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I always though how silly it was for teachers to pretend they got the correct answer in a text analysis of a century old author. Apparently it's even true for a

I always though how silly it was for teachers to pretend they got the correct answer in a text analysis of a century old author. Apparently it's even true for authors that are still alive. Some things seemed so far fetched, so random, so made up. And yet it was supposed to be _the_ right answer. When I offered another one, even knowing the official one but disagreeing, I was graded as failing. Hell, I'm pretty certain most writers just wrote something, and never though about it more. Not all of them are pondering, rewriting every line. And even the ones that do don't necessarily do it for the result the teacher expects. And as a kid, you certainly can't say a classic author is not interesting. You can't say the text is boring, that you don't see talent in it, that you didn't learn anything from it. It has been validated by society, hence it's good. Now you have to say why you think it is, even if you don't. Actually you have to say what you know what the status quo is, which means repeating something you read elsewhere instead of forming a opinion from that and what you think. The opposite of what's school is supposed to teach. We wonder why fake news and bullshit work ? It's because we teach kids to repeat popular opinions and make up things because they look good. We teach them that not only there is a price to pay for not doing that, but that we are ok with being the ones making them pay it. People that felt like that usually went the science road. It's not a bad thing, but it's a positive feedback loop. It means fields in desperate needs of honesty and pragmatism are only welcoming bullshiters and conformists.

