We are all aware of long sustained efforts to turn education into a jargon-filled technical exercise, overlooking such mundane goals as the joy of learning
I could not resist sharing this comment from a reader.
The reader writes:
“Once I was taking a writing course that featured a US Poet Laureate as a guest speaker. He was a grand speaker and told us about many experiences.
“He told us that he attended a university class incognito to see how some professors taught his poetry. An assignment callng for students to describe the purpose and reasons for one of his poems. He participated in the assignment. The professor examined all work submitted. He was told that he didn’t understand the true meaning of the poem…which he had written. So much for that assignment.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
In freshman English Seminar at Haverford with Bill Smith, I remember an extensive discussion whether the measure of a work of literature was if we got what the author intended or if we got value meaningful to us that might not have been his conscious intent.
That said, I am reminded of two movie scenes. One from Back to School with Rodney Dangerfield, where he gets upset with Kirk Vonnegut because the paper Vonnegut wrote on his own work was rejected by a professor. The other is the famous scene from Annie Hall where Woodie Allen gets upset by the bloviations in a movie line by someone about Marshall McCluhan, and when Allen cannot take it any more he brings out McCluhan to tell the guy how full of it he is
LikeLike
Love that scene from Annie Hall!
LikeLike
I wanted to copy this here from a comment Robert D Shepherd made about 6 months ago…quote: “We need to return to reading “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”—to focusing on this poem, this essay, this novel, and what it communicates, and we need to retreat from having our students read to practice their inferencing skills or their identifying the main idea or context clues skills. We read because we are interested in Hedda Gabler or Madame Bovery and the plights they are in, not because we wish to hone our understanding of the structure of the novel IN GENERAL.” The comment by Robert D Shepherd was very helpful to me in understanding how the “reading wars” have played out and how we can go too far off in a one track…
thanks Diane and thanks Robert D Shepherd
LikeLike
All of the techniques for comprehension being rolled out are the “brain childs” of people trying to make a profit from education. The rubrik conundrum just reveals the inaneness of it all! They sell their concepts to school districts along with exacting rubriks (or sell them to our main “district” Arne Duncan) and then it becomes a one size fits all cookie cutter approach to learning. Something like the FFT evaluation may work for Danielson who now tours the world preaching “her way” and that was fine and good for her BUT PLEASE STOP MAKING SPECIFIED METHODS INTO ASSEMBLY LINE STRATEGIES good only for the profits of those who create and manufacture them for the masses. We are not purchasing Fords on an assembly line. We teachers are in the “business” of creating life-long learners and neither we nor the students we teach should be part of an assembly line. And yes teacherken in art school during critique sessions the notion of interpretation veering from the original intent or even that the original intent might never be known always added to the quality of the learning and engagement. Gee how ever did I make it through art school without my peers and mentors using a rubrik?
LikeLike
Art: I don’t know how your reply is intended to further my comment in any way? I was not commenting on the things that you wrote (I know them all too well from my own experience.) I was trying to thank Robert Shepherd for an excellent example of how things “went wrong” in teaching about poetry (which we did in our second and third grade classes in the 60s and 70s without all the deconstruction but we were criticized for having the children memorize too much)… that was my only purpose in writing… so I don’t want to feel attacked by you thinking that I don’t know how bad Arne Duncan’s policies are. People who wend their way to this list already know most of that.
Again, Thanks Robert D Shepherd
LikeLike
Art: The Massachusetts Governor and Education Commissioner fabricated goals for Race to theT (a misnomer; education is not a race)… these are the fabricated goals below; they also dismissed all of the work of the social studies committee that had prepared frameworks, curriculum alignment and tests because there were no state funds and then they miraculously found money to buy Pearson/PARCC… I didn’t think i needed to build my street “creeds” here — but if you go back through my comments I think you will find where I stand ; I have written the Governor, Ed Markey, Elizabeth Warren and signed petitions for Arne Duncan to be replaced. If I want to comment on the nuances of teaching poetry/literature (which I did for 10 years in classrooms) I don’t think I should have to undergo a comment that says I am not ‘principled” or something.
