist takeover of the English and other departments. In my case, a professor in a course required by the general education requirements took issue with an essay I was required to read in front of the class (which was a story about my families experiences as immigrants), shouted me down and said that I would fail the class and there was nothing that I could do to change that. That was putting my major's GPA requirements at risk, so I had to pursue action with the administration. That wasn't an uncommon event. My takeaway is to STFU around these topics.
      • Freak_NL 10y ago
        Ah I see, I thought you meant a more general comparison of how someone with a humanities or engineering background experiences poetry. I have no experience with US academics (which I presume you are referring to).
      • littletimmy 10y ago
        Why was (s)he so offended by it?
    • WalterBright 10y ago
      After failing an exam, I was told by an upperclassman that the secret to a good grade in humanities classes was regurgitating the opinions of the professor. My solution to that was I never took another humanities class.
      • int_19h 10y ago
        I can definitely relate to that. I did reasonably well in literature classes in high school, but every now and then I'd turn in a what-did-the-author-mean essay on some subject that deviated from what we've been told to expect... and every time I got a (local equivalent of) B from the teacher for "writing well and trying to make an argument", but not an A because "you're just wrong". I had several arguments with teachers over it which went nowhere, and they were never particularly interested in making their case beyond "No-one else wrote that in their essay, so why do you think you're special? You're not.". Eventually I concluded the same thing - that the purpose of the class is not to have me actually think, form opinions, structure arguments and express them - despite what they kept telling us! - but rather to find out what the established interpretation is, and express that in a way that looks like I'm convinced by it. Armed with that knowledge, I proceeded with future essays, and what do you know? They were all As. That whole experience really soured me up on that business, though, because whatever I was submitting for my assignments, I knew it was all bullshit from my perspective. And you know what? In retrospect, some of my opinions I strongly held then may well have been wrong in part or entirely... but they were my thoughts and my opinions, the real thing, and backed by real arguments. And if I were that 15 year old kid, with the experiences and the mindset formed by them that I had, not a single thing would have changed about them. So, instead of teaching how to think and argue and express myself, they taught me that you conform to what someone else expects from you, and hide your deviations; or else. It's a good thing they weren't the only teachers... But that experience definitely steered me away from humanities, and towards math and sciences. There, at least, there was clear right and wrong, and any occasional ambiguity would be clearly highlighted as such and acknowledged by everyone explicitly. And if you were right, you could be as obstinate as you wanted about it; and if you were wrong, you'd be shown a very clear and objective reason as to why.
        • deleted 10y ago
    • forgottenpass 10y ago
      Crudely generalising; wouldn't engineering types be more susceptible to conclude that there is only one sanctioned way interpreting some text rather than someone with a humanities background? Sure, but only to the extent that phrasing around "interpreting text" implies that the meaning sought exists in the text, rather than the cascade reactions taking place in readers upon their careful observation of the piece.
  • MiddleEndian 10y ago
    Not sure about that. While I am an engineer myself, many among my family, friends, and family friends are artists, including writers, and as far as we've discussed, none of them like these sorts of questions. Even my English teachers in school complained about standardized tests and indicated that you had to game them and figure out what the test writer wants to see.
  • acobster 10y ago
    Gee, thanks for giving us humanities people a voice. :/ As an artist myself, I have a huge problem with assessing qualitative analysis using something as mechanical as multiple choice. Authorial intent definitely falls under that umbrella. Rigid assessments would better show the students' ability to recognize the mechanics/techniques of a piece, such as the use of metaphor. And in general, you're really not supposed to speculate about authorial intent anyway.
  • RA_Fisher 10y ago
    The quantification of learning horrifies this statistician. The belief that a standardized test is more objective than say a trained human assessor neglects the subjective nature of human makers of the test. It puts the humans behind a facade that creates the appearance of objectivity but not actual objectivity. The benefit of standardized tests is that they lower labor costs of assessment not that they increase the quality of assessment. It's only with that admission that a reasonable cost-benefit analysis could be done.
    • Godel_unicode 10y ago
      Your argument is that standardized tests are more biased than individual assessment? I find that hard to believe bordering on ridiculous. There's a great deal of evidence that standardized exams are less biased as there's a consistent standard of correct answer across the board. With individual assessment there's far too much room for "I know what you meant" to sneak in. This has come up a lot with job interviews; if you want to interview impartialy, have a fixed bank of questions and grade answers to a rubric.