longer_arms 7y ago
> And as a kid, you certainly can't say a classic author is not interesting. You can't say the text is boring, that you don't see talent in it, that you didn't learn anything from it. It has been validated by society, hence it's good. That is because that statement is both not useful in the context (you're there to pick it apart) and reflects pretty badly on your understanding, clearly the text has some depth, even if not consciously included, to be analysed. If your conclusion was "rubbish" when you're meant to be making a point about subtext, you're failing, its pretty simple. People include subtlety in their art even if they don't intend it. Things can not be fantastic but still reflect society, the author, your own experience, which is the point of literature analysis.
- sametmax 7y ago
  Some are, but I think many don't. Text analysis is a lot like wine tasting: there is something to it, but it's way over the top. And if you put a brand new text and put 10 experts on it, they will come up with different interpretations. They will even claim terrible wine is good because of the bottle. There is also a huge mentality implication. See for example your reaction: you assume my understanding is bad while knowing nothing about me. And I just criticized people drawing definitive conclusions about other people so distant we know little about them. The example in the article supports this and beyond, and while a few data point is not evidence, it calls for a debate. I think it's perfectly ok for kids to be wrong about their text interpretation if they produce a personal constructed analysis. First because it's pretty hard to prove there is only one right analysis and you got it. Second because the process is as important as the result. Good teachers target that, but few do.
  - eru 7y ago
    There's wine tasting and than there's blind wine tasting. The latter has some things going for it as a proper endeavour. The former is just a pastime that's more about finding nice words than actually tasting wine.
  - longer_arms 7y ago
    Except your comment was about refusing to engage in the activity, analysis of the themes and subtext. The whole point is that of a subjective analysis, with infinite interpretations which aren't objective views of the text, but a product of the interrelationship between: the text, the context of the text's writing (inc authorial intent), the analyser, their context, and the context of the academia around the text pre existing. These aren't objective measures, but the aim is to have something to say, to have enough insight into the world to link ideas up and make something up that sounds convincing. Saying the book isn't as good as other people said it was isn't that, and it isn't really very useful, even as a personal opinion, and is completely missing the point of the exercise.
- deleted 7y ago
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matwood 7y ago
I appreciate the classics, but I would always get in trouble in school for asking how the teacher knew this is what the author meant. Even before I knew what a skeptic was, I was a skeptic. :) I also was not being a smart ass. Many authors have additional writings that add color to the writing being studied.
- sametmax 7y ago
  I agree. Plus the classics are too often talked about like this one homogeneous corpus. But they span on over 2500 years, with huge objective, quality and target audience differences. I can appreciate Seneca and at the same time don't give much credit to Kant. You could reflect deep into To kill a Mockingbird and see Flaubert as dry and over hyped. And you should be able to say that in class without being threaten with a bad grade. Even if you were hypothetically wrong, if such an absolute is possible in this field.
- elliekelly 7y ago
  > I also was not being a smart ass. It really bothers me that you even have to clarify something like this. Students should be skeptical of what they're being told. That doesn't make a student a smart ass - it makes them a critical thinker. Teachers who take offense when their "authority" is innocently questioned are doing a massive disservice to their students.
  - isostatic 7y ago
    There's two types of people who ask the questions 1) Those that want a response that they can consider. These are critical thinkers. 2) Those that don't care what the response is. These are smart asses. In schools the latter are far more common, and far more likely to speak out
    - mcguire 7y ago
      Note that the difference is not necessarily obvious. I was once in several classes with a guy who would ask questions that were just slightly off-topic and odd---possibly about differing interpretations, possibly just trying to completely derail the class. I still don't know which of the two cases was right. I do know he managed to drag the class so that we missed rather a lot. AI classes, by the way.
ascar 7y ago
> Some things seemed so far fetched, so random, so made up. And yet it was supposed to be _the_ right answer. When I offered another one, even knowing the official one but disagreeing, I was graded as failing. I absolutely agree with this. This was a constant source of frustration for me in literature classes. I enjoyed exploring alternative solutions and answers. Most science teachers encouraged that, even though there mostly was a "right" answer and I was missing some (mostly unknown to me) details in alternative theories. Exploring alternatives helps (me) to understand the problem and solution better. But in the most subjective classes possible - literature analysis - where nobody really knows what the author meant, alternative opinions were considered wrong. And my only task was to repeat the teachers or text books opinion. Frustrating is an understatement. This part of the article captures the issue perfectly: > I just put that stanza break in there because when I read it aloud (I’m a performance poet), I pause there. Note: that is not an option among the answers because no one ever asked me why I did it.
- eru 7y ago
  I guess because of exactly how weak the 'right' answer's justification is, that they have to defend it so vigorously.
- rayiner 7y ago
  I think that part of the article actually perfectly captures why the author's argument is wrong. Nobody cares why she put the stanza break where she did. That's not what the question is asking. The question is asking about the objective effect of the stanza break in the context of the poem. All the student is being asked to do is recognize that there is an (objective) shift in subject from one stanza to the other, and recognize what those subjects are. Moreover, the student is only being asked to choose the best answer out of the four presented, not to derive the "correct" answer. Out of the answer choices, only one (C) fits: > A. compare the speaker's schedule with the train's schedule [incorrect because the first stanza isn't about the speaker's schedule] > B. ask questions to keep the reader guessing about what will happen [incorrect; the only questions in the poem are rhetorical] > C. contrast the speaker's feelings about weekends and Mondays [correct, because the first stanza mentions feelings about the weekend, while the second is about dread for Monday] > D. incorporate reminders for the reader about where the action takes place [incorrect, because both stanzas take place in the reader's bed]
wccrawford 7y ago
I had this experience in "music appreciation" in college. I was supposed to get the same feeling from the music that the "expert" in the book did, and was wrong if I didn't. I failed that class. I never bothered re-taking it.
eru 7y ago
> We wonder why fake news and bullshit work ? It's because we teach kids to repeat popular opinions and make up things because they look good. We teach them that not only there is a price to pay for not doing that, but that we are ok with being the ones making them pay it. Luckily, you are overestimating the effect of education. Kids don't pay enough attention to be so indoctrinated.
- ecocentrik 7y ago
  No, I don't think he is. I've run across enough dull people who say things like "think outside the box", to understand the power of conformist indoctrination. I think you're underestimating the formative power of educational systems to teach through punitively reinforced repetition. Children are being failed for expressing creative interpretations of something that purposefully offers its audience multiple and sometimes conflicting interpretations. Most will abandon attempts at expression in formalized settings and shift their brains into parroting memorized interpretations offered by their teachers. In this case the teachers are training their students based on interpretations offered by the state.
- sametmax 7y ago
  I think the meta teaching is more important, and more impactful that the information taught.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  Kids pay attetion like they eat stuff - not how you want them to neccessarily or what would be rational even. One thing I noticed about socialization processes is they are about teaching things they are too afraid to teach directly like when and how to lie and when hypocrisy is acceptable. If you practice some vice while expecting them to be virtuous you teach that the "good behavior" (say you serve them broccoli and water while you have fried chicken and soda) is childish and vice is to be preferred when not forced.