Fabricated Goals awarded money through Arne Duncan’s wrongheaded policies:
We expect that students who are currently furthest behind will make faster, more dramatic improvements and that gains will accelerate over the next six years as the benefits from the state’s investments take off. Our goals for each measure, described below, are ambitious yet grounded in the state’s historic ability to continuously improve statewide performance . They are:
1) Increase historic rates of gain in student performance on NAEP and MCAS (our ESEA assessment) by 15% between 2010 and 2014 and another 25% between 2014 and 2016. This will increase the share of students scoring in Advanced and Proficient and reduce the share scoring in Warning or Failing (Below Basic on NAEP).
2) Reduce achievement gaps in student performance on NAEP and MCAS by 25% between 2010 and 2014, and another 25% between 2014 and 2016.
3) Maintain our first-in-the-nation standing on all four NAEP assessments in 2010, 2012, and 2014.
4) Improve overall high school graduation and college enrollment rates by 5% between 2010 and 2014 and an additional 5%
between 2014 and 2016.
5) Reduce achievement gaps in high school graduation, college enrollment, and college course completion rates by 15% between
2010 and 2014 and another 15% between 2014 and 2016.
If we attain these goals, by 2014, about 3,000 more students in the class of 2014 will graduate from high school, and 2,000 more
will enroll in college. An additional 13% of students will score Advanced or Proficient on the mathematics MCAS, translating to 70% of students statewide. We will no longer have some of the largest achievement gaps on NAEP, and we will cut our MCAS achievement gap almost in half in just six years.
And we will accomplish all of this without compromising our standards.
————————————————————————————–
LikeLike
Thank you, Jean. I am honored that you read this, remembered it, and remembered the context in which this statement was made.
LikeLike
One of my favorites that my friend in the English department uses in her classes:
Billy Collins
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
LikeLike
Alan: thanks again for this; I shared it this year with the granddaughter in high school before she took the MCAS tests… her parents realized what was happening but the high school student was “still in shock” from the testing so we will save it and she will see the humour/irony later after the “melt down” from the extremes of the tests. I don’t think she would actually “tie the poem to a chair” but we wanted to have her see there is flexibility in thinking… and experiencing another’s creative work…. that seems to be “drilled ” out of our students today.
LikeLike
I use this with my 8th grade students, as well! My husband is a poet & professor and agrees that we should not be teaching kids to beat poetry with a hose.
LikeLike
Thanks for sharing this again. I have long thought of this poem as an anthem of the Counter-Rheeformation. 🙂
LikeLike
As a high school sophomore I had an English teacher who believed there was one correct interpretation for each piece of literature. I argued with her that literary interpretation was a matter of opinion, and she told me to “strike the word opinion from your vocabulary.” So much for the joy of literature.
LikeLike
I had a similar experience when a neighbor showed mr a valentine’s card his daughter had written in grade school. There was a cute valentine drawn on the outside of the card. I opened the card to the following message: I love you Dad for the following three reasons. I thought to myself, so this is what state testing and rubrics has brought us—three reasons to love your Dad, nothing more, noting less.
LikeLike
great story, Alan!
LikeLike
Post graduate poetry class: the instructor was obsessed with a certain poet and what his poetry meant. We tied this guy’s poetry to a chair and executed it. Later in the class, the poet visited us. Our instructor was beside himself with anticipation when he asked what the poems meant. I’ll never forget our instructor’s face when the poet said, ” Oh, there’s no meaning, they’re just words.” Imagine a test on that!
LikeLike
Stephen Spender tells a wonderful story about attending a reading by T.S. Eliot. An undergraduate asked, “Mr. Eliot, what did you mean by the line ‘Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree’?” And Eliot replied, “Well, I meant, ‘Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree.'”
LikeLike
Mood, theme, tone
A, B, C, or D
get it right
to protect your teacher.
But, what if
you see things differently?
Your teacher
taught you to think.
Do you?
Should you?
Will you?
LikeLike
rratto: your comment brought to mind—
TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost, THE ROAD NOT TAKEN
In school or out, I feel gratitude to those individuals who have encouraged me to follow my own path even when, as Frederick Douglass reminds us:
“I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.”
Thank you for reminding me of this.
😎
LikeLike
I have often wondered if Frost was simply writing about a walk in the woods, not some deeper metaphor. The beauty of literature, like art, is that each of us can take away something meaningful.
LikeLike
My father spent his career as an English professor at University of Memphis and used to tell this story about how he swore-off deconstructionism when he was still a young professor.