      • toast0 10y ago
        The argument is that an exam with free form answers is a more objective measure of knowledge than a multiple choice exam. Not an argument about bias. I think it depends on the subject matter, especially interpretation of art is hard to have one correct answer, an essay test could be graded upon support for the argument etc, where a multiple choice test is really "what did the authors of the test think the author intended?"
        • RA_Fisher 10y ago
          Agreed. Unless we're talking about math (logic proofs), we should probably stop using the term, "objective." It's sloppy thinking.
      • RA_Fisher 10y ago
        Because standardized tests can be applied to such a large set, the biases of one test maker can be spread to many test takers. Contrast this with individual assessment where the biases of many test "makers" have an opportunity to cancel each other out. This is similar to the logic behind randomized assignment in randomized-control experiments. It's not that the mice are the same, it's that asymptotically their differences cancel each other out. I'd recommend this article: http://stat.wharton.upenn.edu/~rosenbap/heteroReprint.pdf http://stat.wharton.upenn.edu/~rosenbap/heteroReprint.pdf
  • robotjosh 10y ago
    We could talk about the same problem in terms of why they still teach HC11 assembly in engineering school instead of teaching the industry standard arm-cortex. It is because most people in higher education are out of touch.
    • admax88q 10y ago
      Or maybe it's because the specific assembly you learn is far less important than the act of learning any assembly. Learning your first programming language is a challenge, but once you have done that, subsequent languages are easier because you managed to adopt the programming mindset.
      • Noseshine 10y ago
        You may as well do that using something that's widely being used right now. Doing that to me seems to have obvious advantages. You seem to defend the usage of out of date stuff, with what argument? The one you give does not require using the old stuff.
        • toast0 10y ago
          If it's likely that you will understand the second assembly language you learn much better than the first, it could be better that you learn a commercially dead language first. Alternatively, the 68HC11 is a very simple architecture, making it easy to learn the essence of assembly. Using an architecture with more capabilities will be easier than learning to do without. (although cycle counting on an architecture with memory latency is much harder)
          • Noseshine 10y ago
            it could be better that you learn a commercially dead language first. Why? It does not follow from your argument, you just make that claim - one that I find very strange.
            • 10y ago
  • XaspR8d 10y ago
    I find that claim very confusing. If anything my experience with "humanities people" has been that they object greatly to any standardized interpretations of art and have huge issues with the cut-and-dried "analysis" taught by middle- and high-school curricula. If anything, the stereotype is that engineers are overly prone to answer-seeking while non-engineers are much more comfortable with relativism?
• mhurron 10y ago
  > If she had known the answer, would that make the question any better? If anyone can answer what the 'correct' interpretation of a piece of writing is, it's the author. If they can not, well maybe the authors intent wasn't what the questions are asking. Of course this is a fundamental problem in the way we teach and test literature. No piece of work has a single meaning because meaning is found in the merging of the work and the viewers background. What we teach is that works have one correct interpretation and if you do not read it that way, you are wrong.
  • steveklabnik 10y ago
    Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author
    • Retric 10y ago
      Which fails as it assumes text must have inherent meaning. But, it lets people avoid criticism making it a popular standpoint.
      • jasode 10y ago
        >Which fails as it assumes text must have inherent meaning. It doesn't assume that. It doesn't matter whether the text does or does not have inherent meaning. The essay's point is that the reader's judgement is just as valid as the writer's. As an extreme example, the phrase "colorless green ideas sleep furiously"[1] can be interpreted by the reader as having meaning even though Noam Chomsky says it's a meaningless sentence. The author is not the final and not the only interpretation that's valid. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorless_green_ideas_sleep_furiously https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorless_green_ideas_sleep_fu...
        • Y201K 10y ago
          That's not really the reason that phrase was thought up tho..
        • 10y ago
• gmac 10y ago
  it is worse abroad "Abroad"? I'm pretty sure you'll find countries that are not the US that do it much better. I'm willing to countenance that there are countries that are not the US that do it worse.
• kwhitefoot 10y ago
  Where is 'abroad'?
