Comment by Veen
6 years ago
High school literary criticism is just training for basic interpretation skills. It doesn't matter what's really "in" the poem, just that the student is capable of rudimentary analysis of meaning and symbolism and so on. If they went on to study literary criticism at a higher level with a decent teacher, they'd have to justify their interpretations with reference to the work as a whole, the writer's other work, their influences, the historical period, and other context.
Thank you. I think a lot of us in tech (including myself) have had only shallow/imperfect exposure to the humanities in school, and then later seen many noisy/poor/confusing examples from the field.
However, I've known some people well-educated in the humanities, and (for example) I've often seen them to have on-point insight into real-world situations, while most of us with engineering/science-heavy educations are fumbling around with our overconfident opinions based on little/mistaken information.
Which is not to say that there might not be a lot of noise in any field, but it would be foolish to naively dismiss someone who's invested many years in intense reading and analysis in any of those fields. Surely that person knows things and has gotten good at some kinds of thinking that we haven't even heard of.
Consider the example of someone who took and Web/app framework class, but has no experience in CS basics, algorithm design, systems architecture, engineering process and collaboration, product lifecycles and maintainability, etc. They can make a site/app, and don't see what all the fuss and perceived posturing in the field is about.
You don't find it odd that this analysis of meaning does not require meaning? Isn't it more like creative writing at the high school level?
This means it is worthless for a multiple choice test and should be a write-up with argumentation. A miniature dissertation.
Like, say, maturity exam is here in Poland. They're a pain to grade, have to be very careful guidelines and alert examiners.
I’m sorry, in what world is literature or English multiple choice?!
In Australia / NSW it’s essays and essays, including a creative writing prompt that I’ve always genuinely found fun. Think /r/writingprompts.
Never really engaged with the rest of English but it requires choosing your own texts (no list) to compare and dissect. Still flawed? Yeah, but I feel like ‘they tried’.
> in what world is literature or English multiple choice?!
If you click on the article, the first thing your eye is drawn to is an image of a multiple-choice scantron bubble-sheet. Its reasonable to think that this image is relevant to the discussion the article presents and to implicitly conclude that the article is describing a multiple-choice test.