He was at a conference in Oxford, Mississippi on William Faulkner’s works. Faulkner was still alive at the time and someone had managed to persuade him to attend. During one of the panels, a professor had presented a paper advancing a particular interpretation of passages from The Sound and the Fury, and when he was done the panel chair turned to Faulkner and asked him what he thought of the paper. Faulkner responded that he thought the interpretation was interesting but really wasn’t what he’d had in mind when he wrote the parts in question. At that point one of the other panelists shot up out of his seat and exclaimed “No, you’re wrong!”
That was the moment my father swore off deconstructionism forever. He never denied that readers construct their own meaning from a text and that this has validity for them and their experience, but he always made it quite clear to his students that that was individual and separate from the author’s intent. If you want to know that for sure, he used to say, then you’d better ask them directly.
LikeLike
Reminds me of an old Get Smart episode where Max Smart (Don Adams) is analyzing an abstract painting in an art gallery. After a rather elaborate explanation he finally gets to a small black dot in the center of the painting: “and so 99, the small black point at the center of the painting represents man’s fundamental inhumanity to fellow man.” As soon as he is finished, the “small back spot” is a bug that flies off the painting. I can still see the scene in head!
LikeLike
I don’t know if AP English Literature and Composition still requires this, but when I took the test in 1991, we had to come up with the “correct” interpretations of poetry and prose. I hated that, because I felt like, unless we dug up the author and asked him or her what the poem or prose meant, HOW could we know if the AP people knew what was “correct?” I was forever “misanalyzing” the prose, and especially the poetry, in class and it made me crazy. BUT, I discovered one thing. If the poem listed the author (it usually didn’t), then the poem was supposed to be analyzed the opposite of what you would expect of that author. For example, we had one in class from an old test that was George Bernard Shaw. I thought he was being satirical, but, according to the AP people, in THAT piece of prose, he was totally serious on the subject. I have NO idea how the AP people decided this. So, when my test appeared, there was a poem on death by Emily Dickinson. So I wrote my essay arguing that Dickinson was not afraid of death in that poem. I got a 5 on the test, so I guess I must have been “right.” I don’t think that anyone had any clue. It was just a game of the system. To this day, I think the whole concept is ridiculous, and I hope AP no longer uses it.
LikeLike
Maybe they never saw “Arms and the Man”
We expect that students who are currently furthest behind will make faster, more dramatic improvements and that gains will accelerate over the next six years as the benefits from the state’s investments take off. Our goals for each measure, described below, are ambitious yet grounded in the state’s historic ability to continuously improve statewide performance . They are:
1) Increase historic rates of gain in student performance on NAEP and MCAS (our ESEA assessment) by 15% between 2010 and 2014 and another 25% between 2014 and 2016. This will increase the share of students scoring in Advanced and Proficient and reduce the share scoring in Warning or Failing (Below Basic on NAEP).
2) Reduce achievement gaps in student performance on NAEP and MCAS by 25% between 2010 and 2014, and another 25% between 2014 and 2016.
3) Maintain our first-in-the-nation standing on all four NAEP assessments in 2010, 2012, and 2014.
4) Improve overall high school graduation and college enrollment rates by 5% between 2010 and 2014 and an additional 5%
between 2014 and 2016.
5) Reduce achievement gaps in high school graduation, college enrollment, and college course completion rates by 15% between
2010 and 2014 and another 15% between 2014 and 2016.
If we attain these goals, by 2014, about 3,000 more students in the class of 2014 will graduate from high school, and 2,000 more
will enroll in college. An additional 13% of students will score Advanced or Proficient on the mathematics MCAS, translating to 70% of students statewide. We will no longer have some of the largest achievement gaps on NAEP, and we will cut our MCAS achievement gap almost in half in just six years.
And we will accomplish all of this without compromising our standards.
————————————————————————————————————————————————
LikeLike
I heard a Fly buzz – when I died
BY EMILY DICKINSON
I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air –
Between the Heaves of Storm –
The Eyes around – had wrung them dry –
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset – when the King
Be witnessed – in the Room –
I willed my Keepsakes – Signed away
What portion of me be
Assignable – and then it was
There interposed a Fly –
With Blue – uncertain – stumbling Buzz –
Between the light – and me –
And then the Windows failed – and then
I could not see to see –
LikeLike
I write a little read blog where I try to do what my English teacher, told me to do forty years ago. I write what it is like to work with students who have academic challenges. My English teacher, was always scolding me to show- don’t tell so I try to write the experiences with limited editorializing. Last year I wrote a short piece about preparing for the New York State English Language Regent.. I talked about reading a poem from the August Regent titled, Home Techtonics, by John Brantingham. Imagine my great surprise when John Brantingham responded.