  • brianwawok 10y ago
    Usually Europe in this context. Sometimes Asia.
• balfirevic 10y ago
  > If she had known the answer, would that make the question any better? Maybe yes, maybe no. Reasoning here is the implications which goes in single direction only: since she doesn't know the answer we can conclude the question is bad; had she known the answer, the question might be good or it might still be bad.
• RodericDay 10y ago
  I've always thought english class is actually cover for a bit of psychology class. In english class you may discuss, for example, "the sky was rainy and sad stuff was happening, this is the author applying pathetic fallacy". Or, "the lady wore red, and she is the object of desire, so there is a color-idea running through the novel". The immediate response was "no way the author put that in on purpose!". And a little debate ensues about how authors do often meticulously insert details to keep a thematic thread like that going. Famously, there's a character grid from Catch-22 floating around, that basically lays out the traits and how they were injected throughout the plot-line. More commonly, though, what we write is imbued with the same biases that psychological studies try to extract. So an author may write a story where every male character speaks in a way that gets interpreted as "in this novel the men represent War". And the author may pipe in to say "I did NOT intend it like that!", and this is fine. However, it wouldn't really be the end of it. Maybe the author revealed some subconscious opinions. So this is why I've always thought that "reading too much" in english literature was just doing a little bit of armchair psychoanalysis, where you are the doctor and the patient is the author, and their book their story. (I'm a bachelor in mech eng and a masters in chem eng and haven't taken english since highschool though. take with handfuls of salt) edit: A student a while back sent a letter to various authors and asked them if they deliberately inserted symbolism in their work. It's a cool read. http://mentalfloss.com/article/30937/famous-novelists-symbolism-their-work-and-whether-it-was-intentional http://mentalfloss.com/article/30937/famous-novelists-symbol...
• deleted 10y ago
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• pbz 10y ago
  The task is to draw a thinking cat. You can complete this task in a million different ways. What you (should) get judged on is the technique used. Does it look like a cat, are the shadows properly drawn, are the proportions of the cat in order, does the cat look like it's thinking like a human would, etc. What is irrelevant is if that cat matches the image the teacher had in mind when she came up with the task.
  • Godel_unicode 10y ago
    I agree that should be the task. Unfortunately, this is a multiple-choice test, so the task is more "guess what I think the poet meant". There's no room for technique here.
    • slavik81 10y ago
      Yet some people consistently do much better on these exams than others. There is definitely a skill to it.
      • mikekchar 10y ago
        I should probably stay out of a discussion like this, but I once worked as a teaching assistant in a Japanese high school. Some of my students were studying for university entrance exams and the English sections were ridiculous. As a native speaker, I was not able to read everything in the time allowed. It became very clear to me that the test makers were not interested in whether or not the students could read English. They were interested in whether or not the students were clever enough to find the correct answers without reading the English. So I taught them how to do it. Now, the questions I often ask myself is - Would it have been better to let my students fail the entrance exam, knowing that English would not be required in their major? Keeping that in mind, was it wrong for the test writer to write a test that favoured clever application of technique over English knowledge? What were they selecting for and what was the best way to determine it? Why is English even on the entrance exam? Similarly, why would anyone have a test about poetry on a standardised exam if their intent was not simply to discover how well the students could jump through hoops?
• matthewaveryusa 10y ago
  This reminds be of a hilarious problem I once had analyzing a poem in french lit class. Read this and tell me what you think (in english and french)? http://fleursdumal.org/poem/120 http://fleursdumal.org/poem/120 I thought the entire poem was sexual -- singular tree being a euphamism for a phallus, and the waves of the sea reverberations of an orgasm. I was given an F and sent to the principal's office. It was then and there that I decided that math was more my thing.
  • smallnamespace 10y ago
    You're going to have to break down the metaphor more explicitly, because I don't think the structure (logical or otherwise) of the poem really points to such a straightforward interpretation. Like, what is the isle then? Yourself?
  • QuercusMax 10y ago
    It says "singular trees", which I interpret as meaning "unique" or "exotic", not "only one". There's definitely more than just what you were reading there; a fair amount of symbolism (sails and rigging? sailors chanteys?).