SolaceQuantum 7y ago
"...And yet it was supposed to be _the_ right answer. When I offered another one, even knowing the official one but disagreeing, I was graded as failing." Funnily enough, Death of the Author is well established critical theory in English literary interpretation (criticism). On Academic merit, if you have appropriate evidence in the literature to support your theory then your theory is valid and discussable on its interpretive merits. This is taught at the college level. I would like to have English classes teach critical reading in the classical sense of english literary theory much earlier. But I'm really not sure how to begin to teach someone how to interpret before I show logical steps towards singular interpretations first.
rayiner 7y ago
That was not my experience. I went through a libertarian phase in college and wrote lots of papers that were rather contrarian. I always got "As." Of course you can't just say "the text is boring" or that "you don't see talent in it." That's a really dull thing to say. You need to be able to understand the status quo well enough to be able to articulate it on its own merits, and then go beyond that to explain why you disagree. (And that's an important life skill! If you can't articulate your opponent's argument as well as they can, you can't hope to persuade them to change their mind.)
- sametmax 7y ago
  I can write you a 20 pages essay about why a text is boring and why I don't see talent in it, with detailed analysis on the style, fit, comparison with similar intent and pieces of art and explain the reason I think the usual analysis is overblown given the weakness of the text. If a teacher find intensity and depth in a text that has little substance or nuances in the most obvious lines, I'd argue that it's actually the most important point to make if you want to say something that matters. Of course, to win the meta game is to know that is not actually the most important point to make if you, as a student and human being, want to open more opportunities in your life.
everdrive 7y ago
>And as a kid, you certainly can't say a classic author is not interesting. You can't say the text is boring, that you don't see talent in it, that you didn't learn anything from it. It has been validated by society, hence it's good. Now you have to say why you think it is, even if you don't. Actually you have to say what you know what the status quo is, which means repeating something you read elsewhere instead of forming a opinion from that and what you think. The opposite of what's school is supposed to teach. I completely agree with this, but just want to note that it's possible to do this properly. Usually this happens in college. The societal approval must still be taught, but it ends up being a discussion unto itself. "This writing style was popular at the time, and people had the following social expectations for men and women of the upper class, and these were informed by the following social movements, etc, etc." A real discussion of why this work gained so much esteem allows for constructive criticism, or might even help a student to understand a work that would have otherwise been impenetrable. [edit] If anyone's read "The Rape of the Lock" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rape_of_the_Lock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rape_of_the_Lock), this is a great example of a work that would have been impossible for me to understand without a great literature teacher an some historical and contextual education. The social norms, expectations, and how someone would politely and indirectly talk around them would have been completely impossible for me to grasp if I were left to my own devices.
- staticautomatic 7y ago
  Why must societal approval still be taught? And who gets to decide what society approves of? Hint: "Society" isn't the answer.
  - everdrive 7y ago
    Because it explains why the work gained popularity, and what the nature of that popularity was. Why are you reading it today instead of something else? [edit] There's no reason societal approval must be taught uncritically. Maybe I used a poor term. I just meant that some historical works are seen as great literature. And the values that society currently held at the time, and subsequently must be part of the staying power of a given work. Obviously other things come into play as well such as writing style and quality.
yomly 7y ago
Really liked this post and really hit me deep, given that I grew up hating all "arts"-based subjects only to discover in my 20s that I loved them, but lacked the correct mental model to appreciate them growing up. The concept that education on arts can bias certain mindsets definitely resonates with me as I struggled with English as a child and I recall struggling to grok what a "sentence" was: once a teacher explained it as being "about a line long" then proceeded to punish me when I took that too literally and put a full stop at the end of every line. "Hell, I'm pretty certain most writers just wrote something, and never though about it more." On this particular point, to provide an alternative perspective on the subject, I have had an academic music professor argue to me that even the creator of any art may not be a good objective critic of their art within the context of some wider academic framework. This could be due to at least two reasons: 1. the artist was too emotionally involved in the art so is unable to unbiasedly critique it 2. the framework/wider context of analyzing a piece of art may take shape later after the initial inception of the art. In any case, I'm probably talking a bit past you - any person who adopts an assertive position "the author did X because they intended to achieve effect Y" is at best lazy and worst wrong if they're unable to back up that assertion with some kind of evidence (e.g. autoanalysis by author or letters/interviews)
- deleted 7y ago
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- sansnomme 7y ago
  Fwiw most people here won't be able to give a hard and fast definition of a sentence; this is why we have Recurrent Neural Networks.
- asleori239k 7y ago
  The flip side of this that it's not limited to the arts. I came to love math later, more and more as I got into higher-level math, because I realized lower-level stuff tended to be taught in this way that is very focused on minute almost irrelevant details. If people had started with big-picture principles and worked down, I would have been much more into it earlier. I had a stats professor in college who said (in a course on nonparametric statistics) something like "there are two types of statisticians out there, those who are horrible at arithmetic, and those who are great at it." His point was just that it's possible to get very abstract math concepts really well and also be kinda sloppy with other things. I guess my point is that early exposures to anything can really bias people's perceptions a lot, even when it's not representative or necessary. Vocational stuff I think can be like that too: early exposures to different types of careers can be really biasing even when your understanding of it as a broader field is really misleading.
slothario 7y ago
Well, this is the way I saw it as a student: the purpose isn't to provide "the right answer," the purpose was to understand the test, give the answer that they wanted, and use school as a springboard to better things. If you treat it as a system to be gamed you don't have to worry about what the truth really is. I actually was always better at English than I was at math (much better). I even won an NCTE writing award in high school, and found math difficult. But I studied physics in college because I'm someone who can't stand BS and don't like the way English is taught at the college level. The idea of pure, simple truths deeply appeals to me. But I feel even writing this is heresy. Maybe I'm just being a smug STEM type and I don't appreciate the world of literature. Maybe I just don't get it. But I went into college wanting to understand things, and making a game out of extracting hidden meanings from books just didn't offer anything I was looking for.
oldjokes 7y ago
I feel the same way about much of Computer Science. So much nonsense was forced into my head as the "best practices", from OO development to Agile to cloud snake oil to crypto scams. And then on top of that it turns out the CPUs are designed to be inherently insecure so all those amazing mathematical proofs in perfect penmanship were a waste of time.
- sametmax 7y ago
  CS is very new though, and already pressured by immense economical interests. Give it a thousand years.
- kyle-rb 7y ago
  I feel like OOP, Agile, "cloud" as a concept, and cryptocurrency/blockchains are not computer science topics. The way in which blockchains are implemented, sure, that's math, applied as cryptography, applied to achieve distributed consensus, which is very much computer science. But you specifically mention crypto scams, which is much more applying the general concept of distributed consensus to different areas, and I think that's where it jumps out of the realm of computer science. Maybe a better label for the "best practices" for the application of computer science is "software development". I think that, as an area of instruction, is more inherently subjective.
