{"id":7468,"date":"2005-02-28T06:06:07","date_gmt":"2005-02-28T13:06:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp\/2005\/02\/28\/meaning.html"},"modified":"2005-02-28T06:06:07","modified_gmt":"2005-02-28T13:06:07","slug":"meaning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2005\/02\/28\/meaning.html","title":{"rendered":"Meaning"},"content":{"rendered":"

It would be really funny if it weren’t so annoying. A well-published author of an essay included on a state standardized test (the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, or TAKS) looked at the five questions asked about the essay in the test. She has a few problems with them<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On her way home from George West, Naomi was struck by how the students had remembered details of the piece but, when she asked, could remember none of the questions. When I sent her copies of the questions, she said “It reminded me of the trouble I always had with standardized tests.”<\/p>\n

The trouble? “Almost every question has more than one ‘right’ answer,” she said.<\/p>\n

That’s the difference between testers and writers. Poets and other literary writers see literature as a collaborative engagement between the writer and the reader. They expect different readers to have different reactions to their work, to draw different messages based on their experiences and concerns.<\/p>\n

So she had a problem with a question that asked what the essay was “mainly about.” Answers included “moving to a new place” and “the significance of names.”<\/p>\n

“Say a kid had just moved to a new place and had a lot of revelations about himself, that would be the right answer for him,” she said. “Another kid who felt special about names would focus on that.”<\/p>\n

She had similar arguments with the answers to several other questions, arguments she had had since, at age 22, one of her poems was selected for a textbook.<\/p>\n

“Out of five questions the kids were supposed to answer, I couldn’t answer three,” she said.<\/p>\n

The biggest problem with interpretive questions (“What’s the essay mainly about?”) is just that — there is rarely any single answer, and rarely universal agreement on the “best” answer (or what “best” means).<\/p>\n

Or, as Ogden Nash put it, <\/p>\n

He o’er the works of Shakespeare<\/p>\n

A thousand hours spent<\/p>\n

And found a thousand meanings<\/p>\n

That Shakespeare never meant.<\/em><\/p>\n

Granted, academic English departments often go completely overboard in reinterpreting and deconstructing and otherwise mangling interpretations of works of literature. That they can, <\/em>though, is indicative to me that testing on subjective questions like this is bound to cause trouble — not to mention embarrassment.<\/p>\n

I don’t know how you test whether kids can draw a theme from an essay or story (let alone determine whether that’s something that should <\/em>be tested for), but there should be a better way.<\/p>\n

(via Liz<\/a>)<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It would be really funny if it weren’t so annoying. A well-published author of an essay included on a state standardized test (the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, or…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7468","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-school-daze"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2576,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2002\/06\/03\/paging_dr_bowdl.html","url_meta":{"origin":7468,"position":0},"title":"Paging Dr. Bowdler …","author":"***Dave","date":"Mon 3-Jun-02 10:00am","format":false,"excerpt":"The New York State Regents exam, which is required for all high school students in order to graduate, includes essay questions based on excerpts from literature. 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But in the past decade or so -- certainly with the advent of Dubya's \"No Child Left Behind\" but increasingly amidst a flurry of \"school accountability\" programs -- they have taken on\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "~PlusPosts"","block_context":{"text":"~PlusPosts","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/plusposts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8159,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2005\/05\/05\/writing_at_leng.html","url_meta":{"origin":7468,"position":2},"title":"Writing at length","author":"***Dave","date":"Thu 5-May-05 3:05pm","format":false,"excerpt":"There's a truism that in academia, one gets judged by the quantity, not the quality, of what one writes. 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