Apparently he hadn’t even been aware, at first that his poem was part of a standardized exam..
I was thrilled, he was happy that his poem started a discussion in our class.
I am saddened that I only read poetry with adolescents as preparation for a standardized exam.
LikeLike
@jeanhaverill… I am a bit confused by your comments. No “attack” was intended at all. I too remember a time when divergent views on an author’s work was acceptable – not only acceptable but embraced. The connection I am making has to do with the desire to return to this state that embraces and enables true critical thinking. Right now everything becomes “black or white” and not acceptable to have shades of gray (this includes poetry analysis as well as professional freedom afforded in a classroom).
LikeLike
I would also like to add that we were not reading TO DISSECT but were reading to feel and react in a humanistic way were there was natural divergence.
LikeLike
Poetry?
You’re kidding, right?
If this baby works out as planned, the kids will be reading home health care aid job training manuals.
After all, that’s where the jobs are…
LikeLike
Michael: yes,
Mr. Opus put down those musical instruments. Leave them on the bus, or better yet “hock” them ; there will be no instruments in THIS school…
LikeLike
yes, god forbid that they study “art history” or something useless like that
LikeLike
Robert, you know the little people have no business studying art history or theater or music.
Those are the purview of our betters.
(I have not noticed the elite colleges canceling those offerings)
😉
LikeLike
Ah, Ang. I keep forgetting that. This thinking is so hard. Good thing that I now have David Coleman to do that for me.
LikeLike
❤
LikeLike
The analysis of literature seldom if ever matches the author’s intentions. Analysis of anything—for instance poetry, short stories—or novels, is subject to bias and personal views. The results in one class may differ from the results in another.
It’s amazing what professors and their students in a high school AP or honors classes, in addition to college classes, discover in a work of literature that the author never intended.
We need go no further than the Bible to see how many different opinions there are from a text that is probably the most studied book in history. How many Christian denominations and sects are there? How many wars have been fought because of disagreements over what the Bible means? The same could be said of Islam and Buddhism because these religions also have many denominations and sects that disagree with each other.
A bubble test of any kind no matter the fancy jargon used to title it only reveals one aspect of one dimension of the individual filling in the bubbles. People are much more complex than any bubble test can discover.
National Geographic Magazine’s February 2014 issue featured “The New Science of the Brain” pointing out that we do use all of our brain and the storage capacity needed to produce a human brain image would take 1.3 billion terabytes of memory and global digital storage capacity in 2012 was only 2.7 billion terabytes—one brain has the capacity and complexity of half the world’s computers, a brain that designed and built those computers along with everything else we see around us daily.
And these so called experts who want to boil kids down to the results of a bubble test think they can use the results to judge teachers who didn’t even take the test. These Wolves of Sesame Street think that these standardized tests are a legitimate methods to judge teachers as failures or fantastic but what happens when they ask a few hundred questions the child doesn’t know in a world where there are billions of answers. How will they ever know what the Child does know and how much effort was applied to learning in the classroom?
When I was six or seven, I was given a test and from the results, my mother was told by the school’s administration that I was so retarded that I would never learn to read or write.
LikeLike
Thank you for sharing; my significant other had a high school principal who said to his mom “your son will never go to college” and he did get in to Holy Cross, he got a Master’s at Babson (business/finance) and a doctorate at BU which is where I met him. Thank you for being open about this; it reminded me of how much I respected him. He died 3 years ago at Christmas and your open and honest sharing I am grateful for today!
quote: “When I was six or seven, I was given a test and from the results, my mother was told by the school’s administration that I was so retarded that I would never learn to read or write.”
LikeLike
my mother was told by the school’s administration that I was so retarded that I would never learn to read or write
For those not aware of this, Lloyd Lofthouse is, today, a gifted novelist, in addition to being a highly experienced educator.
LikeLike
My comment, here, is awaiting moderation.
Until then, for any who don’t know this: That kid who would “never learn to read or write,” Lloyd Lofthouse, is now a very gifted novelist and a highly experienced educator,
LikeLike
How I love to see these discussions of the many, many ways in and out of texts!