  - toby 7y ago
    OOP design is usually part of a CS curriculum (at MIT it was, at least) since it has some theoretical framing and applies to a wide variety of practical problems. I don't think I've ever heard of a class in crypto scams or Agile.
    - detaro 7y ago
      A pure CS curriculum probably won't, but one aimed at Software Engineering or whatever name you'd pick for CS + industry-applied stuff might very well have a class that includes Agile and other development techniques. (Our legal classes also touched on it)
  - 7y ago
ubermonkey 7y ago
>I always though how silly it was for teachers to pretend they got the correct answer in a text analysis of a century old author. Some elements of analysis are verifiable, like when someone provides meaningful context around lines in Shakespeare, but once you get past very elementary discussions of literature the notion of "right answer" is kind of over. My primary degree is literature; above dumb-freshman courses, the emphasis is on analytical thinking about the text, and on the rigor of that thinking, not on the supposed correctness of the analysis. But, of course, this interferes with your thesis, so...
- redblacktree 7y ago
  No OP, but I read his thesis that low-level courses should also be putting the "emphasis on analytical thinking about the text," but instead focuses on the "supposed correctness of the analysis" I don't see that your comment interferes with his thesis at all.
- sametmax 7y ago
  It doesn't. I just think I would have liked you as a teacher, and most I met didn't not have your point of view.
  - ubermonkey 7y ago
    To be clear: I'm not a teacher. I've been in software for 30 years. Lots of people my age in the biz don't have CS or MIS degrees. Most of the degrees back then were lagging real-world tech in a huge way, so we mostly taught ourselves. Our degrees are in things like physics, or math, or engineering, or political science, or (like me) literature & creative writing. Specialization is for insects. ;)
- asleori239k 7y ago
  Yeah I came to say something similar. Good art education (at least with criticism) is really focused on the strength of the arguments and the strength of the expression of those arguments.
jtbayly 7y ago
> I always though how silly it was for teachers to pretend they got the correct answer in a text analysis of a century old author. Apparently it's even true for authors that are still alive... This also happened to Flannery O’Connor. She once wrote the following to an English Professor: “The interpretation of your ninety students and three teachers is fantastic and about as far from my intentions as it could get to be.” http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/i-am-in-state-of-shock.html?m=1 http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/i-am-in-state-of-shock....
- jfengel 7y ago
  Note that she does not intend it approvingly. She's using "fantastic" to mean "of fantasy", as in, "not grounded in reality". Despite her claims to the contrary, I do find her tone "obnoxious". Their fault was not in their interpretation, but in asking the author to confirm it. A great story will "go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it", but I find it self-important for a writer to declare that their piece achieves that lofty goal. I agree with her assertion that their interpretation is dull and simple, but if that's where they've settled, it's as valid as any other. I feel like she's said, "No, I've written a great work of art, and if you've reached a boring conclusion from it, that's your fault." I find it dismissive of her to say in two sentences that there's "no lessening of reality" but simultaneously "not meant to be realistic": that's a cheap way to excuse vagueness. It's not that difficult for a work to be open to multiple interpretations the longer you look. You can achieve that with ink blots. So if they find merit in the work, they should keep reading to appreciate that merit more fully rather than ask an author to affirm their decryption. But I feel like she hasn't engaged well with the work they have put in: she's dismissed it entirely and missed an avenue they have a right to explore.
segmondy 7y ago
Those classes are all about conformity. It's about learning how to play the game of life and not going against the grain. "smart students" learn to read their teachers and know how to feedback the expected answers even if they don't agree or believe in it. A lesson that's very much needed in life. A lot have not learned this lesson and this is why many of us on this site still marvel at the bullshit companies raising millions and wondering HTF! Because those "smart founders" learned how to feed BS that their audience expected back to them. I learned this lesson when I took humanities, it was so stupid, but I knew exactly what the teacher wanted to hear when we studied architectures & paintings. It was all subjective and her own opinion. I fed her back her crap and I passed the class. If you haven't learned this yet, it's not too late. The world is full on chicken shit.
- kolinko 7y ago
  Which is ironic, considering humanities are supposed to be about exploration of ideas and creative thinking.
  - criley2 7y ago
    Liberal arts / liberal education is less about "creativity" and more about "getting people to be capable enough to understand the national legislature and have a non-garbage political opinion". The liberal arts in America were seen as a prerequisite of a democracy.
  - chris_wot 7y ago
    Yes, but only if the result of your exploration and/or your ability to creatively think conforms to the educator(s) viewpoint.
- i4t 7y ago
  "... are all about conformity." You give them too much credit, imo. That would be way to clever, too much 'conspiracy'-like. But, I agree that if you go against the grain, confront their bs... you're toast.
  - 7y ago
pojzon 7y ago
I still remember one poem from high school we were supposed to guess a meaning of. The author was still alive at the time. It was about black crows soring on the sky and landing on a gray cement floor. Teacher went all out saying its about dark thoughts and existential crisis etc. I actually met the author and asked him about the poem. She said, she just likes crows because there was a lot of them in the city she grew up in. Thats it. I even wrote THAT interpretation as my answer to some test later on and i got a failing grade. Told the teacher about my visit and discussion with the author. But he said he does not care because thats not whats written in the answers spreadsheet. After that i realized majority of such teachers are retards and should be fired. Unfortunately our education system is so underpaid, getting anyone half decent wont happen.
mcguire 7y ago
Many teachers are pretty crappy. For these sorts of topics, there are no right answers, although there are certainly some wrong ones. Your job, as a student, is to learn to, and to demonstrate that you can, think about the material, to have some sort of insight beyond the surface features. You can certainly say some author is not interesting to you; you can say you didn't learn anything from it. You cannot say the text is boring or talent-free; that's the same as saying there is one right answer. And keep in mind: the reason a classic is considered a classic (Hiawatha not withstanding) is because other people found it interesting, talented, and learned from it. One difficulty is that a good answer and a wrong answer are not immediately distinguishable, especially from the student's side. The teacher's job is to, among other things, explain why an answer is wrong without pushing some "one true answer". That's hard. Unfortunately, many teachers are crappy. The current US primary and secondary school system tries really hard, with its standardized testing, to enforce crappiness, in the name of fighting other kinds of crappiness, so...yeah. P.S. There isn't a grand conspiracy out to get you. Well, the probability is really low, anyway.
- MockObject 7y ago
  Very few actual social dynamics are "a grand conspiracy".
  - mcguire 7y ago
    That's what they want you to think.
Glyptodon 7y ago
It's true that there are bad choices when it comes to text and interpretation. That doesn't implicate testing, but test construction, which is often poor. I still distinctly remember a surreal class discussion in high school (more than a decade ago) where classmate after classmate of mine in an AP English class responded to a verbal question about a phrase expressing regret over not doing something as though it'd actually been done and the regret was about having done it. It was like "WTF, most of my classmates have problems with basic reading comprehension?" The question was basic, and the teacher basically went row by row to try and get an answer, and it was clear that a huge proportion of the class so misunderstood the text that they didn't even know how to respond to the question.