    • matthewaveryusa 10y ago
      There's a lot in there for sure. I did my due-diligence analyzing the island theme, describing how Baudelaire is evoking all the senses that bring such fond memories. I also had a lengthy section on how this poem can be interpreted sexually. You don't write that you're inhaling the fragrance of breast and not think sex. In the first stanza the exotic perfume of a woman brings the author thoughts of passion. This perfume makes him fantasize. In the next two stanzas the island is a metaphor of his fantasies. The trees and fruits are metaphors for looking at and touching the woman's body. The sails and rigging symbolize sexual pleasure, and the ocean the sexual act. In the last stanza, he comes back from his fantasy and prepares himself to indulge in the act again to the tune of the sailors chant. Flesh that out in 5 pages and that was my essay. I'm not saying it's the correct interpretation, but you can't objectively say it isn't. And the explanation works so why dismiss it? I can only conjecture that the teacher didn't want to get in trouble. Baudelaire was a pervert and his book was banned for its sexual content. I knew that coming in to the essay so given that context it's not far-fetched. Anyhow, who knows right? He could have whiffed a tit and that made him think of this one time he was on a beach with his friends and it was a super cool vacation. I prefer my explanation where the fragrance brought him to a place that John Mayer is expressing in "Your Body Is A Wonderland".
• kurthr 10y ago
  For most of the Multiple Guess standardized Testing the correct question/answer pair is found by correlating that question/answer with others where the high scoring test takers scored the same way... and differentiated from other low scoring test takers who get it wrong (some other answer). Testing houses have been using Big Data and correlation for many decades! As a result, if you take the questions as part of a meta test, you can make some assumptions about answers that are "too easy" and instead choose one which is more correct (because high scorers tend to use it). That often means that correctly used, obscure but field relevant, vocabulary is actually the right (highest scoring) answer choice.
• obstinate 10y ago
  > If she had known the answer, would that make the question any better? Of course not. But the fact she doesn't (or, to put it another way, the fact that she does and the right answer is not among the listed options) highlights the absurdity of the question.
• moron4hire 10y ago
  "Open to interpretation" means the same thing as "undefined behavior in the C programming language": i.e. only overly pedantic programmer nerds stick to the assertion that it could mean "anything." When a work is said to be open to interpretation, it means that the author has their expressed opinion, but that it may also suggest other things about the author that they are not willing to admit about themselves. For example, no interpretation of Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game" will draw the conclusion that Card is a fan of Jurassic Park, or that he takes his tea with three sugars, or any such thing. There's just no evidence in the work to suggest one way or the other. But you could take his assertion that the book is about camaraderie and the struggle of good versus evil at face value, or you could take the themes of preemptive, hyperviolence he uses to read between the lines and realize that Orson Scott Card is actually a fascist neoconservative. That's what "open to interpretation" means. A particular work does not exist separate from the person who created it, and people are not reliable narrators on their motivations.
• Angostura 10y ago
  Perhaps the point is to show that you can think about the way that the words are being used and produce an interesting hypothesis about the poets' intent and technique. It doesn't have to be 'correct', just demonstrate the ability to thoughtfully analyse a text.
• frozenport 10y ago
  Poems are not open to interpretation. Most are written with a clear motivation. Test questions ask "what was the author trying to say" and "how did they say it".
• mannykannot 10y ago
  I do not think the issue here is so much how good the question is, as what it does to the notion that studying literature teaches critical thinking. It seems to me that there are two ways this can go, neither of them good: 1. The education board's interpretation effectively becomes canonical. While I have some appreciation for the idea that the author's view is not the only one that counts, substituting precisely one alternative does not strike me as having any legitimacy. 2. Students are imbued with the idea that any answer is as good as any other, so long as it looks like critical thinking. That does not transfer well to any area where critical thinking has to deal with some form of reality.
• leArtiste 10y ago
  Bullshit artistry is an important skill that children should learn early in life. Teacher's demands that I should be able to infer the subjective interpretation of an author's intended emotional effect for a passage of text, made me the person I am today. I know how to get banned on HN instantaneously, rather than the minutes it takes some of my peers. I credit my capacity to induce the stifled frustration that my telltale bans express to the forward thinking of the educators that crafted the curriculums I successfully completed during my upbringing.