How clearly they demonstrate what ought to be obvious–that there are MANY ways and that it OBSCENE to have a Common Core Curriculum Commissariat imposing the unexamined, simple-minded notions of the amateurs who prepared the CC$$ in ELA on every teacher, reader, learner, and thinker in every public school classroom in the United States.
Look, I can do formalist criticism, structuralist criticism, new criticism, deconstruction, reader response, historicist or new historicist, or intentionalist criticism (what Wimsatt called “The Intentional Fallacy”) with very young kids. It’s all a matter of how I lead them (or arrange things so that they lead themselves) in their encounter with the work. Usually, what I want to do is to shove them down the rabbit hole or through the wardrobe into something weird and wonderful. I want them to understand that they have to take the trip into that world of the work and have an experience there.
Language and texts are complex and varied. In different kinds of texts, different possibilities are foregrounded. From the point of view of the author, writing a work, sometimes those foregroundings are intentional. But often they are not.
It is altogether possible that a given author of a given text might have little understanding of what he or she has written. There’s a long, long tradition of poets invoking a “Muse.” Such invocations are related to a common experience that writers have. I’ve written some eighty or so short stories over the past few decades. The best of those always seemed simply to come to me. When I was writing, it seemed less that I was composing than that I was transcribing. Most writers will understand what I mean there. Think of Coleridge and Xanadu, for example. He could never recover the rest of it. Or think of what Robert Frost says of the writing of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” He tells how he had spent an evening working on a long, narrative poem, and had taken a break early one morning. He stepped outside, and suddenly, there was a poem, full blown, in his head, and he rushed inside to write it down. He then had to read it, himself, to figure out what it said. Or think of what Frost says about reading Emerson’s “Brahma,” that his understanding of it as deepened and deepened over decades. I suspect that Emerson might say the same of his own reading of his own poem. The best works bear such rereading and keep yielding up treasures, EVEN TO THE AUTHORS OF THEM.
Wallace Stevens says that a poem should almost completely escape the understanding and that he doesn’t know which to prefer, the beauty of inflections or the beauty of innuendoes–the blackbird whistling, or just after. Forester wrote that he had to write to figure out what he thought about things. Auden says that a poem is “the clear expression of mixed feelings.” Well, how subtle are those innuendoes? How long might it take to figure out those thoughts? How mixed might those feelings be? Did the author understand the unexamined assumptions that he or she brought to the writing? Did he or she struggle, at some level, with some of his or her own assumptions, and that struggle is discoverable in the work? When Yeats transcribed his wife Georgia’s statements, made in trance states, into poetry, did he know what those meant at first, or ever?
The education deformers live in a simple world. Everything in ed-deformer La La Land is clear and easy and reducible to data. But that reduction is purest numerology.
There are many ways in and out of texts, and the Philistine authors of the CC$$ in ELA were CLUELESS about most of them.
Say no to the Core. Say yes to freedom of thought in the English language arts and to the many, many ways of encountering texts.
LikeLike
cx: Forster, not Forester
LikeLike
Let’s not forget that what this is all about is hooking kids on learning, so that it becomes like a drug for them, so that it’s something that they have to do the way they have to eat and breathe and sleep. Kids read about snakes because they want to learn about snakes, not because they are interested in what method of expository development the author used in paragraph 14. That stuff is incidental–useful, but minor.
When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer | Walt Whitman
WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me; kijer
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
LikeLike
The idea that a work represents an author’s intention is championed by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., in a number of great works in hermeneutics (the theory of interpretation), including his book Validity in Interpretation.
It’s a controversial notion, but I understand why Hirsch feels as strongly as he does about the author’s intention as the source of meaning. He understands that our basic condition is that my mind is over here and yours is over there, and cultural transmission was created to bridge that gap–by Jove and all the gods that ever were–and we d—-d well ought to remember that.
I agree.
Still, we don’t even know ourselves, so it’s some presumption to think that we know the Other who is, after all, not some specimen of Lepidoptera labeled, pinned to a card, archived, and cataloged.
The ed deformers, bless their simple little walnut-like hearts, don’t understand that.
LikeLike
I remembered a poem this morning I hadn’t thought about in years… a student in my 8th grade English class spoke this poem in the auditorium and it brought tears to my eyes with her voice and understanding and compassion. It was about Abraham Lincoln losing his mother. I will look it up today ; maybe I can find her and thank her ? Were those halcyon days?
LikeLike