longer_arms 7y ago

> And as a kid, you certainly can't say a classic author is not interesting. You can't say the text is boring, that you don't see talent in it, that you didn't learn anything from it. It has been validated by society, hence it's good. That is because that statement is both not useful in the context (you're there to pick it apart) and reflects pretty badly on your understanding, clearly the text has some depth, even if not consciously included, to be analysed. If your conclusion was "rubbish" when you're meant to be making a point about subtext, you're failing, its pretty simple. People include subtlety in their art even if they don't intend it. Things can not be fantastic but still reflect society, the author, your own experience, which is the point of literature analysis.

sametmax 7y ago
Some are, but I think many don't. Text analysis is a lot like wine tasting: there is something to it, but it's way over the top. And if you put a brand new text and put 10 experts on it, they will come up with different interpretations. They will even claim terrible wine is good because of the bottle. There is also a huge mentality implication. See for example your reaction: you assume my understanding is bad while knowing nothing about me. And I just criticized people drawing definitive conclusions about other people so distant we know little about them. The example in the article supports this and beyond, and while a few data point is not evidence, it calls for a debate. I think it's perfectly ok for kids to be wrong about their text interpretation if they produce a personal constructed analysis. First because it's pretty hard to prove there is only one right analysis and you got it. Second because the process is as important as the result. Good teachers target that, but few do.
- eru 7y ago
  There's wine tasting and than there's blind wine tasting. The latter has some things going for it as a proper endeavour. The former is just a pastime that's more about finding nice words than actually tasting wine.
- longer_arms 7y ago
  Except your comment was about refusing to engage in the activity, analysis of the themes and subtext. The whole point is that of a subjective analysis, with infinite interpretations which aren't objective views of the text, but a product of the interrelationship between: the text, the context of the text's writing (inc authorial intent), the analyser, their context, and the context of the academia around the text pre existing. These aren't objective measures, but the aim is to have something to say, to have enough insight into the world to link ideas up and make something up that sounds convincing. Saying the book isn't as good as other people said it was isn't that, and it isn't really very useful, even as a personal opinion, and is completely missing the point of the exercise.
deleted 7y ago
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matwood 7y ago

I appreciate the classics, but I would always get in trouble in school for asking how the teacher knew this is what the author meant. Even before I knew what a skeptic was, I was a skeptic. :) I also was not being a smart ass. Many authors have additional writings that add color to the writing being studied.

sametmax 7y ago
I agree. Plus the classics are too often talked about like this one homogeneous corpus. But they span on over 2500 years, with huge objective, quality and target audience differences. I can appreciate Seneca and at the same time don't give much credit to Kant. You could reflect deep into To kill a Mockingbird and see Flaubert as dry and over hyped. And you should be able to say that in class without being threaten with a bad grade. Even if you were hypothetically wrong, if such an absolute is possible in this field.
elliekelly 7y ago
> I also was not being a smart ass. It really bothers me that you even have to clarify something like this. Students should be skeptical of what they're being told. That doesn't make a student a smart ass - it makes them a critical thinker. Teachers who take offense when their "authority" is innocently questioned are doing a massive disservice to their students.
- isostatic 7y ago
  There's two types of people who ask the questions 1) Those that want a response that they can consider. These are critical thinkers. 2) Those that don't care what the response is. These are smart asses. In schools the latter are far more common, and far more likely to speak out
  - mcguire 7y ago
    Note that the difference is not necessarily obvious. I was once in several classes with a guy who would ask questions that were just slightly off-topic and odd---possibly about differing interpretations, possibly just trying to completely derail the class. I still don't know which of the two cases was right. I do know he managed to drag the class so that we missed rather a lot. AI classes, by the way.

ascar 7y ago

> Some things seemed so far fetched, so random, so made up. And yet it was supposed to be _the_ right answer. When I offered another one, even knowing the official one but disagreeing, I was graded as failing. I absolutely agree with this. This was a constant source of frustration for me in literature classes. I enjoyed exploring alternative solutions and answers. Most science teachers encouraged that, even though there mostly was a "right" answer and I was missing some (mostly unknown to me) details in alternative theories. Exploring alternatives helps (me) to understand the problem and solution better. But in the most subjective classes possible - literature analysis - where nobody really knows what the author meant, alternative opinions were considered wrong. And my only task was to repeat the teachers or text books opinion. Frustrating is an understatement. This part of the article captures the issue perfectly: > I just put that stanza break in there because when I read it aloud (I’m a performance poet), I pause there. Note: that is not an option among the answers because no one ever asked me why I did it.

