Comment by sametmax

I disagree entirely. Traditional humanities courses are in general about learning intellectual history, contemporary thinking, and critical thinking.

Mistaking the worst-case for the central tendency is a classic fallacy that is easy to fall into when expressing contempt.

Bullshit companies don't raise millions of dollars because people study poetry or art history. They seem to raise millions of dollars because there's a long tail of bad startups and a long tail of bad investment decisions, and the intersection of those can be cherry-picked to create the illusion that "the world is full of chicken shit".

The world does indeed contain some chicken shit, but chicken shit is not the central tendency of the world. Terrible startups get funding less frequently than good ones. Good technical ideas often raise millions of dollars and thrive, but sometimes they fail despite their merits. Sometimes "chicken shit" succeeds, sometimes good ideas fail, but it's foolish to mistake the exception for the rule.

But again, all this has very little to do with poetry.

> It was all subjective and her own opinion. I fed her back her crap and I passed the class.

I had an English class I thought was like this. I generally tried not to do that unless I had to, but given this English teacher had given me a D and C- on the first two essays (which is all we were graded on), I decided for the third essay I would get as much help as possible directly from her to see exactly what she wanted and try to provide exactly that, since she obviously didn't want my opinion. By the third visit during her office hours, she had very little feedback and thought it looked good. I got a C+. Visiting her afterwards I had her review the essay to give me pointers on what I could have done better. Her exact words, which I remember to this day, were "all I can say is it doesn't feel authentic."

That class broke me on the subject of English. It was the last required English class for my major, and I made sure not to take another elective in English (and I rather liked the subject before that). Sometimes you're damned if you do, damned if you don't.

> 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.

> "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.

Telling something even though you don't believe in it for personal gain is called cunningness.

I see many people misunderstand smartness with cunningness, people who are smart can be cunning as well but they chose not to.

I learned this in freshman interpretation class in college. In the beginning I fought against the TA (English PhD candidate) teaching the class and I ended up with Cs on my assignments. Then midway through I started playing her game.

"Oh yeah, that cushion represents a vagina; the broom a phallus! Cinderella has a conundrum - her Electra complex will remain unresolved because her birth mother is dead and her father will continue to replace any dead wives by marrying anew. How can she overcome her predicament?! In this version Perrault introduces the fairy godmother as a foil to the mother in Freud's complex. Now the godmother helps Cinderella obtain her own princely phallus and win a bloodless coup over her foul stepmother! Actually in the end all the ladies get a phallus!"

A+

Joking aside, it took me another decade to have this sink in and apply it in life. I still deal with this foolishness daily. The originality of the and variety of the "chicken shit" determines whether or not I stick around at the job or in the situation the chicken shit is flowing.

This is soo very spot on and exactly how I felt about a lot of my humanities classes in college. I almost failed the first one, then learned how to play the game and did a lot better. Sad but true.

I always say I loved engineering classes simply because 1 + 1 = 2, not much room for debate there.

"... 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.

I suspect the bad humanities teacher is a result of university politics in the "office politics" sense allowed to degrade and stagnate.

Essentially if it takes those who are good at the bullshitting game to advance and compete for tenure bullshit becomes the defacto qualifier.

Making matters better yet worse for "optimizing" in both senses are those who actuly are sincerely interested in thd subject - I have had decent ones who would give good marks and respect those who differed philosophically but could give sincere and articulated explanations and justifications.

Another lesson the poet learned from these studies is that these tests are about having the means to pass them, by which I mean having the money to buy the correct answers (whether that be in the form of written answers or a tutor who has seen the answers and knows how to guide your student to the right answer without explicitly communicating it).

It’s the college enrolment thing all over again.

Which is ironic, considering humanities are supposed to be about exploration of ideas and creative thinking.

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.

This is one of my favorite takes ever on the way we teach literature K-12: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2112

I definitely had some English teachers who were simply bad. Your 'sentence' experience resonates with my teacher who insisted that the five sentence "hamburger" paragraph format was inviolate and marked any paragraph shorter than five sentences as 'incorrect'. (Good luck obeying dialogue rule that way...) But I had a lot of others who actually knew about their topic and cared about teaching it well. A lot of them were open to multiple interpretations of stories; one even managed to competently outline "death of the author" and explain why "the author intended..." wasn't always the right way to look at things.

That was where the problems of the classroom format became painfully obvious. The way we read books wasn't centered on keeping kids interested or even promoting deep analysis. Rather, it was shaped by the need to assign reasonable amounts of homework, and to practice writing brief essays without referencing the text - because that's what standardized tests require. The length and pace of book discussions was based on how long it took to finish the book at 30 pages/night, which also encouraged discussions that were completely invalidated by the next days reading. And the ideal "result" of a book was 40 minutes of writing on a single thesis which had to be simple enough to produce without opening the book.

The result was that we simply didn't learn a lot of useful things which didn't fit the format, like contextual analysis or studying an author's canon. Meanwhile, lots of the things we did learn - close reading, deconstruction, death of the author - came through in ludicrously contrived examples that made them seem idiotic. Failing to teach a subject is a shame, but actively leading students to hate the subject is shameful.

Funny story: Most people today agree that Fahrenheit 451 is about (for some definition of "about") the evils of TV, consumerism, and mass-entertainment culture. Bradbury agrees.

Back in the dim, distant past, many people thought it was about censorship. Bradbury, in an interview at the time, agreed.

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.

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]

I guess because of exactly how weak the 'right' answer's justification is, that they have to defend it so vigorously.

"I just put that stanza break in there because when I read it aloud (I’m a performance poet)..."

But why does she pause there? A lack of breath? (She's going to be unconscious by the end of the second stanza.) To emphasize some kind of separation in some aspect of the poem?

I have this strange feeling the author is being intentionally obtuse.

Very few actual social dynamics are "a grand conspiracy".

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.

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.

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.

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.

Why must societal approval still be taught? And who gets to decide what society approves of? Hint: "Society" isn't the answer.

I'm all about teaching about societal approval as long as it's labelled as such and put in perspective. I think that actually it would have helped me a lot to have it labelled that way: I would have respected the teacher more, and learned about the way humans work sooner.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

CS is very new though, and already pressured by immense economical interests.

Give it a thousand years.

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.

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.

I think the meta teaching is more important, and more impactful that the information taught.