Comment by rayiner
6 years ago
The whole poem and questions are here: https://www.jiskha.com/questions/1027961/Midnight-by-Sara-Ho....
Frankly, I think the author is being a bit disingenuous. Question 5 for example: What function does the stanza break serve? She says she put it where it is because she's a performance poet and thought it should go there. One, that isn't the question. The question isn't asking about the author's subjective state of mind, but to remark on the objective function of the stanza break. The subject of the poem clearly shifts at that point from reflecting on the weekend to talking about the anxiety of the upcoming day. Out of the answers presented, (C) is clearly the best answer. Two, the author's point simply begs the question. The break sounds good there because there is a structural break in the underlying poem. Her subjective impression of where the break should go reflects an objective fact about the structure of the poem.
The other questions are likewise quite straightforward. The website doesn't reproduce the full test booklet, but I suspect the prompt does not ask for the "right answer" but "the best answer out of the choices presented." The test is not asking students to plumb the depths of the author's pscyhe, but evaluate consistency or inconsistency between each answer choice and the objective aspects of the poem. It's not an exercise in literary analysis, it's an exercise in reading (knowing the meaning of words) and logical analysis.
Take Question 6: "The train is important to the poem because it represents..." Who knows what the author meant the train to represent? But to an objective observer, C ("following a planned routine") clearly "fits" the text better than the other answers. That's all the test is asking students to figure out.
If you’re a good test taker, the answers they want are clear, but that’s not the point. The point is that applying this model to art, something which has been essential to the human experience for tens of thousands of years, is a stultification of our culture for no better reason than that we want to measure something.
If the goal of education in a democratic society is to produce an informed, well-rounded electorate then cultivating a relationship with art is as important as an understanding of science. It seems like we’re doing something else here though. I would hesitate to dismiss the damage done by a system that produces questions like these at the societal scale.
This is a reading test, not an art test. Here, whatever "art" is in the poem, there is also text with plain, objective meaning and discernible structure. The test is directed to the latter, not the former. And that is, by far, the more important thing to teach children. An informed citizenry in a democracy doesn't need art. They do need to be able to convey their thoughts in a structured, clear manner in writing.
If that's the objective, then give them a piece of technical writing, and then ask them whether the nuts should be screwed tight before or after the wooden pieces are put in their slots.
I think we all know why they're using poetry, though. They want to PRETEND to be testing ability at deep literary criticism.
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Then write the questions about a newspaper clipping or a grocery list or something. No need to pillage poetry in search of objective facts.
> An informed citizenry in a democracy doesn't need art.
There's no point in _having_ a democracy without art.
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This is incredibly dangerous and I’m going to push back hard on this narrative. If informed citizens of a democracy don’t need art, how are they supposed to differentiate between propaganda, nationalist myth making, hate speech attempting to clothe themselves as legitimate attempts at artistic expression? When my mom’s nationalized school in Pakistan had dance classes cancelled by the dictatorship, that wasn’t an anti-democratic attack? When they covered up that statue of Justice in Bangladesh, is that OK because citizens don’t need art? When they said that the national fruit of Bangladesh was the jackfruit so why not have a national religion, you don’t think any time to stop and smell the rose of aesthetics reveals that argument to be the equivalent of GW Bush saying his favorite political philosopher was Jesus Christ?
When Milorad Pavic wrote that book “Dictionary of the Khazars” that was not too far from a call from genocide in print, no aesthetic training would have been useful then? Art correlates with history and I daresay you wouldn’t maintain informed citizens of a democracy don’t need to know history. Art tells you something about the motivations of an elite (which some of those citizens might be a part of someday), and what is chosen for a high culture tells you about where the place might be going.
The problem is you're trying to educate millions of kids and you want some common standard to judge them against (to figure things out like college admissions). You can't just say "put down whatever and we'll judge it by how you feel or how I feel".
Besides, you're not testing their artistic abilities, you're testing learning comprehension and and things they learned in English class. Do you know that we're graduating kids who are functionally illiterate? I think that's a bigger problem to tackle than worrying about how poetry is taught to kids.
>The point is that applying this model to art, something which has been essential to the human experience for tens of thousands of years, is a stultification of our culture for no better reason than that we want to measure something.
You say that but what are you basing this on? Just personal feelings?
>I would hesitate to dismiss the damage done by a system that produces questions like these at the societal scale.
I disagree. These are perfectly fine questions. In fact, if you converted to the education system to the montessori-style system that would be disastrous.
My point is that conditioning children to think of art in this formulaic way can only be attributed to ignorance or malice. There is no need to test for reading comprehension using a banal interpretation of poetry.
For evidence of the significance of art in the human experience, check the historical record. The oldest musical instruments are something like 50,000 years old. As far as I know, similar artifacts were not produced by any other hominids. On both the societal and the individual level, creative inspiration has done more to help people exceed their boundaries than any systemized rubric ever has.
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If these tests are about text comprehension and not interpretation of art, why use poems then? Wouldn't an advertisement, a legal text or simply a newspaper article serve a better purpose?
I've written some (bad) poems and asked people to tell me what it means for them and got some answers that are wildly different from my own. For example: I once described the sunrise as a "bleeding ceiling of the world", mainly because I needed a dramatic phrasing. But many people I asked thought it was about suicidial thoughts or death. Rather, I just wanted to emphasize the importance of (reaching) the sunrise while keeping the overall somber / grim tone I established in the first and second verse.
Which leads me to 'death of the author' vs. 'authorial intent'. What is the objective meaning of my metaphor? The readers or mine? And is my psychologists guess more valuable than that of a childhood friend of mine?
> Dissecting meaning like this is also where you get into the whole death of the author vs. authorial intent rabbit hole. And you can write whole books about that topic and which is also a quite subjective topic (I'm leaning more towards death of the author, as you might guess).
That is also just another interpretation of the metaphor. A kid on a small island country might not associate trains with a fixed daily schedule at all, because they only know about trains from other media. Your answer only is "objective" within cultures that can make that association between trains and schedules. In duringearly industrialization, the SAT answer might be that the train stands for the unrelenting progress of technology and how it sucks all live out of factory workers (see charlie chaplins 'modern times').
Per your last para, isn't that "the train is important to the exam boards recognised interpretation of the poem because ...". Unless the poet makes it explicit then you're making up facts and expecting people to buy that one, likely false, interpretation.
It's simply not useful to anyone except exam paper sellers and politicians who want numbers to put in election material and don't care how many years of other people's lives are wasted to make those figures appear to mean something.
That sort of lame education system needs putting out of its misery.
That was just side commentary though. The question wasn't bad because the stanza breaks were arbitrary. The question was bad because the poem wasn't formatted correctly in the test itself.
The teacher was writing her because he himself couldn't figure out where the stanza breaks were and had to ask.
> But to an objective observer
“objective observer” is a phrase that indicates a failure to understand either objectivity or observation, but, in the context of a reader of a written text, a distressingly common failure in the society that views the narrowest forms of biblical literalism (and also, arguably, Constitutional textualism) as even coherent, much less correct.
That's the version that doesn't have the stanza break. :-)