eru 7y ago
I guess because of exactly how weak the 'right' answer's justification is, that they have to defend it so vigorously.
rayiner 7y ago
I think that part of the article actually perfectly captures why the author's argument is wrong. Nobody cares why she put the stanza break where she did. That's not what the question is asking. The question is asking about the objective effect of the stanza break in the context of the poem. All the student is being asked to do is recognize that there is an (objective) shift in subject from one stanza to the other, and recognize what those subjects are. Moreover, the student is only being asked to choose the best answer out of the four presented, not to derive the "correct" answer. Out of the answer choices, only one (C) fits: > A. compare the speaker's schedule with the train's schedule [incorrect because the first stanza isn't about the speaker's schedule] > B. ask questions to keep the reader guessing about what will happen [incorrect; the only questions in the poem are rhetorical] > C. contrast the speaker's feelings about weekends and Mondays [correct, because the first stanza mentions feelings about the weekend, while the second is about dread for Monday] > D. incorporate reminders for the reader about where the action takes place [incorrect, because both stanzas take place in the reader's bed]

wccrawford 7y ago

I had this experience in "music appreciation" in college. I was supposed to get the same feeling from the music that the "expert" in the book did, and was wrong if I didn't. I failed that class. I never bothered re-taking it.

eru 7y ago

> We wonder why fake news and bullshit work ? It's because we teach kids to repeat popular opinions and make up things because they look good. We teach them that not only there is a price to pay for not doing that, but that we are ok with being the ones making them pay it. Luckily, you are overestimating the effect of education. Kids don't pay enough attention to be so indoctrinated.

ecocentrik 7y ago
No, I don't think he is. I've run across enough dull people who say things like "think outside the box", to understand the power of conformist indoctrination. I think you're underestimating the formative power of educational systems to teach through punitively reinforced repetition. Children are being failed for expressing creative interpretations of something that purposefully offers its audience multiple and sometimes conflicting interpretations. Most will abandon attempts at expression in formalized settings and shift their brains into parroting memorized interpretations offered by their teachers. In this case the teachers are training their students based on interpretations offered by the state.
sametmax 7y ago
I think the meta teaching is more important, and more impactful that the information taught.
Nasrudith 7y ago
Kids pay attetion like they eat stuff - not how you want them to neccessarily or what would be rational even. One thing I noticed about socialization processes is they are about teaching things they are too afraid to teach directly like when and how to lie and when hypocrisy is acceptable. If you practice some vice while expecting them to be virtuous you teach that the "good behavior" (say you serve them broccoli and water while you have fried chicken and soda) is childish and vice is to be preferred when not forced.

SolaceQuantum 7y ago

"...And yet it was supposed to be _the_ right answer. When I offered another one, even knowing the official one but disagreeing, I was graded as failing." Funnily enough, Death of the Author is well established critical theory in English literary interpretation (criticism). On Academic merit, if you have appropriate evidence in the literature to support your theory then your theory is valid and discussable on its interpretive merits. This is taught at the college level. I would like to have English classes teach critical reading in the classical sense of english literary theory much earlier. But I'm really not sure how to begin to teach someone how to interpret before I show logical steps towards singular interpretations first.

rayiner 7y ago

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

sametmax 7y ago
I can write you a 20 pages essay about why a text is boring and why I don't see talent in it, with detailed analysis on the style, fit, comparison with similar intent and pieces of art and explain the reason I think the usual analysis is overblown given the weakness of the text. If a teacher find intensity and depth in a text that has little substance or nuances in the most obvious lines, I'd argue that it's actually the most important point to make if you want to say something that matters. Of course, to win the meta game is to know that is not actually the most important point to make if you, as a student and human being, want to open more opportunities in your life.

everdrive 7y ago

>And as a kid, you certainly can't say a classic author is not interesting. You can't say the text is boring, that you don't see talent in it, that you didn't learn anything from it. It has been validated by society, hence it's good. Now you have to say why you think it is, even if you don't. Actually you have to say what you know what the status quo is, which means repeating something you read elsewhere instead of forming a opinion from that and what you think. The opposite of what's school is supposed to teach. I completely agree with this, but just want to note that it's possible to do this properly. Usually this happens in college. The societal approval must still be taught, but it ends up being a discussion unto itself. "This writing style was popular at the time, and people had the following social expectations for men and women of the upper class, and these were informed by the following social movements, etc, etc." A real discussion of why this work gained so much esteem allows for constructive criticism, or might even help a student to understand a work that would have otherwise been impenetrable. [edit] If anyone's read "The Rape of the Lock" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rape_of_the_Lock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rape_of_the_Lock), this is a great example of a work that would have been impossible for me to understand without a great literature teacher an some historical and contextual education. The social norms, expectations, and how someone would politely and indirectly talk around them would have been completely impossible for me to grasp if I were left to my own devices.

staticautomatic 7y ago
Why must societal approval still be taught? And who gets to decide what society approves of? Hint: "Society" isn't the answer.
- everdrive 7y ago
  Because it explains why the work gained popularity, and what the nature of that popularity was. Why are you reading it today instead of something else? [edit] There's no reason societal approval must be taught uncritically. Maybe I used a poor term. I just meant that some historical works are seen as great literature. And the values that society currently held at the time, and subsequently must be part of the staying power of a given work. Obviously other things come into play as well such as writing style and quality.

yomly 7y ago

Really liked this post and really hit me deep, given that I grew up hating all "arts"-based subjects only to discover in my 20s that I loved them, but lacked the correct mental model to appreciate them growing up. The concept that education on arts can bias certain mindsets definitely resonates with me as I struggled with English as a child and I recall struggling to grok what a "sentence" was: once a teacher explained it as being "about a line long" then proceeded to punish me when I took that too literally and put a full stop at the end of every line. "Hell, I'm pretty certain most writers just wrote something, and never though about it more." On this particular point, to provide an alternative perspective on the subject, I have had an academic music professor argue to me that even the creator of any art may not be a good objective critic of their art within the context of some wider academic framework. This could be due to at least two reasons: 1. the artist was too emotionally involved in the art so is unable to unbiasedly critique it 2. the framework/wider context of analyzing a piece of art may take shape later after the initial inception of the art. In any case, I'm probably talking a bit past you - any person who adopts an assertive position "the author did X because they intended to achieve effect Y" is at best lazy and worst wrong if they're unable to back up that assertion with some kind of evidence (e.g. autoanalysis by author or letters/interviews)

deleted 7y ago
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sansnomme 7y ago
Fwiw most people here won't be able to give a hard and fast definition of a sentence; this is why we have Recurrent Neural Networks.
asleori239k 7y ago
The flip side of this that it's not limited to the arts. I came to love math later, more and more as I got into higher-level math, because I realized lower-level stuff tended to be taught in this way that is very focused on minute almost irrelevant details. If people had started with big-picture principles and worked down, I would have been much more into it earlier. I had a stats professor in college who said (in a course on nonparametric statistics) something like "there are two types of statisticians out there, those who are horrible at arithmetic, and those who are great at it." His point was just that it's possible to get very abstract math concepts really well and also be kinda sloppy with other things. I guess my point is that early exposures to anything can really bias people's perceptions a lot, even when it's not representative or necessary. Vocational stuff I think can be like that too: early exposures to different types of careers can be really biasing even when your understanding of it as a broader field is really misleading.

slothario 7y ago

Well, this is the way I saw it as a student: the purpose isn't to provide "the right answer," the purpose was to understand the test, give the answer that they wanted, and use school as a springboard to better things. If you treat it as a system to be gamed you don't have to worry about what the truth really is. I actually was always better at English than I was at math (much better). I even won an NCTE writing award in high school, and found math difficult. But I studied physics in college because I'm someone who can't stand BS and don't like the way English is taught at the college level. The idea of pure, simple truths deeply appeals to me. But I feel even writing this is heresy. Maybe I'm just being a smug STEM type and I don't appreciate the world of literature. Maybe I just don't get it. But I went into college wanting to understand things, and making a game out of extracting hidden meanings from books just didn't offer anything I was looking for.

oldjokes 7y ago

I feel the same way about much of Computer Science. So much nonsense was forced into my head as the "best practices", from OO development to Agile to cloud snake oil to crypto scams. And then on top of that it turns out the CPUs are designed to be inherently insecure so all those amazing mathematical proofs in perfect penmanship were a waste of time.

sametmax 7y ago
CS is very new though, and already pressured by immense economical interests. Give it a thousand years.
kyle-rb 7y ago
I feel like OOP, Agile, "cloud" as a concept, and cryptocurrency/blockchains are not computer science topics. The way in which blockchains are implemented, sure, that's math, applied as cryptography, applied to achieve distributed consensus, which is very much computer science. But you specifically mention crypto scams, which is much more applying the general concept of distributed consensus to different areas, and I think that's where it jumps out of the realm of computer science. Maybe a better label for the "best practices" for the application of computer science is "software development". I think that, as an area of instruction, is more inherently subjective.
- toby 7y ago
  OOP design is usually part of a CS curriculum (at MIT it was, at least) since it has some theoretical framing and applies to a wide variety of practical problems. I don't think I've ever heard of a class in crypto scams or Agile.
  - detaro 7y ago
    A pure CS curriculum probably won't, but one aimed at Software Engineering or whatever name you'd pick for CS + industry-applied stuff might very well have a class that includes Agile and other development techniques. (Our legal classes also touched on it)
- 7y ago

ubermonkey 7y ago

>I always though how silly it was for teachers to pretend they got the correct answer in a text analysis of a century old author. Some elements of analysis are verifiable, like when someone provides meaningful context around lines in Shakespeare, but once you get past very elementary discussions of literature the notion of "right answer" is kind of over. My primary degree is literature; above dumb-freshman courses, the emphasis is on analytical thinking about the text, and on the rigor of that thinking, not on the supposed correctness of the analysis. But, of course, this interferes with your thesis, so...

redblacktree 7y ago
No OP, but I read his thesis that low-level courses should also be putting the "emphasis on analytical thinking about the text," but instead focuses on the "supposed correctness of the analysis" I don't see that your comment interferes with his thesis at all.
sametmax 7y ago
It doesn't. I just think I would have liked you as a teacher, and most I met didn't not have your point of view.
- ubermonkey 7y ago
  To be clear: I'm not a teacher. I've been in software for 30 years. Lots of people my age in the biz don't have CS or MIS degrees. Most of the degrees back then were lagging real-world tech in a huge way, so we mostly taught ourselves. Our degrees are in things like physics, or math, or engineering, or political science, or (like me) literature & creative writing. Specialization is for insects. ;)
asleori239k 7y ago
Yeah I came to say something similar. Good art education (at least with criticism) is really focused on the strength of the arguments and the strength of the expression of those arguments.

jtbayly 7y ago

> I always though how silly it was for teachers to pretend they got the correct answer in a text analysis of a century old author. Apparently it's even true for authors that are still alive... This also happened to Flannery O’Connor. She once wrote the following to an English Professor: “The interpretation of your ninety students and three teachers is fantastic and about as far from my intentions as it could get to be.” http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/i-am-in-state-of-shock.html?m=1 http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/i-am-in-state-of-shock....

jfengel 7y ago
Note that she does not intend it approvingly. She's using "fantastic" to mean "of fantasy", as in, "not grounded in reality". Despite her claims to the contrary, I do find her tone "obnoxious". Their fault was not in their interpretation, but in asking the author to confirm it. A great story will "go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it", but I find it self-important for a writer to declare that their piece achieves that lofty goal. I agree with her assertion that their interpretation is dull and simple, but if that's where they've settled, it's as valid as any other. I feel like she's said, "No, I've written a great work of art, and if you've reached a boring conclusion from it, that's your fault." I find it dismissive of her to say in two sentences that there's "no lessening of reality" but simultaneously "not meant to be realistic": that's a cheap way to excuse vagueness. It's not that difficult for a work to be open to multiple interpretations the longer you look. You can achieve that with ink blots. So if they find merit in the work, they should keep reading to appreciate that merit more fully rather than ask an author to affirm their decryption. But I feel like she hasn't engaged well with the work they have put in: she's dismissed it entirely and missed an avenue they have a right to explore.

segmondy 7y ago

Those classes are all about conformity. It's about learning how to play the game of life and not going against the grain. "smart students" learn to read their teachers and know how to feedback the expected answers even if they don't agree or believe in it. A lesson that's very much needed in life. A lot have not learned this lesson and this is why many of us on this site still marvel at the bullshit companies raising millions and wondering HTF! Because those "smart founders" learned how to feed BS that their audience expected back to them. I learned this lesson when I took humanities, it was so stupid, but I knew exactly what the teacher wanted to hear when we studied architectures & paintings. It was all subjective and her own opinion. I fed her back her crap and I passed the class. If you haven't learned this yet, it's not too late. The world is full on chicken shit.

kolinko 7y ago
Which is ironic, considering humanities are supposed to be about exploration of ideas and creative thinking.
- criley2 7y ago
  Liberal arts / liberal education is less about "creativity" and more about "getting people to be capable enough to understand the national legislature and have a non-garbage political opinion". The liberal arts in America were seen as a prerequisite of a democracy.
- chris_wot 7y ago
  Yes, but only if the result of your exploration and/or your ability to creatively think conforms to the educator(s) viewpoint.
i4t 7y ago
"... are all about conformity." You give them too much credit, imo. That would be way to clever, too much 'conspiracy'-like. But, I agree that if you go against the grain, confront their bs... you're toast.
- 7y ago

pojzon 7y ago

I still remember one poem from high school we were supposed to guess a meaning of. The author was still alive at the time. It was about black crows soring on the sky and landing on a gray cement floor. Teacher went all out saying its about dark thoughts and existential crisis etc. I actually met the author and asked him about the poem. She said, she just likes crows because there was a lot of them in the city she grew up in. Thats it. I even wrote THAT interpretation as my answer to some test later on and i got a failing grade. Told the teacher about my visit and discussion with the author. But he said he does not care because thats not whats written in the answers spreadsheet. After that i realized majority of such teachers are retards and should be fired. Unfortunately our education system is so underpaid, getting anyone half decent wont happen.

mcguire 7y ago

Many teachers are pretty crappy. For these sorts of topics, there are no right answers, although there are certainly some wrong ones. Your job, as a student, is to learn to, and to demonstrate that you can, think about the material, to have some sort of insight beyond the surface features. You can certainly say some author is not interesting to you; you can say you didn't learn anything from it. You cannot say the text is boring or talent-free; that's the same as saying there is one right answer. And keep in mind: the reason a classic is considered a classic (Hiawatha not withstanding) is because other people found it interesting, talented, and learned from it. One difficulty is that a good answer and a wrong answer are not immediately distinguishable, especially from the student's side. The teacher's job is to, among other things, explain why an answer is wrong without pushing some "one true answer". That's hard. Unfortunately, many teachers are crappy. The current US primary and secondary school system tries really hard, with its standardized testing, to enforce crappiness, in the name of fighting other kinds of crappiness, so...yeah. P.S. There isn't a grand conspiracy out to get you. Well, the probability is really low, anyway.

MockObject 7y ago
Very few actual social dynamics are "a grand conspiracy".
- mcguire 7y ago
  That's what they want you to think.

Glyptodon 7y ago

It's true that there are bad choices when it comes to text and interpretation. That doesn't implicate testing, but test construction, which is often poor. I still distinctly remember a surreal class discussion in high school (more than a decade ago) where classmate after classmate of mine in an AP English class responded to a verbal question about a phrase expressing regret over not doing something as though it'd actually been done and the regret was about having done it. It was like "WTF, most of my classmates have problems with basic reading comprehension?" The question was basic, and the teacher basically went row by row to try and get an answer, and it was clear that a huge proportion of the class so misunderstood the text that they didn't even know how to respond to the question.